The late Professor Mara Lynn Keller was instrumental in getting the Goddess Studies program unit established in AAR. She spent her final year, 2023, designing and founding a new nonprofit, peer-reviewed publishing house, Women's Spirituality Studies Press (www.wsspress.org), and left a bequest toward that end. This fall WSSP is launching its inaugural list: an anthology of diverse women’s voices across Western traditions, edited by Xochitl Alvizo and Gina Messina; the first two titles from the Women’s Spirituality Classics series (by Charlene Spretnak and the late Carol P. Christ), and two powerful collections by celebrated poets, Mary Mackey and Annie Finch. WSSP publishes books in seven areas related to religions and spiritual traditions worldwide. It publishes both academic books and books for a general audience. The Executive Director of WSSP, Dr. Gina Messina, will facilitate a community discussion about the field of Women’s Spirituality studies today and possible future directions.
In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book
The 2026 November Annual Meeting in Denver, CO: Friday, November 20 - Tuesday, November 24. All times are listed in Mountain Time Zone. For more information about the November Annual Meeting, co-hosted with the Society of Biblical Literature, click here.
Please note that this is the preliminary schedule and is subject to change. We anticipate a mostly final schedule in mid-August. If you have any questions, please contact annualmeeting@aarweb.org. For Other Events, your event is not confirmed until you received notification from AAR staff.
The Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Committee invites you to our annual Networking Luncheon at the AAR Annual Meeting. It’s a chance to strategize together about the future of academic labor. Colleagues across all positions—part-time, contract, and permanent—are encouraged to bring ideas, share challenges, and explore concrete steps toward greater equity, fair pay, and labor justice in our profession. Please note: this year’s luncheon will be bring your own lunch, and no registration is required. Simply come by, share a meal, and join the conversation.
Welcome to the Christian Scholarship Foundation reception and luncheon! We are delighted for invited guests to join us for this special luncheon to reconnect with each other.
For information, contact Matt Quintana (students@ibr-bbr.org).
As you prepare for life beyond the PhD, conversations about research often take center stage. But what about the teaching life that awaits you? This luncheon invites doctoral students to gather in intentional community to reflect on the transition from doctoral study to faculty leadership. Hosted by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, this gathering creates space to connect with peers across institutions and to begin building relationships with an organization deeply committed to strengthening teaching in theology and religion. While Wabash primarily supports faculty, we recognize that the habits, imagination, and pedagogical commitments of future professors are formed long before the first faculty appointment. This conversation will explore what it means to prepare now for a thriving teaching life—intellectually, relationally, and vocationally. Come meet other doctoral students navigating similar questions. Learn how Wabash supports faculty once they enter the professoriate. Begin building the networks that will sustain you not just through the dissertation, but into the classroom and beyond. This is a space to think ahead, build relationships, and imagine your future as a teacher-scholar with intention. Please register directly on our website or at this link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeb3oDM9TAdiHFE3dbkT8N6mTWr_pO…
James K. A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom has been widely acclaimed and used in a variety of educational settings since its publication in 2009. In a new second edition this fall, Smith rearticulates his core argument that human beings are lovers shaped by liturgies for our shifting world. The context has changed dramatically: the dominant "liturgies" shaping desire today are algorithmic feeds, streaming platforms, and AI interfaces–all enacting the desire complex of neoliberalism. This panel explores how Smith's framework meets this moment. Does the concept of embodied habit formation need rethinking when so much formation happens through disembodied digital practices? And in such a landscape, can a liberal arts education still be liberating?
For information, contact Ruth Anne Reese at secretary@ibr-bbr.org.
I am proposing an author meets critics roundtable panel on Professor Ali Altaf Mian of University of Florida's highly anticipated new book Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty (University of Notre Dame Press, 2026) that brings together the study of Islam, South Asia, and Continental Philosophy in singularly innovative ways.
Panelist
Respondent
I am proposing an author meets critics roundtable panel on Professor Ali Altaf Mian of University of Florida's highly anticipated new book Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty (University of Notre Dame Press, 2026) that brings together the study of Islam, South Asia, and Continental Philosophy in singularly innovative ways.
Panelist
Respondent
This panel engages with David Albertson’s The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure(Oxford, 2025), a study that explores the intersection of mystical theology, mathematical imagination, and the conceptual frameworks of Christian contemplative practice. Albertson argues that Christian contemplation can be understood through a logic of ‘measure without measure,’ in which the disciplined structures of the mind and imagination allow for encounters with the infinite, the ineffable, and the divine. Drawing on historical sources from patristic, medieval, and early modern authors, the book examines how geometric, proportional, and formal analogies mediate the relationship between human cognition and divine transcendence. Papers in this panel engage concepts key to Albertson’s work, including historical investigations of geometric or numerical metaphors in Christian spirituality; philosophical or theological analyses of measure, proportion, and the infinite.
Papers
This paper maps Albertson’s “measure without measure” onto synodal preaching at the Council of Basel (1431–1449). Feast-day sermons to the general assembly used geometric, proportional, and formal analogies as more than rhetorical flourish: they served as disciplined structures of mind and imagination, mediating encounters with divine transcendence. Three Basel case studies extend Albertson’s argument. Two sermons by a Cistercian present a macro-scale pedagogy in which ordered time and cosmology trained cognition through the intelligibility of creation, while an anonymous sermon on the Conversion of Paul supplies a micro-scale hinge, describing the inexhaustible complexity of an atom. Lastly, a Corpus Christi sermon treats the Eucharist as a “surface” where finite elements meet infinite realities.
David Albertson’s Geometry of Christian Contemplation dances along the boundary between those who frame the divine in terms of the radical absence of form and those who would prefer to speak of absolute form or something like a ‘form of forms.’ In his Contra Eunomium, Gregory of Nyssa states that, where God truly abides, there is no “form, no place, no size, no reckoning of time, or anything else knowable.” And yet Gregory too shares the insight that a correct appreciation of form and figure—even as instantiated in matter, like the bush that burned or the cleft of rock from which Moses peered out—might prove a crucial stepping stone in our ascent to the divine. This paper aims to continue the dialogue about form and formlessness with figures like Gregory initiated by Albertson in his latest book.