In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

What becomes of ecclesial belonging when the immigrant congregation that formed you can no longer hold you? Drawing on a hermeneutic phenomenological study of eight Indonesian American emerging adults raised in two Southern California evangelical congregations, this paper argues that departure from the immigrant church is not the failure of an ecclesial imaginary but its reconfiguration. The study surfaces several collective themes spanning the affirmative (resourcing, closeness, formation) and the critical (otherness, differences, schisms), revealing how participants carry the formational imprint of their ethnic faith communities into new contexts—from pan-Asian fellowships to “exvangelical” disaffiliation. Deploying a kinopolitical notion of imagined communities for non-linear faith identity development (Anderson [1983] 2016; Gin 2009; Nail 2015), the paper positions these departures as ecclesial flows rather than mere congregational losses—to reimagine belonging as circulation rather than enclosure—and hears in them echoes of Deus Migrator (Phan 2016), the God who travels with the (ecclesial) migrant.

“Ecumenical shared ministries” (ESMs) result from two or more congregations merging resources and worshipping together while retaining distinct denominational affiliations (Beardsall et al. 2018). In 2025, I conducted a qualitative study of two ESMs in neighbouring rural communities. Adapting Sarah Dunlop’s method of “narrated photography,” I collected photos of each ESM’s worship space (Dunlop 2024). I then conducted semi-structured interviews to explore how congregants engage in receptive ecumenism to discover “what each tradition might…fruitfully have to learn from the other” (Murray 2008).

My qualitative data suggests that the messy work of receptive ecumenism happens for ESMs through real-time encounters between differently ritualized bodies in a shared worship space. One ESM models receptive ecumenism by bringing differently ritualized bodies into the same space for a shared liturgy. The other ESM rarely engages in receptive ecumenism because differently ritualized bodies take turns using the same space instead of worshipping together in it.

This paper explores the emergence of AI-generated Christian influencer characters circulating on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. In a viral TikTok video with over 30 million views, an AI-generated Moses recounts the Exodus narrative in the style of a POV influencer vlog. Accounts such as holyvlogsz, followed by 450,000 users, portray biblical figures—Daniel narrating the lion’s den or Mary announcing her pregnancy—as social media personalities addressing contemporary audiences. Through content analysis of these viral videos, the paper interprets the phenomenon through the lens of mediatization theory, which examines how media logics increasingly structure religious communication. The paper also analyzes the racialized aesthetics of AI-generated biblical figures, showing how visual conventions derived from Western Christian imagery and global platform culture shape representations of sacred characters and influence emerging forms of digitally mediated religious authority. The paper investigates the merging of histories and futures in the AI Christian influencer. 

This paper investigates the dynamics of ritual failure in Hong Mai's twelfth-century collection Yijian zhi, situating its anecdotal narratives within the socioreligious context of the Song dynasty. Drawing on Ronald Grimes's taxonomy of ritual "infelicities" and Edward Schieffelin's distinction between procedure- and outcome-oriented failure, the study identifies two categories of failed rites. The first encompasses performance-centered breakdowns—flawed petitions, impure personnel, and procedural errors—that Grimes's framework diagnoses effectively. The second, however, resists such explanations: rituals that are correctly performed yet catastrophically rejected. To account for these cases, the paper introduces the concept of "cosmological invalidation," whereby a ritual's efficacy is nullified not by human error but by a higher moral-bureaucratic order governing karmic debts and underworld adjudication. The paper argues that narratives of inevitable retribution served a theodical function in a period of political instability, challenging the universality of performance-centered and strategic-negotiation models of ritual theory.

This paper examines ritual failure through the practice of jiaobei (珓杯, moon-block divination) in Daoist and local ritual contexts in central Hunan. Jiaobei are routinely cast there at critical moments of ritual performance to confirm divine permission for a ritual to proceed. When divinatory results fail to meet ritual expectations, it produces a publicly visible moment of uncertainty.

Rather than signalling ritual breakdown, such moments initiate a process of negotiation. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, this paper analyses how ritual masters respond to unfavourable jiaobei results by modifying bodily techniques, e.g. mudras and mantras, and ritual pacing in order to “urge” the divination (cui gua 催卦). These practices reflect a structured compromise between gods and ritual specialists grounded in Daoist ritual logics.

I argue that jiaobei-mediated ritual failure is an anticipated and productive condition that reaffirms relational authority between gods, ritual masters, and the ritual community, rather than undermining ritual efficacy.

Drawing on late imperial steles from southern Shanxi, this study examines a form of ritual failure that emerged when the infrastructural and organizational conditions sustaining ritual life broke down. The inscriptions record recurring disruptions, including failures to enforce festival calendars and service obligations, disputes over offerings and exactions, and the appropriation of temple property, which generated missed or failed rites. This article argues that ritual efficacy depended less on divine responsiveness than on the functioning of coordination mechanisms that allowed ritual to operate across communities. Local ritual was experienced as effective not through greater splendor, but through stable, low-friction routines grounded in predictable rules, manageable costs, clear resource boundaries, and workable inter-community coordination. When these conditions collapsed, officials and local elites intervened, claiming to bring ritual back under governance through regulation and documentation, thereby reorganizing local authority in the name of repairing efficacy. Ritual failure thus provides a window onto local power dynamics.

This paper investigates the dynamics of ritual failure in Hong Mai's twelfth-century collection Yijian zhi, situating its anecdotal narratives within the socioreligious context of the Song dynasty. Drawing on Ronald Grimes's taxonomy of ritual "infelicities" and Edward Schieffelin's distinction between procedure- and outcome-oriented failure, the study identifies two categories of failed rites. The first encompasses performance-centered breakdowns—flawed petitions, impure personnel, and procedural errors—that Grimes's framework diagnoses effectively. The second, however, resists such explanations: rituals that are correctly performed yet catastrophically rejected. To account for these cases, the paper introduces the concept of "cosmological invalidation," whereby a ritual's efficacy is nullified not by human error but by a higher moral-bureaucratic order governing karmic debts and underworld adjudication. The paper argues that narratives of inevitable retribution served a theodical function in a period of political instability, challenging the universality of performance-centered and strategic-negotiation models of ritual theory.

This paper examines ritual failure through the practice of jiaobei (珓杯, moon-block divination) in Daoist and local ritual contexts in central Hunan. Jiaobei are routinely cast there at critical moments of ritual performance to confirm divine permission for a ritual to proceed. When divinatory results fail to meet ritual expectations, it produces a publicly visible moment of uncertainty.

Rather than signalling ritual breakdown, such moments initiate a process of negotiation. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, this paper analyses how ritual masters respond to unfavourable jiaobei results by modifying bodily techniques, e.g. mudras and mantras, and ritual pacing in order to “urge” the divination (cui gua 催卦). These practices reflect a structured compromise between gods and ritual specialists grounded in Daoist ritual logics.

I argue that jiaobei-mediated ritual failure is an anticipated and productive condition that reaffirms relational authority between gods, ritual masters, and the ritual community, rather than undermining ritual efficacy.

Drawing on late imperial steles from southern Shanxi, this study examines a form of ritual failure that emerged when the infrastructural and organizational conditions sustaining ritual life broke down. The inscriptions record recurring disruptions, including failures to enforce festival calendars and service obligations, disputes over offerings and exactions, and the appropriation of temple property, which generated missed or failed rites. This article argues that ritual efficacy depended less on divine responsiveness than on the functioning of coordination mechanisms that allowed ritual to operate across communities. Local ritual was experienced as effective not through greater splendor, but through stable, low-friction routines grounded in predictable rules, manageable costs, clear resource boundaries, and workable inter-community coordination. When these conditions collapsed, officials and local elites intervened, claiming to bring ritual back under governance through regulation and documentation, thereby reorganizing local authority in the name of repairing efficacy. Ritual failure thus provides a window onto local power dynamics.

Ruha Benjamin contends that “we are living in the imagination of AI evangelists” who promise “ to guide us into the Future™” while “positioning themselves as Guardians of the Galaxy, even as they engineer the crises against which we must guard” (2024).  As these “AI evangelists” advance an eschatological and redemptive vision for their technology—while obscuring its dystopian propensities— Jamaican Revival Zion practitioners are troubling the exclusionary logics of “algorithms,” “artificial intelligence,” and even the very constitution of “science” and “technology.” Revivalists, and practitioners of other Africana religions, have long grappled with dystopian worlds not made for them, even as they are used as fungible resources from which to create these imperialist futures.  The paper offers Revivalists’ use of TikTok as a digital balmyard, mediated by copresences and seemingly divinatory algorithms, as a case study in the contentious world-building potentialities and “technologies of spiritual refusal” housed within Africana religions (Stewart 2022). 

This paper highlights the prominent role of digital technology among next-generation African diaspora Christians. From the moment one enters All Nations Church in New Jersey (ANCNJ) , the pervasive presence of digital media is unmistakable. Large, cinema-like screens evoke the immersive atmosphere of Times Square, while high-quality live-streaming reflects sophisticated, often unseen technological infrastructures. ANCNJ actively engages across multiple social media platforms, aligning its ministry with the digital habits of emerging generations. Spoken word is used as an embodied form of religious expression, and the digital space is engaged with as a cyber sanctuary.  Participants narrate their spiritual journeys, voice communal concerns, and translate doctrinal themes into embodied and culturally resonant expressions. Spoken word becomes a liturgical act and a process of identity formation, serving as a new practice of gospel proclamation. Drawing on participant observation and semi-structured interviews, this paper examines how second-generation migrants appropriate popular culture to express faith and identity. 

This paper examines religion as an affective, digital, and political practice through which young Ghanaians attempt to navigate economic precarity and global inequality. Focusing on Christian youth in Accra, ages 18-35, the study interrogates how spirituality mediates psychic life and how religious practices and spaces function as modes of survival and social networks, as places of belonging, identity, and ethical formation. As Africa’s youth population rapidly expands, this research examines youth as a social category formed through technological ambiguities, structural failures, and uncertain futures, global ecological pressures, and declining mental health. To make sense of Africa’s religious landscape, the research introduces the language of “warped intimacies” and argues that Ghanaian youth’s high religiosity reveals a reconfiguration of social relations toward religious figures and institutions. This project aims to unearth the material and affective consequences of transnational economic and theological forces on the lives of young Ghanaians.

We are living in a time of global meta-crisis marked by ecological disruption, social instability, and widespread emotional, physiological, and spiritual distress. As uncertainty deepens, the role of chaplains becomes increasingly vital. This paper explores how chaplains can expand traditional forms of spiritual accompaniment by integrating resilience, innovation, and relational skills to support organizations addressing social suffering. Drawing on my lived experience as a case study, I examine how chaplaincy skills—such as group facilitation, reflective practices, grief work, and meaning-making—can support communities beyond religious institutions. Examples of collaborations with climate nonprofits, public health departments, schools, libraries, and community initiatives demonstrate how spiritual care can address burnout, anxiety, ecological grief, and loss of meaning. I argue and present transdisciplinary thinking and creative approaches to chaplaincy are essential for meeting emerging spiritual needs and fostering collective resilience to prepare for our future(s). (AI was used to support summarizing the abstract in a concise manner) 

How is spiritual care evolving in response to human–animal relationships? This paper presents findings from a mixed-methods study that maps the emerging multifaceted field of veterinary chaplaincy, animal chaplaincy, and interspecies spiritual care. Drawing on survey and interview data from 43 chaplains and chaplaincy educators in the United States and Canada, this research foregrounds the voices of chaplains working in a wide range of human-animal contexts, including homes, veterinary practices, animal shelters, wildlife sanctuaries, ecological habitats, and religious institutions. These chaplains provide a range of spiritual care interventions, creating rituals for transitioning animals, offering grief support for caregivers, and companioning animal-care professionals experiencing occupational and moral distress. This dialogical session will focus on key insights from the findings: how practitioners prepare for the work and how they sustain their practice.

This paper agues that healthcare chaplains should become more actively involved in organized labor as part of their vocation and as a strategy for sustaining the future of chaplaincy. Drawing on Catholic social thought, feminist ethics, labor history, and ethnographic interviews with chaplains in healthcare contexts and nurses involved in the 2026 New York City nurses' strike, I develop a pragmatic account of solidarity as both moral virtue, social practice, and professional call. 

This paper examines how SETI practitioners use game theory, historical analogy, and policy protocols to predict and control the fundamentally unknowable event of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of scientific literature, I argue these methods constitute scientific divination that transforms radical uncertainty into managed risk while simultaneously generating new forms of enchantment. Game-theoretical models depend on non-empirical axioms that conjure particular futures into calculable existence. Historical analogies mobilize sanitized colonial narratives as predictive tools, reading futures in the past. Post-detection protocols impose bureaucratic order onto speculative scenarios, promising control without eliminating surprise. Rather than opposing enchantment, these rational methods produce meta-empirical otherness—potential alien presences that structure present action despite their unknowability and speculative nature. SETI's predictive practices are existential technologies for navigating decisions with species-ending consequences, revealing how prediction operates and enchantment intensifies precisely where empirical grounding fails and rationalization appears most complete.

This paper will provide an overview of the lineage of thought, treatment, and community building that anomalous experiencers have engaged with to make meaning of what has happened to them. Drawing from archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper reframes the lives of experiencers, and often their most traumatic moments, not as cultural curiosities but as sites of lived meaning and care within the context of psychiatric history and religious experience.

How do meaning-making strategies surrounding the “UFO phenomenon” intersect with “religion”? This paper explores the call-and-response between mainstream institutional UFO denial and grassroots subcultural knowledge production. The UFO phenomenon and associated notions of non-human intelligence destabilize hegemonic Western paradigms. Those in the UFO community navigate this fraught terrain through four distinguishable truth-seeking orientations: 1) speculative-political, 2) investigative-scientific, 3) communicative-spiritual, and 4) reconstructive-experiential. Symbolic boundaries and appeals to authority, experience, and science position UFO knowledge relative to mainstream institutions. Communicative-spiritual knowledge production, the third mode, is oriented vis-à-vis the spiritual-but-not-religious milieu as well as religious orthodoxies. In the U.S., UFO communities bypass both cautious Catholic openness and fundamentalist Christian demonization of UFOs to improvisationally bricolage Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, esoteric, and New Age elements into UFO-based spiritualities. The paper will conclude with two subcultural case studies of attempts at communication with non-human intelligences and the hierarchies of knowledge thereby reproduced or subverted.