Online June Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

The study of sacred space has traditionally centered on fixed, physical locations integral to religious experience. However, decentralized religious movements like the Bahá’í Faith—lacking clergy and permanent places of worship—challenge conventional models of sacredness and community formation. While digital religion scholarship has explored how hierarchical traditions adapt to online spaces, it has not sufficiently examined how decentralized faiths construct sacredness in deterritorialized, networked environments. This study employs multi-sited digital ethnography to analyze how Bahá’ís in Ireland engage with transnational digital networks to sustain religious identity, communal belonging, and governance. Through virtual study circles, devotional meetings, feasts, and interfaith dialogues, digital platforms constitute sacred space rather than merely extending religious practice. The shift to online participation alters community relations by increasing accessibility and global engagement, but it also generates tensions between local and transnational religious networks

The memorization of the Qur'an is a practice as old as revelation. Its completion to memory is considered a communal obligation, is the accomplishment of millions of Muslims around the world and is the aspiration of millions more.  This paper argues through the narrativized testimonies of Qur'an memorizers in Canada that memorization is not simply committing the verses of the Qur'an to memory. Rather, it is a highly ritualized, relational language performance-practice immersed in transnationality and global networks, the learning of which is internalized to transform understandings of self, community and futurity. 

The Trebor Seven YouTube website is the longest-running site teaching telekinesis on the Internet.  It’s creator, Robert Allen, not only demonstrates his abilities through hundreds of “TK moves” but he also aims to teach telekinesis through his channel and other websites.  As students begin their exercises to unlock their own abilities, hoping to join the ranks of the virtual Jedi, they are introduced to a religious perspective which is a precursor to success at telekinesis.  In this paper, the author will adopt the phenomenological approach and take the role of the new student, reporting on the process of learning telekinesis through “being-in-the-world”, embodiment, and radical Otherness from Robert over a period of three months.  Combined with interviews of Robert and his students, this paper will examine YouTube as a meeting point of community, spirituality, initiation, and educational empowerment, particularly for sites which claim to teach psi abilities.  

In recent years, the concept of religious literacy has become central in discussions on religious education. A key critique is the lack of empirical evidence supporting its effectiveness. To address this gap, an experimental survey was conducted to explore two main questions: a) whether religious literacy leads pupils to develop a more positive attitude towards religious diversity, and b) whether secularization leads to religious illiteracy among pupils and lower scores in their attitudes towards religious diversity. The results show that religious literacy improves through religious education but does not necessarily lead to more positive attitudes towards religious diversity. Contrary to some claims, religious literacy and attitudes towards religious diversity were both higher in the more secular context. This suggests that societal challenges related to religion stem from deeper structural, political, or economic issues, rather than from a mere lack of knowledge about religions.

Despite being a Muslim-majority country, Islamic religious education in Bangladesh remains politically and socially contested. The education system comprises Bengali-medium, English-medium, and Madrasa streams, each with varying approaches to religion. While public and Alia Madrasas include Islamic education under government oversight, Qawmi Madrasas focus solely on Islamic teachings and are privately run. Political regimes have historically used religious education to gain legitimacy, and global events, like post-9/11 Western critiques, have shaped perceptions of madrasas. However, scholars argue that madrasas also offer social support and are evolving with global and technological influences. The 2016 Holey Artisan attack reignited debates, highlighting that radicalization is not confined to Islamic schools. Recent political shifts, especially post-2024, have brought Islamic parties back into curriculum debates, raising concerns over radicalism versus the moral grounding Islamic education might provide. This paper explores the historical, pedagogical, and moral dimensions of religious education across different systems in Bangladesh.

Friedrich Schleiermacher is perhaps a curious figure with whom to reflect on the reception of the Nicene Creed in the modern era, since he was not shy about pointing out the difficulties in trinitarian thought that are enshrined in the Nicene Creed, and his Glaubenslehre (1830/31) called for a fresh Protestant treatment of the doctrine. This paper complicates the prevalent interpretation of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of God and trinitarian thought, which sees his work as marginal to the discussion, instead suggesting not only that Schleiermacher’s dogmatics had an enduring influence in this regard but also that his work has significance for constructive theology in the present era.

This essay examines the trinitarian theology of nineteenth-century Lutheran theologian Gottfried Thomasius, contextualizing his work within the theological and philosophical challenges to traditional trinitarian doctrine during the German Enlightenment. While Thomasius is primarily known for his controversial kenotic Christology, this analysis focuses on his doctrine of God and defense of Nicene orthodoxy. The essay argues that Thomasius sought to preserve and extend the Niceno-Constantinopolitan trinitarian consensus by developing a robust concept of divine personality (Persönlichkeit) in response to modern philosophical critiques. This study demonstrates how Thomasius articulated a trinitarian theology that maintained both divine unity and personal distinction through his innovative concept of "absolute personality." 

Unlike their philosophical contemporaries, the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’) (hereon the Brethren) cites the Qurʾān directly in almost every other paragraph of their fifty-one treatises. They were a ninth-tenth century Shīʾite philosophical movement from Baṣra, Iraq. Little is known about the actual group or its members, and their only remains are fifty-one treatises with two summaries. This paper argues that one of the reasons the Brethren employs the Qurʾān is to show how it can be used for theurgical purposes to physically free the body from pains. Following Gregory Shaw, Christian H. Bull, Brian Copenhaver, I argue that theurgy (literally Divine Acts) are “ritual elements that combines intellection (noêsis) that produces union with the divine.”[1] These ritual elements and actions can consist of magic, numerology, talismans, invocations, and prayers. 

Messianic interpretations of the Qurʾān and its hermeneutical manifestations (taʾwīl) remain underexplored. This paper examines the messianic reception history of the seemingly legal verse Q 17:33 in early Shīʿī exegetical sources. I demonstrate how second/eighth-century Shīʿī Imams, Muḥammad al-Bāqir (d. 114/732) and Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765), reportedly interpreted maẓlūm (“the oppressed one”) in Q 17:33 as their martyred forefather, Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī (d. 61/680), and manṣūr (“the helped one”) as the Qāʾim/Mahdī from their progeny. The Qāʾim is depicted as defeating the Sufyānī, a descendant of Yazīd I (d. 64/683), in a conflict limited by the verse’s principle of “no excess.” I also show how the Imams align the Qāʾim’s eschatological events and locations with those of Ḥusayn’s final months. This early typological reading presents Ḥusayn as a prefiguration of the Qāʾim’s movement, offering deeper insight into the development of messianic interpretations of the Qurʾān.

Amīr Khusraw is one of the most famous poets from the Indian Subcontinent. A court poet of the Delhi Sultanate–one of the most important Islamic empires during the thirteenth century, Khusraw was at once a poet, Sufi, literary critic, linguaphile, and connoisseur of music. Khusraw played a central role in developing Indo-Persian aesthetics and poetics, laying the foundation for a distinct Indo-Persian literary heritage that remains alive in contemporary South Asia. Khusraw was deeply well versed in various Islamic intellectual sciences. This allowed him to not only creatively deploy from the literary and religious tradition(s) preceding him but also to synthesize them. Responding the the inimitability of the Qur’ān debate that explores the relationship between poetry and the Qur’ān, Khusraw penned a theoretical treatise titled Preface to the Full Moon of Perfection that creatively deploys tools from literary criticism and argues for poetry to be a source of wisdom. 

This paper presents is one of the first comparative textual studies of the “messianic” religious movements of late medieval Islam (ca. 1300-500), who are often assumed to have been isolated from intellectual traditions.  Scholars have thus compared these movements to the early (8th-9th c.) “extremist” Shiʿi sects, particularly because both viewed the Shiʿi Imams as divine figures.  However, taking the examples of the Hurufis and the Safavids, I show the belief in the Imam’s divinity among these later groups to have arisen from a particular indebtedness’ to a major point of Sunni dogma, the uncreated nature of the Qurʿan, which Shiʿi groups in turn commonly equate with the Imam.  Ironically, while their “extremist” belief in Imams’ divinity has invited these movements’ characterization as manifesting a “popular” Shiʿism unchanging throughout history, I show how it emerged from the highly connected, interconfessional intellectual milieu historically specific to late medieval Islam.