In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This paper proposes Paul DeHart’s Unspeakable Cults: An Essay in Christology as a launching point for a renewed Schleiermacherian Christology in the twenty-first century. DeHart’s theology offers a key correction of Schleiermacher’s thought, which I analyze through consideration of the incisive and underappreciated critique leveled against Schleiermacher by his Roman Catholic contemporary Johann Adam Möhler. On Möhler,’s account, Schleiermacher’s desire in the Glaubenslehre to avoid theological speculation leaves Schleiermacher with no principled reason to pass beyond postulating an activity of God in relation to the world-system to an activity of God in se. DeHart’s broadly Thomist correction of Schleiermacher preserves the distinctive features of Schleiermacher’s Christology, bringing together a modern historical and scientific consciousness with a consistent Chalcedonianism. DeHart’s theology shows how a contemporary Schleiermacherian Christology offers perhaps unparalleled resources for integrating historical theology, contextual theologies, and key interlocutors in Biblical studies and the critical study of religion.

In this paper, I will argue that Ernst Troeltsch’s Glaubenslehre represents a major development within the Schleiermachian tradition. To do so, I will first demonstrate how Troeltsch acts both as a bridge into the dialectical turn away from the lingering remnants of Ritschlianism, as well as its own alternative route that attempts to take up the Schleiermachian tradition in a new direction. Second, I will establish how Troeltsch’s constructive theological project is framed by his critical appropriation of Schleiermacher. Third, I will turn to Schleiermacher’s concept of the Spirit in order to show how it functions as the crucial hinge for Troeltsch’s understanding of his project as both a continuation and extension of Schleiermacher’s Gluabenslehre. Lastly, I will conclude with some suggestions about the constructive promise that a Troeltschian reading of Schleiermacher might bring to contemporary attempts at pursuing the project of Glaubenslehre today.

This paper considers an underexamined aspect of Karl Barth's interpretation of Friedrich Schleiermacher: Barth's positive reception of his social ethics. In his 1923/24 lectures, Barth goes so far as to suggest that Schleiermacher surpassed the social ethics of early socialist figures such as St. Simon and Charles Fourier. In particular, Barth highlights Schleiermacher’s critique of economic inequality and his call to reduce the workday. He argues emphatically that this social aspect of Schleiermacher’s thought “should never be forgotten” (Barth 1982, 39). These remarks challenge what Gary Dorrien has called the "founding narrative" of modern theology. From this, a potential point of convergence between Barth and Schleiermacher emerges around their respective politics, one that might open doors for a reassessment of their legacies. 

This paper reexamines hadith sciences in early modern Islam, arguing that beyond their conventional role in textual verification, they functioned as critical arenas for negotiating epistemic authority, historical authenticity, and spiritual legitimacy. Through close analysis of an eighteenth-century South Asian debate between Shāh Walī Allāh (d.1762) and Fakhr al-Dīn Dehlavī (d.1783), two prominent muḥaddithīn deeply embedded within Sufi traditions, the study reveals how hadith criticism served as an adaptable intellectual framework rather than a purely exclusionary discipline. While Walī Allāh deployed rigorous isnād scrutiny to challenge the widely claimed genealogical link between Ḥasan al-Baṣrī and ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, Fakhr al-Dīn employed the same methodological rigor to reaffirm its historical plausibility, underscoring hadith scholarship's inherent interpretive flexibility. By foregrounding their nuanced engagements, this paper expands scholarly understandings of early modern Sufi historiography and demonstrates how hadith criticism mediated complex epistemological negotiations concerning inherited spiritual traditions, textual authenticity, and competing religious identities.

This paper explores the position of Sufism in Qanoon-e-Islam, or the Customs of the Moosulmans of India, an 1832 text authored by Ja’far Sharif, an Indian Muslim, under the direction of G. A. Herklots, a Dutch Surgeon in the East India Company. In 1921, a revised edition was published, which made significant changes, including inserting a dedicated section on “Sufi Mysticism.” This paper seeks to provide a step towards decolonizing the study of Sufism. By analyzing colonial documents that were co-created by European Orientalists and Indian Muslims, we can understand what new conditions of knowledge were being created about Muslims. Ultimately, the construction of Sufi practice as an anthropological object of study, as initiated through Qanoon-e-Islam, produces inherent contradictions as Sufism is forced to cohere in the secular grid of intelligibility. This has significant implications for understanding the role of Sufism within broader Islamic thought and practice.

Although scholarship in Islamic Studies has highlighted the contributions of women as religious scholars engaged in the transmission of ḥadīth and in jurisprudence, or as ascetics in the mystical traditions of Sufism, their roles in and contributions to the history of Islamic philosophy remain unexplored. The fourth paper examines the philosophical contributions of Sitt al-ʿAjam bint al-Nafīs, a thirteenth-century philosopher, who is known for her commentary on Ibn ʿArabi’s Mashāhid al-asrār al-qudsiyya as well as authoring two additional works. In addition to being an important text in the reception history of Ibn ʿArabi, the commentary is also important for a central aim in modern scholarship: understanding the ways in which philosophers of the Islamic world engaged with various traditions of Greek thought and Islamic mysticism. The paper also raises methodological challenges and questions concerning the retrieval of women’s philosophical works in the Islamic context, raising larger questions on what constitutes a canon and what counts as philosophy.

The legacy of Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā ibn Ḥabash al-Suhrawardī (549/1155-587/1191) is often remembered in light of his philosophical innovation in formulating the Philosophy of Illumination (Hikmat al-ishrāq). His mystical ontology and epistemology allow for an elaborate role of dreams and vision quests as avenues of knowledge. Among such dreams, scholars of Suhrawardī have extensively analyzed, albeit with varying approaches, the ones elaborating his mystical and philosophical teachings. However, in historical accounts of Suhrawardī, there are a number of other dreams attributed to the shaykh and to other figures that flesh out the making and the reception of the political aspect of his philosophy. My paper will provide an outline of Suhrawardī’s political philosophy by historical contextualization of one of such dream accounts and, in the bigger picture, relating it to a specific motif in dream accounts by ‘ulamā aspiring for political power in the same historical period and geographical region.

Before the concept of the Anthropocene was even proposed, environmental scientists, activists, and ethicists (among others) have poured a great deal of attention to exploring how to undo the harms humans have done to the earth. What is presupposed in this hopeful pursuit?  Are there limits to and/or consequences of it? And are there different ways of thinking environmental ethics? This paper explores these questions, turning to both queer theories of negativity and contemporary eco-theologies as a resource. Building on Christian ethicist Kyle Lambelet’s proposal for apocalypse as a spiritual practice, this paper explores what the antisocial turn in queer theory might offer and considers eco-theological corollaries. In doing so, it explores what it might mean not to try to save the planet, but rather to critically examine and ethically undo our malformed relation to it. 

This paper examines the resources that Arthur Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy, reframed as a “subtractive religion,” provides for ethical life in the Anthropocene. I argue that his metaphysics of suffering offers durable consolation without relying on compensatory goods. Rather than minimizing the climate catastrophe or deferring solutions to the future, his ethics of compassion reveals meaning in alleviating present suffering even without hope for an ultimate resolution. This approach helps us navigate ecological disruptions without guarantees of historical progress or divine intervention. My subtractive framework fosters moral action and emotional resilience in an era when climate impacts exceed our capacity for mitigation and adaptation. It presents a philosophical foundation that neither relies on the instrumental value of nature for human flourishing nor requires the sacralization of the natural world. Instead, it recognizes a shared essence that makes all suffering morally significant.

Since life has affected Earth for eons, the Anthropocene is distinguished by moral agency’s planetary influence.  Accordingly, insofar as the Anthropocene’s intensification undermines that agency, the Anthropocene becomes less unique.  I argue that this irony discloses a moral duty to preserve the Holocene.  However, the Anthropocene is ironic and not simply immoral because not all human activity disturbing the Holocene is immoral.  Instead, much of that activity is necessary to fulfill other moral duties.  I contend this moral tension reflects a link between value and disvalue that is endemic to life.  Yet because not all human activity disturbing the Holocene is due to such bivalence, the Anthropocene also manifests immorality.  Indeed, the Anthropocene is ironic rather than tragic because its disvalue is suffused with immorality.  Still, given that the Anthropocene is bivalent, this tension between moral duties cannot be entirely resolved and thus morality mandates living responsibly amidst it.

Multispecies democracy (MD) challenges human exceptionalism by advocating for the political inclusion of nonhumans, positioning itself as a hopeful intervention in an era of democratic crisis. While MD does not propose direct democratic participation for nonhumans, its advocates argue that humans should act as proxies, representing nonhuman interests in democratic processes. A crucial tension emerges, however: How can MD reject anthropocentric models of agency and freedom while simultaneously depending on humans to articulate nonhuman interests? This paper explores this tension by examining democracy’s dependence on practices of discursive accountability—giving and taking reasons, justifying claims, and revising shared norms. Because nonhumans lack the capacity to take part in these practices, the prospects for their democratic participation require further theorization. By clarifying the limits of MD’s current political vision, this paper argues for forms of nonhuman democratic representation that preserve democracy’s core structure of accountability while expanding its ethical scope.

Excreta, specifically human feces, as in poop, is an understudied phenomenon in the study of Religion. Yet, ancient texts and contemporary contexts speak to its importance for the lives of human individuals and the environment. There is a dual sanitation crisis plaguing the planet. On one hand, there are 3.5 billion people who do not have a dignified, private place to relieve themselves. On the other hand, the copious use of resources to flush (and then extract) feces and urine from fresh water is straining municipal systems. Much more than a technical problem, however, the crisis and its solutions require asking religious, psychological, and social questions. Paying attention to the dynamics of power, worldviews, and practices elucidate why the porcelain toilet system is so entrenched, even in places where ecological sanitation alternatives exist. This paper hones in on the religious dimensions of this question, theorizing that our sh*t is sacred.

This paper employs Rob Nixon’s notion of “slow violence” to examine the systemic issues underpinning the environmental and humanitarian disaster in the Minamata Disease Incident—the worst industrial pollution in Japanese history—and show how the Minamata villagers were rendered “unimagined communities” by the Japanese government-industrial complex during postwar modernization. As is often the case in contexts marked by slow violence, literature emerged as a form of resistance in Minamata. This paper explores Ishimure Michiko’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, a major driving force in the Minamata protest movement, and suggests that her writing, appealing to the local (pre)animistic worldview and the Buddhist notion of Tariki (Other-power), gestures towards a relational framework that reclaims the victims’ subjectivity beyond their subjection to objectification. This framework, transcending the confines of human agency, repudiates the “premises of individualism” on which neoliberal capitalism operates and reimagines a human-nature relationship characterized by sympathy and interdependence.

This paper argues that dominant anthropocentric ideologies, rooted in autonomy and human exceptionalism, have systematically denied agency and well-being to the more-than-human world, contributing to ecological degradation and species extinction. In response, I develop embodied freedom as a theoretical and ethical framework that redefines freedom as relational, interdependent, and materially grounded. Drawing on insights from multiple disciplines, this paper proposes a relational ethics that recognizes the shared vulnerability and agency of all beings, challenging the prevailing notion that freedom requires detachment from constraint. By reframing freedom through multispecies entanglements rather than human sovereignty, this paper offers a pathway toward a more just and sustainable vision of multispecies flourishing in an era of planetary crisis.

This paper examines Pope Gregory the Great's ascetic epistemology historically and systematically. By treating Gregory's sources, both Latin and Greek, it establishes multiple lines of monastic influence on Gregory's approach to the knowledge of God in a Neoplatonic key. It does this by looking closely at Gregory's treatment of the gift of tears across his corpus. For Gregory, tears are a necessary precursor to the vision of God, they make growth in the knowledge and love of God possible, and they accompany the one seeking the vision of God throughout earthly life. By investigating sources of influence less commonly attributed to Gregory and tracing their effect on his picture of human knowledge of the divine, this paper offers a portrait of an understudied figure's inheritance and synthesis of multiple strands of the Christian Platonist tradition in the Late Antique period.

John Smith’s Select Discourses (1660) speaks often of the change of orientation required to come to a proper understanding of, and communion with, God. Moral, imaginative, and intellectual purification, mark a “conversion” from the material world to the realm of spirit and truth, plays a central role in Smith’s epistemology (clearly displayed in his “True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge”), natural theology (“Of the Immortality of the Soul”), and in his soteriology (most obviously presented in his “Excellency and Nobleness of True Religion”). In this paper, I will call attention to Smith’s explicit use of fourfold degrees of knowledge derived from Plato’s Divided Line as a “map” or “guide” for moral and intellectual conversion. Above all, the concern here is for the relationship between the theoretical and the practical. 

My paper will primarily attend to the question of how Plato and Weil each conceived of writing as related to the vision of God, considering the tension between the abstract form of the Good in Plato with Weil’s distinctly Christian notion of grace, as well as the implications of their differences in approach to reading and writing.

The most distinctive aspect of Thomas Gallus’ theology is his theological anthropology, which derives from Dionysius, where all created reality is governed by a threefold metaphysical dynamism of procession, remaining, and return. With respect to rational creatures, these dimensions acquire distinct expression. Metaphysical “procession” takes the form of a descending movement within the soul and a radical receptivity for receiving the divine self-communication. Metaphysical “return” for its part finds its anthropological expression in an ascending, ultimately self-transcending movement of the soul toward and into God. Gallus concretely expresses this dynamic anthropology by conceiving of the soul as a hierarchia in the specific Dionysian sense of the termthe goal of which is union with God. With this hierarchical anthropology, Gallus works out a sophisticated account of the soul's cognitive encounter with God, entailing both "intellectual cognition” and "affective cognition," which interact with each other to bring about a deifying union.

For many traditions whose aim is liberation, the self on behalf of whom we desire freedom is the very cage that confines us. To seek freedom for this self is to pursue a delusion. Various Vedic schools and Buddhist and Jain sects agree on this point yet diverge on what constitutes “liberation.” It has been described as the blissful absorption of consciousness disassociated from materiality, the enlightened insight that sees past the mirage of individuated existence, the loving relationship between a devotee and a deity, or (in the case of Buddhism in particular) an indescribable attainment subject to neither perception nor non-perception. Although none of these senses of liberation resemble “freedom” as we typically understand it, I want to resist the impression that such “spiritual” trajectories are thereby depoliticized. This presentation tracks how notions such as agency and autonomy shift within a liberational framework that views the self itself as the source of unfreedom.

This paper focuses on Edward W. Blyden’s most famous book, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1887). Specifically, it focuses on the problem of the image of God and its relationship to African freedom as conceived by Blyden. I argue that Blyden contends that Christianity presents an image of God that limits African freedom. Blyden focuses on the literal visual images of God that are characteristic of European Christian art. Blyden argues that the representation of the figure of Christ as a white European has made it impossible for Africans to identify with the figure of Christ without undermining their sense of self-worth. By contrast, Islam appeals to Blyden precisely because its iconoclasm leaves the image of God and of his prophets indeterminate. This, according to Blyden, has important consequences for African freedom.

Reinhold Niebuhr once said that “[a]ll profound religion is an effort to answer the challenge of pessimism.” Unfreedom, understood as socially caused and systematic impoverishments of human agency (such as those embodied in the ongoing system of global and imperial racial capitalism), is a source of pessimism. Why does unfreedom persist, even though people try to change things? This question of the ongoing stability of unfreedom is a reformulation of the traditional problem of evil. In this paper, I sketch a framework for theorizing unfreedom, drawing on pragmatism and non-ideal theory. This framework motivates a search for a practical answer to this question that is neither theodicy nor overly simple appeal to human nature. While, I will argue, we cannot know whether unfreedom can be fully overcome, grappling with this pessimism might illuminate some possibilities for change.

Although now primarily known as a philosopher and a mystic, Simone Weil was more well known in her short lifetime as an engaged political actor. One of her many concerns was with how contingent and yet persistent social structures contributed to oppression, and led to political systems that perpetuated what she referred to as force. Indeed, her analysis of power and power structures reveals for her that normal action, and normal thinking, can never fully interrogate or overcome our own desire for power and the exercise of that power against others and ourselves. Weil's response to these concerns, in both her life and her writing, was to identify the madness of action and thought, and embody that as far as possible as an example that no one could follow. This paper will conceptualise for the first time what I call her 'strategic' madness: one which she realised politically and philosophically. 

How do theological and philosophical understandings of language adequately meet the challenge of human difference and unfreedom in the modern world?  In grappling with this question, this paper will introduce a religious and theological reading of Stanley Cavell and show its explanatory power in critiquing and analyzing racial unfreedom in America. By putting Cavellian reflections on the “tyranny of convention” in conversation with Barbara and Karen Fields’ account of racial ideology, I argue that racial unfreedom can be best understood within ordinary language philosophy and its theological and religious inflections. By doing so, I will highlight, why, in the pursuit of liberation and freedom, the language of race has persisting significance for practitioners of religion in and outside of Christianity.