In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Employing the interdisciplinary lenses of Black religious studies, food studies, and Black Feminist theory, this paper examines the everyday lived experiences of Black Mormon women (BMW). It uncovers how Black Mormon women navigate intersectional social exclusions like antiBlackness, misogynoir, and classism within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), and how food practices influence and shape their faith and identities. I draw upon two examples for my argument: Jane Manning James, a Black domestic servant for Mormon church founder Joseph Smith, and Nara Smith, a popular #tradwife social media influencer. From the historical to the contemporary, food is a central measure and tool of these Black Mormon Women's domesticity, racialized gendering, attempts at kinship, and spirituality. It is a contested space of material culture where Black Mormon Women struggle, negotiate, and strive for life, otherwise. 

Normatively, the analytic of care has been theorized within a positive orientation situating care practices as a liberatory salve against anti-black violence. Care as such fails to account for how violence is ordained and materializes vis-a-vis care for the black. "Too black for care" writes Frank Wilderson is the structural position of the blackened. This proposal examines the religious and scientific violence that undergirds the ways in which the enslaved person is cared for and enacts their own care work in the slave hospital on the Butler plantation estates of Butler and St. Simon Islands in Georgia from 1774-1859. How do we think of care and what it means for the enslaved person to be cared for in this site? I contend that the exemplary violence and libidinal economy of slavery is continued and congealed within the religio-scientific analytic of care which continues to determine the blackened existence today.

This paper offers visual analysis of Carie Mae Weems’s now iconic “Kitchen Table” (1990) exhibit and situates the exhibit within a history of 20th-century black photographers who contested visual regimes of white supremacy by training their lens on everyday spaces, habits, and objects. In Weems’s original series of twenty gelatin prints, the kitchen table is a constant but not uncontested focal point. It bears witness to joy and grief, desire and revulsion, laughter and bitterness and ecstasy and agony. For Weems, the table in her home in Syracuse, New York, is a material object and a narrative conceit and a photographic creation. Through all of these registers, she curates the frame with bodies and objects and plays of light to tell a story even as she provokes a disconnect between what beholders see and what she wants them to know. 

This paper investigates the critical resources contained in Black historical romance writer Beverly Jenkins’s self-identification as a “kitchen table historian” and her self-proclaimed work of “edutainment” (Turn On podcast). Jenkins’s naming continues and innovates in a legacy of Black women’s subversive cultural production at the meeting of historiography, literature, and religious meaning-making, ranging from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Audre Lorde, Carrie Mae Weems, and Karen Baker-Fletcher, and imaged through the kitchen table. I argue that the “kitchen table historian” enacts a spatial reformation of historiography in contemporary mass-market historical romance which eschatologically utilizes desire to center a Black historical subject. Analyzing Jenkins’s commentary against comments from white historical romance writer Julia Quinn (author of the famed, originally white Bridgerton series), I showcase how Jenkins’s kitchen table intervention upends the white supremacist presumptions of white-centric historical romance and rehabilitates Black historical consciousness through the erotic, a powerful religious resource. 

In Confessions 9.10.23-25, Augustine and Monica experience God at Ostia. This experience represents a significant departure from Platonic conceptions of divine visions in two ways. First, Augustine and Monica's experience is shared. Second, both Augustine and Monica are epistemic peers. These points stand in marked contrast to how Plato and other Neoplatonists, particularly Plotinus, conceive visions of the Good. For the Platonist, such experiences are fundamentally individual cognitive achievements. They cannot be shared. Furthermore, they can only be achieved within the context of a master-pupil relationship, i.e., an epistemically asymmetrical relationship. We argue these differences in the Augustinian and Platonist accounts stem from how each conceptualizes the nature of the Good. For the Platonists, the Good is a passive object of contemplation. For Augustine, God is an active cause of divine experiences. We argue that this difference has significant implications throughout Augustine’s early epistemology and theory of divine experiences.

One of the main shifts that is detectable in Augustine’s thinking involves a network of ideas connecting the nature and origin of evil, the nature of the human person, and the ultimate hope for humanity. These areas are tied together for Augustine and are particularly prominent in the writings pertaining to Manichaeanism. It has become clear in recent years that in relation to these areas of Augustine’s thought, it is important to consider the influence of Neo-Platonists like Plotinus and especially Porphyry. As I will explain, the analysis of certain critiques Augustine makes against the Manichaeans will enable us to gain a clearer sense of Porphyry’s influence on Augustine, as well as a better understanding of the ultimate position Augustine took on the several important metaphysical and soteriological issues.

In this paper, I recover platonic and Christian sources on divine immensity and argue that immensity is crucial to any resolutely theistic participatory metaphysics. The paper involves three movements. First, I outline a version of immensity drawn from key sources of classical theism, including Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, and Frances Turretin. On this view, immensity describes, not merely the limitless presence of effective divine power, but properly the reality of divine presence as the essence that surrounds and undergirds the essences of all actual and possible creatures. Second, I argue that such a view of immensity guards against the deistic impulse, on the one hand, and the pantheistic/panentheistic impulse on the other hand - and yet allows for a sufficiently robust account of divine presence for a participatory metaphysics. Finally, I conclude by addressing philosophical objections to divine presence as outlined in the doctrine of immensity.

In this paper, I map the summit of Augustine of Hippo’s schema of human perceptual experience as laid out in his De Quantitate Animae (Lt. On the Magnitude of the Soul). As I analyse, Augustine uses Neoplatonist participatory metaphysics in his construction of the seventh gradus of the (human) soul. The gradus are degrees of functionalities the soul possesses. I go on to trace Augustine’s schema of the summit of human perceptual experience as the mansio (seventh gradus) to Thomas Aquinas’ schema as the habitatio. I argue that Aquinas’ schema of the summit of perceptual experience is also shaped by metaphysics of participation via his use of Augustinian theology. Whilst Augustine’s mansio takes us beyond this life into eternity, Aquinas’ habitatio is the summit of joy during one’s earthly life. Both Augustine’s ‘mansio’ and Aquinas’ 'habitatio' connote the concept ‘home.’ A concept which, I argue, is from Neoplatonist participatory metaphysics.

While Gagaku or Japanese court music has been integral to both imperial and local Shinto ceremonies, including various matsuri (festivals), its ritual function remains underexplored in religious and ritual studies. This paper explores the role of “folk Gagaku” in Shinto rituals, emphasizing its significance in the comparative study of religious rituals. Examining small-scale, amateur Gagaku groups in Shiga prefecture, my presentation highlights how localized ritual practices interact with institutional traditions. Presenting ethnographic data and field recordings, I contrast these performances with the imperial Gagaku tradition, revealing tensions between orthodox ritual frameworks and vernacular expressions of sacred sound. The paper advocates for a “sonic turn” in religious studies, employing acoustemology (Feld 2015) to explore Shinto sound culture (Ōuchi 2021). Challenging text-centric approaches, I call for a more integrated understanding of ritual soundscapes, demonstrating the centrality of auditory experience to the study of lived religion. 

This presentation examines the religious practices of Shinto shrine families within shrine kōsha and kyōkai under State Shinto during the Meiji and Taishō periods, focusing on the Miyagishima family of Miho Shrine in Shizuoka. In 1882, the government prohibited Shinto priests from performing religious guidance, leading to a division between Shrine Shinto and Sect Shinto. However, Miho Shrine engaged in religious activities through the Shinto Miho Church, affiliated with the Shinto Headquarters. Inspired by Honda Chikaatsu's Spiritual Learning (Reigaku), they practiced divine possession (kishinhō). The Miyagishima archives (1893–1925) contain oracular records, doctrinal texts, and one of the Ritual texts, "Shinkai Gakusoku", a 1915 ritual manual written under divine possession. This text details childbirth prayers and deity summoning rituals, reflecting Honda’s teachings. By analyzing "Shinkai Gakusoku", it becomes clear that shrine families exercised religious autonomy under kyōkai-affiliated kōsha, preserving spiritual traditions beyond the official framework of State Shinto.

Purification (harae) is a fundamental concept in Japanese religious tradition, particularly evident in the Ōharae, a Shinto ritual performed biannually to cleanse spiritual pollution and restore harmony. While the Nakatomi no harae, the ritual formula, has been extensively studied, the role of the natural landscape in the ritual remains overlooked. This study explores how natural elements—rivers, mountains, trees, air, and the ocean—function as ritual tools, enabling the kami’s purifying intervention. Drawing from ritual materiality and landscape studies, I argue that in the Ōharae, the natural landscape is not merely a backdrop but an ontological potency that actively constructs the sacred space to the point of merging with it. This sacred landscape encompasses a large geographical area which includes also the territories outside of Japan therefore reaffirming the qualitative difference between “center” and “remote”.

Sara Coleridge's Phantasmion (1837) is often identified as the first English fantasy novel. It has usually been read as an intentionally inconsequential work, meant to be enjoyed for its own sake. This paper proposes an alternative reading of the novel, one that views it as part of Coleridge's larger body of theological work. Phantasmion's form as a fantasy novel and the story that unfolds within that form are narrative expressions of her theology. This argument is developed along three lines: First, Coleridge expressly wrote that narrative and fairy tales are the best mode through which children are educated on Christianity. Second, Phantasmion's emphasis on the sanctification of its protagonist anticipates the concerns of her later Dialogues on Regeneration. Third, reading Phantasmion through the lens of Tolkien's "eucatastrophe" reveals that recovering the agency of women is essential to the renewal and restoration of the world.

This paper examines The Gold Thread (1860) by Norman MacLeod as a piece of literary pedagogy in a programme of Christianised Bildung. Written during an explosion of children’s literature in Victorian Britain, The Gold Thread is the first children's book written in literary form. MacLeod's use of literary form both illustrates and enacts his convictions concerning childhood education, which, I argue, were influenced by Freidrich Schiller’s vision of the education of the “beautiful soul"; a vision starkly contrasted to the highly moralised Victorian children's literature of the time. While MacLeod's connection to broader nineteeth century literary and philosophical trends have been largely ignored, this paper explores how MacLeod's Christian adaptation of the notion of Bildung and his use of literary form helped shift religious conceptions of the moral and spiritual lives of children in Britain, contributing to a social movement that culminated in the abolition of children’s labor in Scotland.

In this paper, I examine Kierkegaard’s use of polyvocal pseudonymity—the creation of multiple different authorial personae—in light of similar literary projects undertaken at roughly the same time by J. L. Heiberg and Robert Schumann. I argue that, despite the historical connections between Heiberg and Kierkegaard and their shared city and culture, Kierkegaardian polyvocality is better understood as akin to Schumann’s polyvocal pseudonymous music criticism. While Heiberg employs pseudonymity largely to instantiate distance between reader and author, Schumann’s pseudonymity appears as a response to the inability of language to describe or present music. Despite the authorial distance evident in parts of the Kierkegaardian authorship, I argue that Schumann’s understanding and use of polyvocal pseudonymity are a much better fit with Kierkegaard’s usage—and offer readers a literary entry point into discussions of both music and faith.

In an era of religious tumult, Thoreau was an original voice in American religion. He sought to divorce the religious sentiment from its institutional context and helped pioneer an eclectic, experiential and non-institutional spirituality that has taken on new popularity. His religiosity and iconoclastic theological vision have been obscured, however, by his harsh attacks on churches as well as his pluralism, nature mysticism and refusal to systemize his religious beliefs. Nevertheless, Thoreau was religious to the bone and had a profound sense of the holy. While not a confirmed theist, he was open to and sought union with a divine mystery that was at once immanent in nature and not contained by it. Thoreau called this illimitable presence many names, but he often called it God. His religious sensibility was a central thread in his work as a naturalist, his philosophical thought and his ethical commitments. 

George MacDonald constantly engages with the theme of motherhood. The topic appears in the theology of his sermons, literary criticism, fantasy tales, stories for children, and novels for adults. For MacDonald, motherhood is not inherently connected with pregnancy or giving birth, a perspective that was shaped by his experience of losing his mother at a young age but being loved as a child by his spinster aunt and stepmother. Motherhood, with its primary characteristic of love, belongs to all women. The more a woman increases in love and in the quality of her motherhood, the less she will care whether the children she mothers are her own or another’s. This paper argues that even as he develops an ideal of feminine motherhood, MacDonald affirms a primarily non-normative maternal role when he claims that a childless woman can be more truly a mother than a woman who has borne children.

“Liberation Theology” is still in its infancy stages of interreligious comparison and is predominantly understood solely in a Christian context. Even still, scholars are noticing similarities between Christians and Muslims, referring to some as “Islamic Liberation Theologians.” These comparisons are often without developing or defining what makes them “liberation.” In this paper, I will present a two-part framework that allows scholars to identify a type of theology or ethic as “liberation.” The first component of the framework is a theory of oppression, often in terms of salvation history and political oppression. The second component is a focus on praxis, the serious reflection on shared experiences of oppression that leads to the material liberation of the oppressed. To substantiate this framework, I will provide examples from two paradigmatic figures in Christianity and Islam: Gustavo Gutiérrez – Latin American Catholic priest – and Ali Shariati – Shia Muslim revolutionary.

In political discourse, liberation and reconciliation are often seen as competing goals. Liberation and freedom are conceived in terms of autonomy, while reconciliation and unity are conceived in terms of mutuality. Against these customary associations, the Black liberation theologian J. Deotis Roberts insists, “There can be no liberation without reconciliation and no reconciliation without liberation.” Roberts’s Christian theology offers an alternative, dialectical picture of the interplay between freedom and interdependence. This paper compares Roberts’s argument with the work of Mohandas Gandhi. In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi argues similarly that true independence is not possible without taking responsibility for one another. The eighth-century Buddhist monk Śāntideva likewise offers a vision of liberation in which one is freed for the sake of others, and freed by caring for others. Comparing these authors’ arguments points toward an alternative paradigm for integrating the urgent demand for emancipation with the urgent need for cooperation.

This paper studies the myth of peace in the temples of Sukuh, Cetho, and Kethek during the twilight of the Majapahit Kingdom (14th–16th century) and Christian liberation theology. Both traditions emerged from periods of upheaval, seeking harmony through decolonial and transformative practices. The Javanese temples, with their punden architecture, Shaivite reinterpretations, and ruwatan rituals, reflect a quest for cosmic and social balance. Similarly, liberation theology, through Ignacio Ellacuría’s “liberating grace” and Cláudio Carvalhaes’s liturgical resistance, emphasizes decolonization and communal justice. Drawing on Raimon Panikkar’s intercultural myth as and Victor Turner’s ritual theory, this study examines how both traditions construct sacred narratives to address oppression and environmental crises. The ruwatan ritual is compared to Ellacuría’s and Carvalhaes’s transformative practices, highlighting a shared impulse to decolonize dominant paradigms and reimagine peace as spiritual and social renewal. This comparative approach enriches interreligious peacebuilding and offers a framework for contemporary challenges.

Informed by the lives and practices of Palestinian women in Gaza and Mayan women in Guatemala, this chapter attempts to provide an answer to the question “Wenak ya Allah?” - where are you, God, amid genocide? I advocate for an approach that embraces women’s experiences as sources for reflection and inspection of our theologies. Following George Khodr’s theology of the cross, I explore the parallels between the Guatemalan and Palestinian contexts. I argue, following Guatemalan and Palestinian women’s embodiment of care and agency amidst genocide and its aftermath, that the commitment to ethics of care embodies God’s presence within the community in Gaza and Guatemala. We see God embodied in those who practice care, particularly women.

Unlike most twentieth-century social revolutions religion played a central role in both the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions. Both Iranians and Nicaraguans re-articulated the meaning of their respective religions in prefigurative free spaces. As the socio-political climate worsened in their respective countries in the late 1970s they employed stories from the Bible and Qur’an to mobilize against their respective governments. 

Although class and regional differences exist between religious participants from each country our comparative case study reveals that they shared in common sacred stories centered on prophecy, religious virtue, miracles, and the challenges associated with demanding social justice.  Building on the religious discourse approach, centered on literatures that focus on stories and storytelling, we set out to examine the specific ways these sacred stories motivated them to take action and facilitated their transformation as revolutionary actors.

As part of broader anti-violence efforts, in 2019, the López Obrador administration launched Creamos Paz (Let’s Create/Believe in Peace) through the Office of Religious Affairs. This initiative promotes peacebuilding by collaborating with officials, scholars, and interfaith actors, challenging Mexico’s secular tradition. This paper examines how Mexico’s new religious policy is implemented and negotiated locally. Using a mixed-methods approach—including multivariate analysis, participant observation, interviews, and archival research—I identify two trends: while the Catholic-majority Bajío region remains less engaged, southeastern states, with higher Indigenous and non-Catholic Christian populations, show greater interest. Evangelical actors have strategically leveraged religious affairs offices to strengthen governmental ties. Despite its pluralistic rhetoric, Creamos Paz may advance Evangelical expansion while offering limited engagement—and veiled exclusion—to non-Christian minorities that misfit world religions frameworks. I argue that these developments reflect a broader shift toward Protestant-inflected secularism in Latin America, where religious freedom discourses reshape religious power within secular regimes.

Religious pluralism in the Arabian Gulf is not simply permitted or restricted but actively shaped by state policies that regulate, accommodate, or brand religious diversity. This paper examines five models of state-managed religious pluralism: Saudi Arabia’s restrictive monoconfessionalism, Bahrain’s sectarian pluralism, Kuwait and Qatar’s pragmatic accommodation, the UAE’s branded tolerance, and Oman’s subtle inclusivity. While the UAE has pioneered religious tolerance as a diplomatic and economic tool, Qatar is cautiously adopting similar strategies. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain manage religious diversity through controlled sectarian governance, while Oman sustains a low-profile, historically embedded pluralism. These models suggest that innovation in religious governance doesn't necessarily lead to greater freedom but often reinforces state control. By comparing these models of pluralism, this paper argues for expanding research beyond high-profile interfaith diplomacy to examine whether less visible, embedded models such as Oman’s—whether innovative or not—may offer a more durable foundation for religious pluralism.

Religious institutions have been central to Hong Kong’s education system, yet its religiously diverse school sector arose inadvertently as a byproduct of colonial governance and persisted into the postcolonial era. This paper contends that religious plurality in Hong Kong’s schools emerged not from deliberate policy but as an unintended consequence of administrative practices under British rule—shaped by laissez-faire oversight in education, reliance on religious bodies, and demographic shifts, notably migration, within evolving sociopolitical conditions. Through historical and institutional analysis, it traces the evolution of religious education from early Christian schooling and the establishment of Hong Kong’s first non-Christian (Buddhist) school in the 1930s to the transformative mid-20th century. It further examines how the educational system solidified existing pluralistic structures despite post-handover ideological tensions and constraints on Western religious influence. The paper analyzes how governance approaches, regulatory frameworks, and religious networks have collectively shaped Hong Kong’s distinctive form of religious plurality.

This paper presents findings from a multi-methodological study of atheism and agnosticism (which we collectively label as nontheism) in contemporary China, conducted as part of a broader international research program exploring nontheistic beliefs, identities, and moral perspectives. The results reveal that, unlike the naturalistic, anti-religious atheism common in the West, Chinese nontheism is characterized by high engagement with supernatural beliefs and low levels of anti-religious sentiment. While Chinese nontheists associate atheism with political orthodoxy, they do not favor particular nonreligious labels. In terms of moral outlooks, Chinese nontheists are not markedly different from the Chinese general population, exhibiting both relativist and conventionalist perspectives. These findings provide insight into the cross-cultural and pluralistic dimensions of atheism and agnosticism as well as the nature of meaning, value, and belief in twenty-first-century China.