In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

The Light Verse (24:35) would have resonated with Jewish audiences by evoking the Temple menorah and the rabbinic concept of the Shekhinah. Through close intratextual analysis, the Light Verse is linked to the Qur’anic accounts of Moses’ theophany (20:10-12; 27:7-9; 28:29-30), highlighting shared motifs of fire, blessed tree, guidance, and celestial radiance. While paralleling the biblical burning bush, the Qur’an reconfigures its imagery in the depiction of a lamp fueled by a blessed oil that shines though untouched by fire. Symbolic correspondences align this imagery with rabbinic portrayals of the Shekhinah and menorah as embodiments of divine light. References to “houses” of remembrance (24:36) further echo Temple symbolism. Moreover, just before the Light Verse (24:34), the Qur’an explicitly states that it is providing a metaphor from a previous tradition. By invoking an established symbol rather than introducing a novel metaphor, the Qur’an situates its message within a recognizable Jewish representation.

The Book of Job represents a kind of internal critique of the Deuteronomistic theology that dominates most of the rest of the Hebrew biblical canon. Yet its place in the canon is very marginal, as it does not deal with God’s covenant with Israel and has even been taken by many readers since ancient times as a work of fiction. In the Qur’ān, as with other biblical stories that present moral ambiguities, Job’s story is significantly altered and is, if anything, even more marginal than in the Hebrew Bible. This paper argues, however, that the Qur’ān echoes Job’s critique and in fact places it at the heart of the creation narrative, in the mouth of Iblīs. Like Job’s, Iblīs’s critique is tacitly conceded, but the effect is to reinforce rather than destabilize the Qur’ān’s theology.

Typology once occupied a central place in biblical literary criticism, though the term itself has receded as scholars have turned toward approaches emphasizing historical particularity and intertextuality. Yet the phenomenon typology describes—the recognition of recurring narrative patterns across sacred history—remains central to the way many scriptures present themselves. This paper examines typological reasoning in two post-biblical scriptures, the Qurʾān and the Book of Mormon, and compares their use of biblical figures and narrative templates. The Qurʾān repeatedly invokes figures such as Abraham and Moses as paradigms of prophethood, presenting a recurring pattern of revelation, proclamation, rejection, and vindication that culminates in the Qurʾānic message. For its part, the Book of Mormon embeds biblical types within a cumulative covenantal history that anticipates and culminates in Christ. By comparing these two texts, the paper clarifies the Qurʾān’s distinctive non-linear typological logic within a broader late-antique context of biblical reception.

While the Nazi’s eugenic program in both its genocidal and natalist forms has long been acknowledged as a centerpiece of the regime, the theological resonances of this future-orientation are often subordinated to explanations citing social, biological frameworks. Using Hitler Youth “Home Evening” training booklets and ego-documents, this paper interrogates the function of family for the Nazi project and its relationship to a religiously-coded future, particularly as messaged to and experienced by so-called “Aryan” children in Nazi Germany, but also as withheld from those labeled enemies. Ultimately, I argue that family as discursive concept and as practice played an essential––if ambivalent––role in Nazi Germany: we find simultaneously a strategic, exclusionary mobilization of family for reproductive ends and a fracturing of the family as social unit, all in the name of a redemptive future purity undergirded by an ontological network of sacrality.  

This article revisits the 2008 debate on Francis Bacon’s wedding metaphor in Redargutio philosophiarum, 1608. Unlike historiographic salvagism and feminist environmentalism, I consider the religious intent of the text, thus resisting the secularist reading of the scientific revolution. I argue for framing this cosmic wedding (connubium) as a political theology, an enchanted concept of family employed to domesticate the scientific project and guarantee the reproduction of future scientists. To establish my argument, I will contextualize Bacon’s theology within the English Reformation. Following Katharine Park’s cues, I will then discuss the late medieval Royal Marriage tradition, framing its pulse with what queer scholars have called “repronormativity.” Third, I shall discuss with Social Reproduction Feminism the role of Nature in this marriage: a wife whose task is to produce the “offspring of heroes.” The conclusion foregrounds the significance of the political theology of family in contemporary discourses of ecology and earth future.

This article examines twentieth century Hmong messianic movements as a transpacific political theology. The central thesis contends that failed messianisms of twentieth century Hmong in Vietnam and Laos do not signal the death of Hmong messianism but its transmutation into Hmong American contexts. The essay has three movements: (1) descriptive messianisms, (2) failed messianisms, and (3) contemporary messianisms. In descriptive messianisms, I offer anthropological and historical accounts of Hmong messianism. The dialectic of the political state broker and the messianic figure emerge as key tropes. In assessing failed messianisms, I draw from Walter Benjamin’s notion of the Messianic that is tensive with world history. That messianic movements persist despite their failure points negatively to their eschatological horizon. To posit contemporary messianisms, I employ a transpacific method unveiling messianism’s transmutations from Asia to America. This section contends that the logic of messianism remains operative in new forms as "secularized theological concepts."   

Artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in global climate governance, shaping early-warning systems, risk analytics, migration forecasts, and disaster prediction. These technologies are often framed as instruments of climate justice, promising more efficient protection of vulnerable populations through anticipatory governance. Yet AI also redistributes power by determining whose vulnerability becomes visible and whose suffering becomes actionable. Engaging debates on AI “alignment,” this paper argues that the deeper issue is not simply whose values guide technological systems but what conception of life and vulnerability they presuppose. Within climate governance, climate harms are translated into predictive models and risk indicators that render vulnerability measurable and manageable. This translation rests on an ontological assumption that life is primarily something to be secured as risk. When ontology is misconstrued in this way, ethics becomes procedural and policy becomes managerial. Drawing on phenomenology, the paper advances an ethics of vulnerable flesh that reframes climate governance around relational exposure, interdependence, and the conditions of livability.

This paper profiles the work of Señot Donald Mendiola, a Chamorro yo‘åmte (healer) in the Northern Mariana Islands. While the paper will highlight Señot Mendiola’s work with traditional healing, it will also explore a vital part of his practice, that of hearing and speaking to the spirits and the taotaomo‘na (the people of before/ancestors). This paper takes as its point of departure the resilience of cultural practices that have survived hundreds of years of colonialism and the potential of these practices to subvert Western epistemologies and ontologies. I argue that the future of my home islands lies in the acquisition and retention of these practices. Because they foreground Indigenous Chamorro epistemology and ontology, they provide alternatives that counter the hegemony of Western knowledge and practices. These practices will help the Indigenous of the Marianas tell different stories about our history and our relationships with our human and other-than-human kin.

Contemporary deforestation in the Baltic countries is driven by the perception that these sparsely inhabited regions are, in fact, Terra Nullius. The earlier authority of the Church, however, has been supplanted by the greed and power of global corporations. With the integration of Baltic countries into the Western market system, the profiteering motives of lumber and related industries are eclipsing the traditional world views rooted as deeply in the land as the great trees being felled. The region as a whole is still perceived as a wilderness sparsely inhabited by pagans and nature-worshippers. The future survival of Baltic forests—and the spiritual life of those nations—depends on recognizing traditional Baltic views of forests as protected and sacred spaces, and defending them from the short-sighted and Utilitarian perspective that the forests must be exploited, their financial value cashed in, and the raw timber made a resource for the privileged West. 

The comparative religious category of efficacious ritual singing offers a paradigm for considering and crafting healing futures. These songs, delivered by ritual specialists, seek to enact metaphysical transformations in physically afflicted subjects, ushering forth exalted, divine realities without disrupting pre-existing conditions of death and decay. My study is grounded in the long-standing practice of three autoethnographic contexts: Hindu deathbed chanting; Jewish pre-burial recitations; and Shipibo Amazonian plant medicine songs. Within the observable logic of such rituals, physical affliction coexists with metaphysical perfection—futures which are ritually accessible beyond linear time, although not yet fully manifest. This productive tension can be called the ritual song paradox. These healing songs are powerful tools for confronting unbearable realities without bypassing them, while encompassing them with attention and care that magnifies a more perfect world. This moves beyond biomedical paradigms of cure and provides access to perfection even in the face of suffering.

This presentation examines the processes of healing in the Church of Santo Daime in Brazil, where religious practice, indigenous knowledge, and biomedical science converge around the psychoactive brew called ayahuasca. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted across multiple Santo Daime communities, I investigate how ritual, forms of embodiment, music, vestment, space, community, and lore shape the experience and the perceived healing outcomes of ayahuasca ceremonies. My presentation will argue that the healing processes in the Church Santo Daime, although centered around the consumption of the brew ayahuasca, cannot be achieved solely through the chemical properties of the psychoactive brew. Instead, healing is the result of communal experience and support, sustained bodily discipline, and a collective understanding of ayahuasca as sacred. 

Research on religion and health has shown that religious beliefs and practices are associated with both positive health outcomes and, in some cases, delays in seeking medical care. This study examines how Ghanaian immigrants in the United States draw on religion and medicine to interpret health and make health-related decisions after migration to a context where medical authority is institutionally dominant. Drawing on in-depth interviews with seventy Ghanaian immigrants and participant observation in Ghanaian churches in Houston, the study will analyze narratives about illness, healing, and medical authority across physical and mental health domains. By foregrounding religion as an interpretive framework, the study contributes to scholarship on religion, health, and migration and highlights how immigrant congregations shape approaches to health, healing, and care.

This paper explores the religious, ethical, and epistemological dimensions surrounding Long-Acting Injectable (LAI) antipsychotics for severe schizophrenia in South Korea. Moving beyond pure bioethics, this study analyses LAIs through Religious Studies, framing the psychiatric injection as a "secular sacrament" administered within the modern "liturgy of the clinic." By deconstructing the supposedly objective framework of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), the paper utilises the concept of "meaning response" to reveal how psychiatric efficacy heavily depends on the therapeutic alliance and "secular faith." We evaluate this ritualised clinical encounter against the WHO QualityRights framework, investigating whether LAIs function as inhumane "chemical restraints" or as instruments of empowerment. Ultimately, this research argues that EBM and traditional Faith-Based Healing (FBH) are not fundamentally opposed. Both operate on parallel mechanisms of belief, authority, and meaning-making, demonstrating that true psychiatric recovery requires a collaborative synthesis of biological intervention and faith-based trust.

This paper theorizes the sleepover party as a form of queer and trans Pentecostal study. Drawing on multi-year ethnographic research with differentially racialized queer and trans Pentecostals in São Paulo, Brazil, I examine all-night, intergenerational sleepovers held in cramped apartments as sites of queer and trans Pentecostal worldmaking. Building on queer anthropological approaches to the “infraordinary,” Moten and Harney’s notion of “study,” and recent work that troubles binaries of sacred/profane, ecstatic/secular embodiment, and serious/silly, I argue that the sleepover emerges as a sacred practice of collective respite within an anti-Black, LGBTQ+-phobic, and class-stratified world. Singing praise music, putting on wigs, gossiping, sharing miracles and prophesies, drinking wine, and staying awake through stretches of boredom, the sleepover is a kind of vigil. As a “minor method,” it redirects attention toward the “micropractices” that sustain queer religious life and the infraordinary of queer religiosity.

This paper approaches the trans child not as a marginal figure of contemporary panic but as a central device through which religious nationalisms organize futurity. Focusing primarily on Turkey, it traces how family rhetoric, child-protection discourse, and reproductive policy converge to make the family appear natural, the nation coherent, and religion protective. Bringing queer and trans temporality into conversation with the study of religion, the paper argues that anti-trans governance does not simply misrecognize trans life. It overdetermines it, naming trans life as the figure against which the future must be secured. By reading law, public rhetoric, and policy as religiously saturated forms of reproductive governance, the paper contributes to ongoing conversations on queer and trans futures and reproductive futures.

This paper argues that queer fugitive joy is not merely an affect that accompanies queer life but a practice that reorganizes bodies, time, and belonging into durable sacred forms. Against both queer theory's tendency to let negation have the last word and softer celebrations of joy that detach it from fugitivity and collective struggle, the paper reads three scenes of queer gathering as sites where joy does organizational work. The Black and Latinx House Ballroom scene functions as fugitive ecclesial practice rooted in African diasporic religions. Two Spirit powwows reclaim Indigenous ceremonial form from which gender-diverse people were excluded through colonial violence. A trans rebaptism in San Salvador seizes Catholic liturgical form from the institution that brought it through conquest. Across these scenes, queer fugitive joy assembles kinship, invents ritual, and produces sacred space, rehearsing futures that the present cannot authorize but that fugitive practice has already begun to construct.

Drawing on experiences providing nursing care for people dying from AIDS in Frankfurt in the early 1990s, I argue that hospice care reveals a queer temporality that is best understood as an entangled field established by the conflicting futurities of both labor and of utopian worldmaking, as well as by a present emerging out of cooperative action. This present is both overdetermined through multiple “copresences” (Beliso-De Jesús) and underdetermined in its outcome because its futurity is shaped by “xenoteloses” (Blas,), i.e., ends that escape utopian or capitalist blueprinting. It is neither open nor foreclosed to futurity.

This paper examines how Buddhist youth programs at Hsi Lai Temple in Southern California function as sites of experiential religious education for second-generation Asian American adolescents. Drawing on ethnographic research with 22 youth participants and 7 program leaders, the study explores how volunteering, peer relationships, ritual participation, and community activities serve as pedagogical processes through which Buddhist values are embodied and transmitted. Rather than relying primarily on formal doctrinal instruction, these programs cultivate learning through participation, relational mentorship, and everyday ethical practices. Using the Buddhist concept of the Five Skandhas as a theoretical lens, the paper proposes a pedagogical framework that highlights the roles of environmental learning, role modeling, and linguistic transmission in shaping identity formation. The study contributes to broader discussions of experiential learning and demonstrates how temple-based youth programs function as important environments for teaching Buddhism beyond the classroom.

In a secularizing society, art museums offer an accessible and low-stakes environment for diverse public audiences—particularly K-12 and university students—to learn about Asian religions. Among these, Buddhist art has had the broadest geographical reach. This paper examines the ways in which select high-profile museums present one of the most vibrant and dynamic facets of Buddhist visual culture, that of the Himalayas and Tibet. It will examine radically different displays of Tibetan artworks at major institutions across the United States, from gilded sculptures against austere, deep gray walls, sparsely exhibited under dramatic lighting, to vivid, intricate, and densely populated shrine room reconstructions. In the process, this comparative study will closely consider the experiential and pedagogical impact of gallery displays and their accompanying didactics, shedding light on various attempts to elucidate one of the most pervasive yet intellectually challenging schools of Buddhism in the United States today.

In Mircea Eliade’s seminal work The Sacred and the Profane, he notes that religious [humans] “experience two kinds of time: the profane and the sacred” (104). The repetition of a ritual or the “cosmicization” of a space is to get closer to the gods (32). Is this possible in contemporary and public spaces? What of helping the sacred erupt in profane spaces?

For four years, the lifelong formation department of a Chicago-based seminary has partnered with The Way of the Cross, a non-profit in the historically Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago. The event mobilizes hundreds of volunteers and thousands of participants for Via Crucis, a mile-long re-enactment of the stations of the Cross. 

This paper uses Via Crucis as a way to explore this question: what can we learn about public religious practice and nontraditional theological education in the face of dwindling traditional church communities and seminaries? 

How can an Islamic building assert a civic presence in an American state known for its megachurches and conservative politics? What architectural language might such a building adopt to navigate sensitivities surrounding the public visibility of Islam? This paper argues that Ismaili Center Houston negotiates minority recognition through aesthetic rather than political means.

The building signals no explicit reference to Islamic motifs; it is composed of cubic volumes clad in white surfaces. The architect Farshid Moussavi evoked a seventeenth-century Safavid palace in Isfahan, Iran, as well as columns in Persepolis as her inspirations. The choices are strategic: rather than a "religious" style, Islamicate spatial configurations are translated into "neutral" types. Drawing on Talal Asad's embodied traditions and Rancière's partage du sensible, I argue that just as Islamicate identity is inscribed in spatial organization rather than visible style, the Ismaili community articulates its faith through civic inclusivity rather than doctrinal closure.

This paper explores how New York City religion, politics, and urban space were shaped by a massive scandal over police corruption and brutality at the turn of the 20th century, and the New York Police Department’s turn to institutional Catholicism in response. After the revelations of the Lexow Committee (1894-95), the NYPD began to identify with the Catholic Church, through public processions, an annual St. Patrick’s Day Communion Breakfast, and a discourse of the sacred moral work of policing. While the majority of NYPD officers had been Catholic since the department’s founding in 1844, Catholicism had not previously been part of NYPD institutional practices or discourses. I argue that deliberately claiming Catholicism was crucial not only for departmental morale and for the spiritual needs of its officers in a period of moral crisis, but especially for cementing the cultural legitimacy of the NYPD in the aftermath of a massive scandal. 

This paper examines how an outdoor Eucharistic community in downtown Atlanta transforms a surveilled urban park into a space of healing for people living without stable housing. Drawing on nine months of participant-observation and interviews at the Church of the Common Ground, an Episcopal “church without walls” that gathers weekly in Woodruff Park, I argue that healing is produced through spatial liturgy: rituals that reconfigure public space, time, and social relations into a mobile heterotopia. Building on Lefebvre’s produced space via Knott’s spatial method and Foucault’s heterotopia, I show how embodied practices, such as call-and-response, circle prayer, testimony, Eucharist, and shared meals, suspend urban hierarchies and cultivate Turnerian communitas. These practices generate belonging, safety, and hope, while contesting redevelopment logics that frame downtown parks as spaces to be cleared. The paper offers an ethnographic account of urban healing and a transferable conceptual lens for studying how liturgy makes place.