In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

In Lorraine Hansberry’s posthumous speculative play What Use Are Flowers?, an elderly hermit confronts the destruction of civilization after a catastrophe and struggles to teach feral children the rudiments of a lost culture through the idea of “use.” Asked to explain the use of flowers, he answers: “the uses of flowers were infinite.” I argue that this enigmatic homage expresses a tragic-pragmatist expansion of ‘use’ from instrumental availability to inexhaustible possibility. Drawing upon Jonathan Lear’s idea of radical hope and the prophetic pragmatism of Cornel West, I suggest that Hansberry challenges accounts of ethical survival that depend on the continued legibility of stable value systems. Instead, the play proposes that beauty may protect from despair even when conceptual structures of meaning collapse. This paper will not attempt to define beauty positively, but rather considers it as the condition under which experience may still answer to something beyond pure survival.

This paper discusses the relationship between beauty and meliorism in the thought of Charles Peirce and Robert Neville, with passing discussion of Jonathan Edwards, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey. It argues that all things are beautiful or good, and that this is a realistic metaphysical claim. The metaphysics of goodness, however, does not presuppose that all things will grow together or progress (synechism). Synechism (and agapism) or meliorism present an ideal to guide our actions, but that guidance comes from an appreciation of an axiologically laden landscape, which presupposes the metaphysics of goodness. The paper presents a metaphysical realism (along with an epistemological realism), a cosmological materialism, and a moral or ethical idealism.

Pragmatist thinkers often express a hopeful outlook on the world. This paper argues that such optimism might be rooted in a cosmological aesthetic, that the universe itself possesses an underlying beauty that inspires creative and practical engagement with reality. To explore this idea, the paper examines the work of Etty Hillesum and Alejandro García-Rivera, two figures who demonstrate pragmatic sensibilities in different contexts. Hillesum, a Jewish mystic and diarist who died at Auschwitz, maintained a deep affirmation of beauty and prayerful spirituality despite immense suffering. García-Rivera, a theologian of aesthetics, argued that beauty plays a central role in shaping authentic communities, particularly among marginalized groups. Their thought is interpreted through the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, who described the universe as a “great work of art.” The paper concludes that many pragmatists are drawn to a poetic vision of reality that nurtures hope and optimism, especially during tragedy and loss.

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In recent years, the language of “decolonizing the academy” has moved rapidly from the margins of activist scholarship into the institutional center of many anglophone universities. While this shift signals an important recognition of the colonial foundations of modern knowledge, it also raises a critical question: what happens when the language of decolonization becomes institutionalized within the very structures it seeks to dismantle? Engaging Latin American decolonial thought—particularly the work of Nicolás Panotto—this paper argues that contemporary academic uses of “decolonization” risk reproducing a second-order coloniality in which decolonial discourse itself becomes institutionalized. Bringing Panotto into conversation with dissenting Baptist and Anabaptist epistemologies rooted in forms of border thinking, the paper suggests that radical ecclesial traditions reveal both the possibilities and limits of escaping coloniality. Decolonization does not begin on a blank slate but amid the shards of inherited colonial histories, requiring rhizomatic and communal forms of theological knowledge beyond the academy.

Drawing upon Andreotti et al.’s work mapping interpretations of decolonization in higher education and de Sousa Santos’ concept of abyssal thinking, I offer an autoethnographic account of my experiences as a female-identifying, queer Latina teaching religiously diverse white students in a progressive, historically and currently eurodominant, mainline Protestant theological school. From this account, I argue that progressive theological institutions rhetorically perform decolonization by asserting that they exist within/execute from a radical-reform or even beyond-reform space. In turn, students mirror these rhetorical performances of decolonization within and beyond the classroom in ways that perpetuate interpersonal and institutional colonial dynamics and processes through a reliance on abyssal thinking. Ultimately, I conclude that colonial epistemologies are too tethered within the arena of theological education to truly decolonize, especially when those who say that the institution, individual, or community is decolonizing still operate from fixations on the abyssal line.

A new course, "The Lives of Holy Objects: Himalayan Buddhist Images as Art and Presence", first invites students to compare objects from museum and art historical perspectives, with field trips to a museum installation, with the living Buddhist community temple's sacred space, and then to launch a cataloguing project and docent training program, producing educational and spiritual materials for the general public and in service to the practitioner community, holding and honoring multiple histories and ways of knowing, sometimes in tension, but enlivening relationships to these beings/objects.