In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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. 

My paper pexplores the humanizing ethic of sport that counters the weighing imposition of authoritarian governments. I suggest that viewing sports through the philosophy of humanism provides a window into speaking about and addressing difficult topics like religion and politics in sporting spaces. Humanism is a lifestance that envisions and practices living well without organized religion, typically amongst individuals in a loose collective of nonbelievers. I argue that humanism can act as an interpretive framework through which sport becomes a site of ethical resistance. I draw upon humanist insights from religion and sport theorists like Eric Bain-Selbo, the theory of Olympism in conversation with early modern humanist philosophers like Albert Camus, values conveyed from prominent atheist professional athletes, and compare between the story of Springboks role in addressing the aftermath of the South Africa apartheid and the targeted effort amongst American female professional athletes against unjust governmental structures. 

Responding to C. Thi Nguyen’s recent work on the philosophy of games, I argue that both the history and form of the fantasy tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons have profound lessons for theological doctrine. I critique Nguyen’s brief treatment of D&D and argue that his own distinction between a ‘dish’ and a ‘recipe’ reveals the danger — navigated by players, religious studies scholars, and practitioners alike — of reducing games to rules, and theology to doctrine. This is a particularly salient danger for theological education, wherein students are familiarizing themselves not just with doctrines but what doctrine itself is and can do. Drawing from recent work on theological education and method, I argue that students must be brought to terms with the constitutive ambivalence of doctrine, and work to gain a more capacious understanding of doctrine’s varied uses, contexts, politics, and corresponding — but never containable — ways of life.

This paper illustrates the ways American Muslim teen girls in the U.S. heartland respond creatively, playfully, faithfully and politically to the precarity of their world through playing basketball. I map the various authorizing forces which impact girls’ ability to play basketball and how the girls play authorities against each other to achieve their goals. I show that they do this by playing up or downplaying basketball as a serious endeavor. Their desire to play is very serious, but they play to have fun. While some girls "fight to play" by finessing the meritorious and beneficial aspects of playing basketball to parents skeptical of their daughters “wasting time,” other girls "play to fight," using their platform as esteemed athletes for anti-war activism. I argue that through playing, Muslim teens recover a girlhood for themselves in a context bent on denying it to them while transforming the community around them. 

With the approaching 30th anniversary of the tragic passing of Tupac Amaru Shakur, an appraisal of how Shakur conceived the idea of “future” is warranted, particularly in light of his consistent articulation and expectation of his early death. This paper explores Shakur’s notion of death as liberative against the terrors of modernity and its commitments to the subjugation, early death, and disappearance of Black persons. Within this framework, I pay particular attention to how Shakur critiques the organized vision of the future articulated within dispensationalist eschatology, a framework through which Black futures are rendered unavailable under the terms of modernity. Rather than imagining the present as a site where Black flourishing is possible, Shakur calls for the end of the world and its dominating logics while visually and sonically depicting Black flourishing in a deferred future—a Black heaven. This paper reads these themes through the song “Blasphemy” from The Don Killuminati: The Seven Day Theory and the video for “I Ain’t Mad at Cha.”

This paper studies the Brahma Kumari tradition in Canada and in global space. The focus is on the issue of globalized identity and female religious authority of the followers. I examine several aspects of the globalization of Brahma Kumari in Canada and its complex links with South Asian religions in India. It seems that the tradition is at crossroads, just as the devotees’ cultural identity is at crossroads – being simultaneously Western and at the same time South Asian. What happens when traditions and identities are at crossroads? Do globalized traditions produce globalized identities? Are there any other transformations that happen in this cultural mobility? By means of analysis of texts and data from interviews with Brahma Kumari followers, this paper seeks to reframe the Brahma Kumari tradition in a global context, a truly global movement, which has made home in Canada while maintaining links with the spiritual homeland in India. 

This this paper will explore the presence, vitality, and active worship of two Hindu goddesses in the Tamil diaspora in the San Francisco Bay Area. While Lakshmi is very well known, representing wealth, health, and auspiciousness, the earth goddess Bhudevi is not as focused upon. Recent wildfires in California wrought havoc, raising questions connecting devotion and ecology. How does environmental catastrophe affect Hindu Americans’ worship of Bhudevi or Lakshmi? Are there caste distinctions or class differences to note, and how do these shape the perceptions of the Hindu diaspora? These questions will be investigated through the interlaced lenses of 1) economics and the varying notions of “value”; 2) the Hindu sacralization of the natural world and its relationship to environmental knowledge; and 3) transformative individual and community action about climate chaos. This research will be based on ethnographic fieldwork situated around two temples: Concord Siva-Murugan Temple and Livermore Siva-Vishnu Temple. 

This paper addresses the creative expansions of the god Jagannath as he travels from his origins in the state of Odisha into the US Hindu diaspora. Despite the popularity of Jagannath’s Ratha Yatra festival, far less attention has been paid to his other travels and his continuous material re-creations. De-centering Puri and its more orthodox Hinduism, this paper confronts some lesser-known movements and dwellings of the god in the San Francisco Bay area. These more imaginative adaptations of the god address the concerns and very lives of the devotees who live there. As a result, the god has moved and transformed—including in his material forms—into American Hindu communities and the homes of everyday devotees. Relying on material culture studies and ethnography, this study delves into more marginal aspects of the god’s transformative reality that allow him to be present to devotees across time, place, and culture. 

This paper presents testimonies from Thai-American restaurateurs whose businesses function not only as sites of commerce but also as spaces where distinctive modes of engagement with Hindu deities emerge. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Thai communities in the northeastern US, the study examines the growing presence of Hindu deities such as Ganesha and Krishna in restaurant interiors. These visual arrangements reflect recent religious developments in Thailand, where Hindu gods have gained prominence as patrons of entrepreneurial success, and reveal how Thai migrants carry these practices into North America. By examining how restaurant art and décor mediate encounters with Hindu imagery, the paper argues that Thai Buddhist restaurateurs emerge as unexpected stewards of Hindu devotion in North America. In doing so, the study highlights how migration, religious materiality, and interreligious borrowing invite us to reconsider familiar narratives about Asian American religion while helping decenter India in the study of global Hinduism.

This paper addresses the Future/s theme by interpreting KPop Demon Hunters (KDH) as a meditation on Korea’s contested religious past that imagines a global future in which shared musical experiences exorcise literal and metaphorical demons by uniting religiously and culturally diverse audiences. KDH celebrates but does not merely represent Korean “shamanism,” creating a hybrid cosmology that cross-references elements from Christianity, Buddhism, and popular culture. Specifically, the film’s conceit of music as exorcism connects centuries-old kut (musical rituals to appease spirits) to pre-Pentecostal Protestant uses of hymn-singing and modern Pentecostal megachurch worship as techniques deployed first to demonize indigenous religions and then to exorcise spirits identified as demons. KDH is sufficiently non-specific about this religious history to attract diverse audiences, bringing together established fan bases for Hallyu (Korean wave) and exorcism media. Mobilizing ambiguous meanings of “idol,” KDH idealizes a global spiritual community fueled by fan devotion to popular cultural artists.

This paper argues that the “Jesus Birthday Cafe” (Jesus Saeng-ca), organized by Korea Campus Crusade for Christ, refashions Christian devotion through the affective and participatory grammar of K-pop fandom. Modeled on the K-pop “Idol Birthday Cafe,” the event transforms Christmas into an Instagrammable pop-up devotional space structured around Jesus photo cards, a photo zone, and limited-edition goods. These material forms make faith tangible, emotionally resonant, and culturally legible for a digital-native generation. Yet they also mediate encounter with the divine through commodified signs shaped by a white, Eurocentric, male image of Jesus. The paper contends that the Jesus Birthday Cafe does more than popularize Christianity; it reveals how evangelical belonging is increasingly produced through consumer aesthetics, affective participation, and visual mediation, while simultaneously reproducing colonial Christian visuality. In doing so, it exposes tensions among accessibility, devotion, commodification, and postcolonial critique in contemporary South Korean evangelical culture and practice today.

The US-made animated film KPop Demon Hunters, released on Netflix in 2025, has broken viewership records and won milestone awards. Its breakout popularity has meant greater attention by American and global audiences to Korean culture and religion. This presents a challenge, but also an opportunity to use the current popularity of that film, and the interest it generates, to teach wider audiences about Korean religious culture. This paper explains and argues that KPop Demon Hunters can and should be used as an effective teaching tool. I explain ways in which Korean religion and culture are used in the film. Then I describe examples of the pedagogical application of KPop Demon Hunters, including an account of my public lecture on the History Behind KPop Demon Hunters given at the Ann Arbor District Library and incorporation into other lessons and works on Korean religion by myself and other scholars.

Black contemporary gospel music provides a womanist method for spiritual care and physical healing. However, little scholarship has examined the capacity for gospel music to heal Black women against the health-reducing factors necessitating their healing, especially the physically and spiritually deleterious effects of stress and, upon accumulation, moral injury. Black women within the United States face particular psychological-spiritual distress resulting from intersectional stress due to the multidimensional oppression imposed on them along race, gender, class, and age. Given that music interventions offer a scalable, cost-effective approach to alleviate physiological stress and psychological stress, this paper proposes the first-ever framework and evidence-base identifying the stress-reducing qualities of Black contemporary gospel music in order to guide the development of gospel music interventions specifically tailored to Black women’s lived experiences with intersectional stress and moral injury. 

This paper engages Miranda Fricker's framework of epistemic injustice and Jonathan Shay's theory of moral injury to examine the intersections of epistemic injustice, moral injury, and moral repair in diasporic contexts.

This paper examines the moral injuries experienced by American Protestant missionaries during the Nanjing Massacre and the Nanking Safety Zone (1937–1938), arguing that their suffering reveals moral injury less as an individual pathology than as a sign of systemic failure. Drawing on diaries, letters, and reports by Minnie Vautrin, Miner Searle Bates, George Fitch, and Robert Wilson, the paper analyzes how humanitarian and spiritual labor under conditions of occupation, scarcity, and violence produced distinct forms of moral injury, including guilt over exclusion, indirect collusion, remorse over misjudgment, and anguish under impossible triage. In conversation with current debates over defining “moral injury disorder,” the paper argues that pathologizing moral injury risks shifting attention away from institutional betrayal and structural violence. The Nanjing case shows that spiritual caregivers themselves may be uniquely vulnerable, and that moral injury can function as an embodied political and theological critique. 

This paper considers artist Khalil Rabah’s long running, parafictional art project The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (2003–ongoing). Rabah uses exhibition-making strategies and display conventions to satirize the violent worldmaking projects that museums are called upon to uphold. I join visual analysis of Rabah’s artwork with decolonial critiques of the museum and state, specifically Israel. During the decolonial and revolutionary post-World War II context of the mid-twentieth century, many newly sovereign nations opened museums. In the case of the Zionist settler-colonial project, the museum pre-dates the founding of the nation-state, paving the way for future statehood. These museums legitimize the terms of possession so that by the time the nation-state is declared, the argument for its existence was already made. Rabah indexes the historical to envision the future of Palestinian sovereignty and simultaneously interrogates the veracity of the museum as an institution of objective truth.

This paper examines calls to save Palestine that were made over a decade before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. This research focuses on the works of Muṣtafa Sadiq al-Rāfiʿī (d. 1937), a renowned figure in the 20th reform movement against colonialism in the Middle East. Although he died in 1937, al-Rāfiʿī warned against the approaching threat which Palestine faced. He called upon citizens of the Arab and Muslim world to claim moral responsibility and to act to halt the impending threat. Born in Egypt to parents of Syrian descent, al-Rāfiʿī is known for his social commentaries that focused on ethical reflections related to the lived realities of his time. This paper explores the articles al-Rāfiʿī published in major newspapers in Egypt and the Levant in the 1930’s, studies the context of his appeal, and analyzes the nature of his moral call for action. 

This paper explores the role that public performance of ritual played in demonstrations of cross-cultural and interfaith solidarity, especially between antizionist Jewish students and Palestinians, during the 2024 student encampment uprising. Through stories taken from the authors' lived experiences and from direct interviews and conversations with student organizers at schools such as Columbia, Northwestern, University of California Los Angeles, and others, this paper argues that public performance of traditionally private ritual was a profoundly essential solidarity tactic to the success of the student movement, and in many cases actually served to deepen student's connections to their cultural and faith traditions at a moment of profound uncertainty. By so doing, the act of the performance of these rituals became not just a spiritual practice, but a compelling and necessary political tool.

Scholarship on evangelical women has boomed over the past decade, offering insight into the American Christian Right and its politics of gender and sexuality. But a major gap within this sub-field remains: historical analysis of evangelical girlhood(s) and the nuanced power structures therein, especially as separate from a theological or confessional approach. Building on the work of Heather Hendershot, Emily Suzanne Johnson, and Sara Moslener, and utilizing a Foucauldian framework of power, this paper examines Focus on the Family's Brio Magazine and argues that evangelical girls exist at specific nexus of disenfranchisement and unique authority that constitutes them as a particular type of subject in both religious and political discourses. Girlhood is a unique position that cannot be earned nor disposed of; Indeed, it is impossible to fully grasp the trajectory of contemporary evangelicalism without understanding the role that teenage girls play in the evangelical imagination and American political realities. 

"The child" as constructed by the Early Church and inherited via colonization by the West is not, in fact, a child at all. A reflection and manifestation of adult cultural and spiritual anxiety, the child in Christian political discourse has often served as a tool for the consolidation of power as opposed to furthering the interests of concrete children themselves. While attempting to attenuate the impacts of such instrumentalization through positive discourse attending to children as actual persons is of certain value, this paper proposes that the greatest good might be done by removing children from political rhetoric altogether. Children, and indeed all those whom their lives touch, would be better served by encouraging Christian communities to resist their urges to consolidate power in moments of anxiety and lean into the faith they proclaim they possess.

This paper explores the ways that Unitarian-Transcendentalist and social reformer Caroline Wells Healey Dall, in her children’s book series Patty Gray’s Journey, broadly, and its second book, specifically, translated slavery, the Civil War, and the aftermath of both for young readers.  Her insistence that children, especially white, Northern children, must know what slavery was and what war was and what both left behind is a reflection of her belief that resilience is forged through knowledge—a belief rooted directly in her Unitarian and Transcendentalist principles. When, Dall prompts us to ask, does the privilege of childhood innocence give way for real-worldly resilience?