In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Within the framework of trauma-informed theology and ministry practices, the act of sharing testimony can be a part of the trauma-healing process. In the context of the Kigali-based ministry, Women Foundation Ministries (WFM), Christian women in contemporary Rwanda are using the liturgical act of giving testimony to re-member the past, forge new identities, articulate their understandings of God, and imagine new futures. Working with Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology and narrative biographical interviews conducted in Rwanda in 2019, this study centers on the lived religion of lay women. Through a case study of WFM, this paper observes that such a grassroots, women-led religious space — even in the wake of layers of individual and collective trauma — employs testimony as a valuable spiritual tool to help women navigate the “Holy Saturday” of unresolved grief, while also working in community toward new futures.

Building on Dana Robert’s call to center women in World Christianity studies, this paper argues that our understanding of their historical role remains incomplete without a visual turn. By examining Chinese Christian posters and Japanese kamishibai, this paper highlights how women addressed their gender identity and actively reshaped theological imagination as well as achieved conversions through the production of visual materials. The case of Charlotte Tippet in China reveals the importance of gendered intimacy with rural Chinese women in creating "visual archives" of their spiritual and social struggles and converting them. The example of Imai Yone in Japan represents women's agency of localizing theology, transforming the street performance of kamishibai into a religious pedagogical tool for Japanese children. Ultimately, these cases highlight the significance of visual sources in understanding Christian women in East Asia as active creators who profoundly formulated visual power for the church's vitality, absent from texts. 

Twenty years ago, historian Dana Robert noted women’s majority status in Christian congregations worldwide, in contrast with a leadership imbalance strongly privileging man. The Gereja Masehi Injili di Timor (Christian Evangelical Church in Timor) is an exception to this rule, in that sixty-nine percent of its pastors are women, and its church attendance and lay leadership are predominantly women. However, this uncommon circumstance has not curbed domestic violence and misogyny. This paper honors these women’s faith by critically interrogating the corrosive notions of masculinity that underlie widespread spousal abuse in Timor and offering preaching that exposes injustice by exercising imagination. It describes the dynamics of abuse in the church and presents a Timorese homiletic for preaching the biblical “texts of terror” to confront gender-based violence. Drawing on postcolonial and trauma theories, I present an approach that will help women to imagine and construct futures free of violence and discrimination.

Spiritual harm and “church hurt” are widely invoked in survivor communities and pastoral conversations, yet it remains undertheorized within religious studies. What distinguishes spiritual harm from ordinary religious conflict, and when does theological formation become injury? Drawing on scholars such as Katie Gaddini and Beth Allison Barr, this paper argues that contemporary women’s deconversion narratives offer critical resources for clarifying the concept. Focusing on memoirs by women formed within white American evangelicalism, including Tia Levings, Shannon Harris, Glennon Doyle, and Cait West, I examine how gendered regimes of authority and sexuality structure experiences of harm. I propose that spiritual harm is operationalized through a matrix of theological, epistemic, and relational dimensions that delegitimize women’s knowledge and constrain their moral agency. Within these accounts, deconversion emerges as epistemic resistance. These narratives also model reparative futures, offering resources for reimagining accountability and healing in and beyond evangelical frameworks.
 

Conceptually robust and practically grounded, the proposed framework comes from both scholarly research and direct advocacy with survivors. It is designed to be intersectional, anti-carceral, contextually flexible, and feminist. It takes survivors’ voices as authoritative without presuming any individual survivor is all-knowing or infallible. It treats spiritual harm as an individual experience that is also always systemic. It recognizes that while maintaining ethical standards is paramount for communities, we need a flexible set of tools for response—there is no one-size-fits-all solution to specific instances of spiritual harm. This framework takes seriously that spiritual harm is pervasively entrenched in western modernity and also envisions societies free of it. It holds the maintenance of human dignity together with the urgency of social accountability. The goal is to address spiritual harm in a manner that, itself, models the spiritual and ethical integrity that was called for, abandoned, and degraded in that instance. 

This paper argues that theories of spiritual harm and repair in religious studies would greatly benefit from Gloria Anzaldúa’s body of work on spirituality, psyche, and writing practices. A critic of the category of "religion" because of its enmeshment in colonial, patriarchal violence, Anzaldúa also unpacked how colonial epistemic violence is spiritual harm. She held these theories alongside writing practices that were reparative, indeed forms of "spiritual activism," that contested the epistemic and material violence of patriarchy and colonialism. While known in religious studies for her woman-of-color theory of "borderlands," what remains under-theorized from her three decades of writing is Anzaldúa's feminist insistence that repair of spiritual harm is formative to her theories and her expansive genre-bending writing that labored beyond academic conventions. This paper bridges Anzaldúan theory with religious studies and feminist writing pedagogies, offering transformative methods for teaching and learning that support marginalized voices and center survivors’ agency.

Recently, Catholic popes have begun a controversial practice of publicly apologizing for specific spiritual harms done by the Church. In this paper, I argue that these public apologies can be fruitful, but only if popes proceed with a robustly Christian and survivor-centered model of repentance, placing the needs of others over concern for reputation.

I argue that public apology does have a place in Catholic repentance, even apology on behalf of the whole Church, but that it must be done on the terms of the survivors and with their (self-determined) interests at heart. I suggest that the Church use its own magisterial formula for the sacrament of reconciliation as a starting script for public repentance. This should include an examination of conscience, a full confession, and an act of penance. Each of these aspects should de-center concern for self and center, instead, the voices of survivors.

Spiritual abuse has emerged as a critical term within recent Muslim discourse, yet it is most often framed as an ethical wrong. While such framing foregrounds survivor experience, it also individualizes abuse and sidesteps Islamic law—an authoritative discursive tradition through which many Muslim communities conceptualize harm. In minority contexts, appeals to institutional accountability remain necessary but insufficient: mechanisms of accountability cannot meaningfully confront practices activists deem abusive if some of those practices are simultaneously justified within prevailing legal interpretations. Avoiding Islamic law leaves this normative architecture intact. This paper argues that struggles over Islamic law are ultimately struggles over the futures of accountability. Drawing on classical legal theory, I propose conceptualizing spiritual abuse as a fiduciary breach of communally delegated religious authority. Reframing spiritual harm juridically relocates accountability within the tradition itself, demonstrating that the question of care is inseparable from how the law imagines its own future.

Spiritual harm is widely invoked in religious studies and social science literature but rarely theorized with precision adequate to clergy sexual abuse of adults. This paper introduces Sacred Relational Archetypes (SRAs) — the constellation of symbolic roles and relational expectations structuring the clergy-congregant relationship in Christian denominational contexts — as a framework for that theorization, drawing on qualitative dissertation research analyzed through the Sexual Grooming Model.

My central argument is that clergy sexual abuse does not merely occur within sacred relational structures but systematically weaponizes them. Perpetrators invert the archetype - the shepherd becomes the wolf, the confessor the interrogator of shame - producing harm that is simultaneously relational, psychological, and theological. I term this process archetypal betrayal. The paper defines spiritual harm specific to clergy abuse, examines its gendered dimensions within patriarchal religious institutions, and draws implications for repair through archetypal restoration.

How can we incorporate religious material culture into the classroom? How can we teach students the skills to analyze material objects? In this session, I demonstrate the value of incorporating material objects into the classroom by modeling an active learning activity for analyzing religious children’s toys. I further show how this activity can be adapted for any collection of material objects. 

Compassionate listening and empathy are powerful and transformative to receive, particularly in times of struggle, but is all too uncommon to experience. Fortunately, the skills of attuning to another with warm curiosity can be learned. In my graduate spiritual caregiving seminars, I first teach "Empathy Guesses," a highly structured exercise that builds feelings and needs vocabulary while also engendering in students unexpected feelings of gratitude for being seen and heard by peers, and confidence in their capacity to be of benefit to others. Habits of social communication and internal monologues also arise that do no serve connection when another needs one's presence; they can be recognized and set aside. Students discover that the intention and effort to understand another matters more than getting it "right". This is a teaching tactic that develops spiritual and professional formation for the aspiring chaplain, minister, educator, or religious leader. 

Research shows that student attention spans keep lessening; yet, we still need students to read and interpret texts. Inspired by a technique made famous by early Christian monks, but borrowed from Judaism, lectio divina—with is incumbent four levels of meaning—helps students slow down and spend time reading. For this “teaching tactic,” we think with the four levels of literal, meditative, responsive and contemplative. This tactic provides ancient tools for modern critical thinking. 

In recent decades, memory athletes have performed wild feats of mental acumen, memorizing decks of cards in minutes and repeating endless series of digits. Their success lies in using modifications of the ancient memory palace system. These techniques can be learned by anyone with an average working memory. Unfortunately, they have also had little impact on classroom pedagogy, since most of them are adapted to vast series of abstract data and not to meaningful, interrelated pieces of information. Moreover, these techniques are generally ill-suited to memorizing verbatim text or language learning. However, an exception lies with Biblical Hebrew, a language with a triconsonantal root system and a type of vocabulary perfectly suited to use the person-action-object memory palace technique. This paper will explore the current efforts and powerful pedagogical possibilities of applying an ancient technique to this ancient language and creating innovative approaches to the study of Biblical Hebrew. 

This Teaching Tactics lightning presentation offers three classroom-tested tactics for teaching in a space where many students, especially nonreligious students, use the course as a catalyst for their own spiritual formation, often because they lack other supportive contexts. The tactics are designed to support student meaning-making while maintaining academic norms and ensuring equitable participation for students who are and are not engaging in formation. First, methodological agnosticism establishes a shared classroom covenant: the course evaluates interpretation, evidence, concepts, and methods without affirming or denying students’ truth-claims. Second, the theory of co-production reframes “religion” and “nonreligion” as relationally produced categories, turning personal testimony into analyzable data without requiring disclosure or belief. Third, an A + (B or C) assignment architecture requires a common academic foundation (Part A) and offers two equally valued pathways: Option B (additional analysis) or Option C (grounded reflection). Together these tactics operationalize rigorous, ethically defensible pedagogy for formation-adjacent classrooms.

Some people are allowed to have a future--a linear destiny with a definite end--in order to be ends in themselves; they may be defined as such in contrast to those denied a future. This selective wielding of futurity is one tool of the settler-colonialism and racialized oppression of what I call the “Master’s Temporality.” A liberative theology of indigenous and land-based futures is uniquely challenged to disrupt these temporal norms without replicating their systems of exclusion. Doing so requires eschewing telos in favor of immanent ambiguity.

With the interdisciplinary scholars of the More Worlds Collective, I will argue that any movement toward liberative futurity must fully disavow mastery. My aim without aim is an anti-telic liberative theology of time based in embodiment rather than transcendence.

When theology considers Indigenous perspectives at all, it almost always looks to the past. But Indigenous people, organizations, and governance systems are always also looking to our collective futures. Society, and churches, often do not have the ears to hear the liberative wisdom that comes from Indigenous circular concepts of time and the ways that past, present, and future are intricately woven together. This paper uses the main themes of Métis novelist Cheri Dimaline's celebrated young adult novel, The Marrow Thieves as a starting point for liberative Indigenous futurisms in service of the world and all our relations.

Given the creativity, resilience, and the epistemic privilege of Indigenous Peoples as those with views from the underside of modernity, what world-building can Indigenous fiction and scholarship offer us, for such a time as this?

This paper reflects on a scene from within the struggles for social and racial justice in a far-reaching social movement in Latin America’s pacific region. The scene shows a vernacular enactment of law in the site of a funeral ceremony for a dear departed leader, in which a messianic temporality appears within a juridically oriented activism formed in the impulse, and collective memory, of a theology of liberation. This theopolitical dimension disturbs and challenges the linear temporality of State law and gives us valuable resources to reassess the complex relation to the State in social movements such as this one. People here enact in their daily practices of grassroots organizing, and of collective mourning, a vernacular law that exceeds the State form and challenges its technique of time framing, while performing a mimetic attachment to its bureaucratic grammar. It is necessary to see in this desire of State law, a law otherwise that is religious in a way that deserves careful attention and consideration.

Brazil can be considered an experiment in colonial ecology. One of the contemporary events that confirms the afterlives of the ancestral catastrophe of colonization and demonstrates the traumatic repetition of environmental catastrophe related to this extractivist model of social construction is the land subsidence of entire neighborhoods in the city of Maceió, capital of the state of Alagoas, in northeastern Brazil. In this eschatological scenario, a Baptist church rooted in the Northeastern tradition of Brazilian Liberation Theology has led efforts to resist, repair, and promote ecological justice in the face of the systemic violence caused by mining. 

Analyzing photographic and ethnographic records of the ruins of the catastrophe from an eco-hauntological perspective, this article aims to demonstrate how the struggles for social and environmental justice articulated by Pinheiro's Church dismantle the disciplinary regimes of capitalist temporalities that devastated territories, populations, biodiversity, spiritualities, and ancestral ways of life in Brazil. 

This paper argues that John Wesley stands within the patristic tradition of deification exemplified by Gregory of Nyssa. In both late antiquity and early industrial England, bodies were rendered vulnerable within hierarchical and economic regimes that disciplined and exhausted embodied life. I contend that Nyssen’s theosis and Wesley’s sanctification share a participatory grammar in which salvation is understood as transformative participation in divine life that reconfigures mortal embodiment. Under industrial modernity, Wesley reformulates this patristic vision as an embodied holiness capable of resisting the reduction of the body to labor utility. By centering embodiment, this study reframes deification as a counter-formation of embodied existence rather than a purely metaphysical doctrine. It further suggests that this participatory logic bears implications for contemporary regimes of racialized vulnerability, where socially imperiled bodies remain sites of theological and political struggle.

The great Byzantine saint Gregory Palamas (1296-1357) explicitly rejected the Platonic idea of the World Soul. I argue, however, that certain structural features of the World Soul remain in the superstructure of Palamas's accounts of the creation and deification of the sensible world through the human soul. I thus argue that through its rational movements in cooperation with the activities of the divine Nous, Logos, and Eros the human soul becomes a functional World Soul in Palamas's thought.

Zizioulas’ landmark work Remembering the Future articulates a powerful vision of eschatology as a central ontological category for Christian theology. Zizioulas' interest in eschatological ontology, however, begins earlier in his career. Already in Being as Communion, he interprets Maximus' triad of genesis–movement–rest as comprehensible only "from the end" rather than organically unfolding "towards the end" (96). In this position we find the seeds of Zizioulas' later more sustained treatment of the question of eschatological ontology in Remembering the Future. In this paper, one element of this discussion will be examined, namely Zizioulas' hard separation of the notion of teleology (captured by the phrase "towards the end") from that of eschatology ("from the end"). This division between teleology understood in a negative light and eschatology understood in a positive light, is discussed at some length in Remembering the Future, 101–109, and will form the basis for this paper's exploration.