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.
This session brings together a diverse panel of distinguished scholars to reflect on the future of Bonhoeffer studies.
These case studies argue that monuments and memorial forms are not static commemorations but dynamic sites of interpretation. Bringing together case studies from South Korea, the United States, and Canada, this session explores how memory is embedded not only in archives but also in land, architecture, and religious structures and how the afterlives of suffering are mediated.
In the first paper, the Holocaust Museum established by Korean Christian Zionists localizes a global narrative of trauma within a geopolitically divided landscape. The second paper examines mid-twentieth-century New Jersey, and how racialized futures were materially produced and subsequently obscured through the shuttering of a black Episcopal church to finance a white one. The final paper examines the religious dimensions of the internment of Japanese Canadians, and how Japanese Buddhist spaces serve as a locus for negotiating memory, loss, and renewal.
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea exemplifies the ongoing Korean War and the persistent political division of the peninsula. In May 2025, the Korea Israel Bible Institute (KIBI), a Christian Zionist organization based in South Korea, inaugurated the Holocaust Museum in Paju, a city adjacent to the DMZ. This paper critically examines how Korean Christian Zionists embed Holocaust remembrance within their political theology to foster a sense of identification with Israel. It examines how both the physical landscape of Paju and its symbolic significance influence their political fantasies regarding Korea’s future, which are profoundly linked with their theological and political aspirations concerning Israel. Employing critical spatial analysis, the paper explores the politics of spatiality among Korean Christian Zionists, focusing on how tangible and imagined spaces shape their theological and political narratives and how their eschatological visions develop a unique geographical imagination within one of the world’s most heavily militarized zones.
Traces of memory remain in and on the land but often require skilled interpreters. Interpreting archives, land, and buildings together allows for memorial interpreters to piece more robust memories together from the traces that remain on the land from its uses. This paper examines a case study from the construction of a Levittown in New Jersey in the late 1950s to elucidate these two claims. I use archival evidence of the Levitt Corporation’s land donation to the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey and of the diocese’s subsequent forced liquidation of a Black parish to fund the construction of a new White parish in the Levittown to sketch the contours of the imagined future of the Episcopal Church in New Jersey at that time. Careful interpretation made it possible to reconstruct the memory of racially exclusive fantasies despite attempts to relegate these memories in archival oblivion.
This paper will examine the religious dimensions of the internment of Japanese Canadians (1942-1949). By drawing on archival materials, The Landscapes of Injustice Project, and contemporary temple discourse, I will also argue that the destruction of Buddhist temples and other spaces and objects during the internment was intended to erase not just the Japanese community but their spiritual foundations in Canada. As such, I contend that the sanmon gate is a place where memories of injustice, the present, and the future are negotiated. I argue that Steveston Buddhist Temple's newly built sanmon gate functions as a nostalgic reconstruction of Japanese Buddhist—specifically Jōdo Shinshū—space in Steveston, a return to land that was once taken by the state, and as a launch pad for future-oriented projects at Steveston Buddhist Temple. This paper allows us to start building an understanding of Japanese Canadian religious space during the internment, now, and in the future.
The intertwined realms of motherhood and food practices shape religious communities, identities, and imagined futures. Food is a central site through which religious meaning, ethical formation, and cultural continuity are enacted, and mothers often act as the primary religious enculturators, through feeding, withholding, preparing, cultivating, sharing food, and passing on culinary and dietary traditions to maintain the continuity and future of the community.
From maternal cannibalism in the Hebrew Bible inverting the maternal role of nourisher, to state positioning of dairy cows as suffering mothers who nourish humans with milk extracted largely by men, to rural Ethiopian Orthodox women preparing bread and coffee for St. Mary's day during a fast, to an interfaith donation garden providing culturally- and religiously-appropriate food as maternal care for the community, this panel shows how foodways, implemented by those who perform mother work, are powerful arenas of regulation, resistance, risk, and hope.
This paper argues that depictions of maternal cannibalism in the Hebrew Bible (2 Kings 6 and Lamentations) intentionally invert the usual maternal role as provider and nourisher. In contexts where women were typically responsible for food processing and preparation, siege-induced famine tragically reverses the maternal task of feeding children. These texts therefore portray starvation not only as physical suffering but also as the catastrophic collapse of maternal roles. The paper combines three data sets. First, it examines ANE siege warfare and its deliberate use of starvation as a weapon. Second, it explores modern cognitive and sociological research on starvation to understand how prolonged hunger affects moral judgment and maternal behavior. Lastly, it analyzes the siege scenes in 2 Kings 6:24–31 and Lamentations 2:20 and 4:10. Taken together, these perspectives demonstrate how the Hebrew Bible depicts famine as a devastating collapse of maternal provision and human dignity.
This paper analyzes the United States government’s reliance on Christian patriarchy in restructuring twentieth-century dairy farming. It argues that the state positioned dairy cows as mothers through religious logics of cisheteropatriarchy and agribusiness, conceptualizing both the role of cattle and human motherhood as mechanically extracted resources on the family farm. Milk’s historical trajectory from a dangerous beverage to “nature’s perfect food” relied on religious productions of cows as suffering mothers who labored for and nourished their Christlike human husbands, masculinizing milk as extracted by men from women. Just as twentieth-century home economics sought to industrialize housewives’s unpaid domestic labor as the home’s spiritual core, cows similarly became mechanized and spiritual mothers. Analyzing state reports and propaganda pieces, this paper argues that American family farmers conceptualized cows as mothers only in relation to themselves as patriarchal fathers petitioned by God to violently, yet affectionately, oversee their multispecies family.
In this paper, I explore everyday food practices in a rural Ethiopian Orthodox community in northwestern Ethiopia, focusing on women preparing and sharing bread and coffee for a day dedicated to St. Mary during a fasting (ts’om) period. In the afternoon, when eating resumes, neighbors gather. The food is not extraordinary, nor does the occasion produce intense emotion, yet a modest joy is shared. Children watch, sometimes help, and join the meal, gradually internalizing modes of reverence through bodily and sensory experience rather than formal instruction. While studies on religion and food often highlight abstention or ritual meals, this paper turns to cooking and eating in ordinary time and space—practices not always explicitly recognized as religious—while attending to the balance between fasting and feasting. Women’s labor quietly mediates this balance, unfolding alongside ecclesiastical structures and sustaining religious life in ways rarely articulated but vital to the community’s ongoing devotion.
How do religious and cultural practices shape food needs, and how might thoughtful people and organizations better respond to food scarcity, including using the lived experience of mothers to better provide food for households? This paper takes up one organization as a case study, situating it in the larger landscape of the urban agriculture and food access ecosystem of a mid-sized Midwestern American city. The garden analyzed in this case study is a robust, interreligious, multicultural volunteer-run donation garden that provides fresh produce for a wide variety of recipient organizations. The principles it relies upon include attention to providing culturally and religiously appropriate food for recipients, and employing skills developed through maternal care in caring for the community.
This panel explores the interaction between nineteenth-century Western philosophy and religious thought and their reception within Eastern Orthodox theology in the “long nineteenth century” (1789- 1918). Papers will explore Semyon Frank's engagement with Schleiermacher's theological anthropology, the reception of Friedrich Nietzsche in Semyon Frank, parallels between Alexei Khomiakov and Johann Adam Möhler's ecclesiology, and the relationship between Schelling’s philosophy and Russian personalism.
Semyon Frank (1877–1950) is considered by Vasily Zenkovsky to be Russia’s greatest philosopher and played an important role in introducing Friedrich Schleiermacher to Russia by translating his work Über die Religion. Although Frank’s ties to Eastern Orthodoxy and German Idealism are important for understanding his anthropology, his intellectual connection with Schleiermacher is essential for grasping certain aspects of his thought. This paper argues that Frank’s later works show significant intellectual links with Schleiermacher’s theological anthropology. His Russian translation of Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion influenced his later ideas about human identity, religious consciousness, and aesthetics—elements he saw as vital to understanding the core of humanity. This paper aims to explore the flow of ideas from the West to the East, particularly those originating from German theologians such as Schleiermacher.
This paper examines the reception of Friedrich Nietzsche in the Russian religious philosophy of S. L. Frank, arguing that the Christian theological transformation of Nietzschean themes—such as individual freedom, heroism, self-overcoming, and moral creativity—played a formative role in Frank's account of bogochelovechestvo (Godmanhood) and its function in constituting human personality. Building on existing scholarship on Nietzsche’s reception by Russian thinkers such as Berdyaev, the paper traces how Frank’s thought Christianized Nietzsche’s Übermensch and incorporated it into a Solovievan metaphysics of divine-human communion, giving the idea new spiritual significance in relation to the Orthodox doctrine of deification/theosis. The paper argues that recovering this Nietzschean current in Frank’s thought offers resources for developing a more robustly individualist Orthodox personalism and linking individual agency to deification.
The nineteenth century witnessed a renewed turn toward ecclesiology in both Roman Catholic and Orthodox theology. In this shift, the Church was understood not as one aspect of Christian life but as the primary locus of Christian existence and theological tradition. This paper places Alexei Khomiakov and Johann Adam Möhler in dialogue. I highlight their shared conviction that the Church is an organism of living unity rather than a rational mechanism. Through Khomiakov’s sobornost and Möhler’s Einheit, both theologians ground ecclesiology christologically and present the Church as the living union of Christ’s Body. I examine their account of the relationship between the Church’s historical visibility and its participation in the Mystical Body, noting their distinction—without separation—between visible and invisible expressions. I argue that their parallel visions anticipate ressourcement ecclesiology, while also exhibiting romantic and universalizing tendencies that shape their legacy in later thinkers such as Florovsky and de Lubac.
This paper investigates the relationship between Schelling’s philosophy and Russian personalism. By examining Pavel Florensky’s formulation of personhood, I will demonstrate how the language of Orthodox spirituality, with particular focus on asceticism, was key for the critical appropriation of Schelling’s thought. Both Schelling and his Orthodox readers were keen to uphold an account of the person as irreducible to the thing-like categories of concepts. But, I argue, Florensky dramatically reconfigured Schelling’s positive solutions by appealing to a theological conception of God’s essence as love and an understanding of asceticism as the practice by which one comes to appropriate this loving essence as the very content of one’s own life. By tightly identifying this kind of ascetic practitioner with the “restrainers of rationality,” Florensky transposed Schelling’s personalist insights into an Orthodox Christian key.
What kinds of futurity are imagined in the cultural flows surrounding the Walt Disney Company, and how are they implicitly and explicitly religious? This lightning round brings together scholars of film, ethnography, theory, history, and more for provocations on this year’s presidential theme.
Since 1955 Disney theme parks have always been spaces of temporal displacement. “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy,” says the plaque above the entrance to Disneyland in Anaheim, California and to the Magic Kingdom in Florida. Today, the Walt Disney Company and its fans engage with futures in the films, the parks, through online roleplay games, on streaming platforms, at fan conventions, and in timeshare vacation homes. Each panelist will present a tightly focused 3-5 minute provocation–an example based on their research in the Disney pantheon– followed by robust discussion among the presenters and between the panel and the audience.
In recent years, the swift advancement of transhumanism, propelled by the rapid progress of artificial intelligence, has transformed what was once a marginal phenomenon into a significant cultural movement. Transhumanism’s goal is to shift humanity’s evolution from the biological to the technological sphere, seeking to free our species from physical- and indeed, spatial and temporal limitations. So far, scholarly work on transhumanism has largely focused on its physical and biological dimensions. The purpose of this panel is to expand this conversation, bringing current scientific perspectives on transhumanism in dialogue with the Christian notion of deification, as well as with analogous transformative practices from Tibetan Buddhism and the tradition of yoga. The panel will underscore the points of contact between these traditions and transhumanism’s striving for self-transcendence, while foregrounding the tension between transhumanism’s longing to overcome physical limitations, and the ascetical character of the religious practices seeking theōsis, nirvāna, or liberation.
As the IAHR’s North American regional association, NAASR will be hosting a conversation at this year's in-person meeting about the state of academia in this region. While the phenomenon of broad-scale institutional challenges is not new (guest editor Gary Lease devoted a special issue of MTSR in 1995 to the “pathologies” characterizing the study of religion in North American universities), the specific infrastructural characteristics of these challenges deserve our attention. Especially since our theoretical commitments ask us to examine the structural workings of power, we are in the intellectual position to explore this moment in higher education not only in terms of its machinations and effects but also in terms of prospective responses and resistances to the same.
We are assembling a discussion with a roundtable format to facilitate analysis that is as forthright and productive as possible. How should we respond to the rapidly changing economic and institutional landscape of academia? How can we demonstrate to our students the importance of thinking critically so as to give them language and tools for their own navigations of the social worlds in which they find themselves? What exactly is our work as scholars of religion in relation to the profession right now? To be clear, and in keeping with NAASR’s priorities regarding method and theory, these questions and their answers should not reinforce a theory/praxis binary. On the contrary, we want to assemble a group of thinkers who can put our particular skills to work in proactively undermining that very binary and demonstrating how needful our scholarship is in this moment.
This session explores a question at the heart of interfaith encounter: how does sustained, meaningful dialogue with another tradition shape who we are? What happens to our own religious identity and lived practice when we engage deeply with another faith—especially when that engagement does not involve conversion?
The papers in this panel critically engage the complex ethical and religious questions raised by the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. Altogether, the authors confront the potential of AI systems to transform—and be transformed by—abiding concerns of human dignity, vulnerability, and flourishing. The first author considers AI’s possible role in virtue formation, while proposing Niebuhrian virtues of moral vigilance as an important check on advancing AI. The second author argues that the creation of compassionate AI in healthcare, especially eldercare, requires modeling multiple dimensions of human suffering and health agency in support of phronetic attention and compassionate response. With the final paper, the authors attend to the development of AI-enabled virtual autopsy systems. These AI-generated digital reconstructions of the postmortem body raise new bioethical and religious concerns about corporeal dignity, privacy, and the governance of digital bodily data.
This paper considers the possibility of AI being employed to improve moral character from the perspective of an account of virtues that is psychologically realistic and informed by a Christian agapeic ethic oriented toward creaturely well-being goods that ground right action. While Part I briefly presents such an account of the virtues, Part II explores three ways that advancing AI may impact virtue formation, each of which is conceivable but has significant limitations and drawbacks. Part III argues that recognizing the social character of virtue formation requires recognizing the importance of extending the rule of law to AI. The effectiveness of rule of law in the face of advancing AI, however, will depend on Niebuhrian virtues of moral vigilance that recognize the ease with which the loftily stated ideals sometimes associated with AI coexist with other aims.
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly pervasive in healthcare, the incentives for technical innovation and financial gain driving efficient AI healthcare automation often interfere with patient care and increase health inequity. However, bio- and AI ethical frameworks remain inadequate for guiding this transformation, especially at the speed and scale in which autonomous decision-making is embedded within healthcare. Incorporating compassionate care into AI systems focuses moral attention onto patient suffering and flourishing (eudemonic well-being), translating ethical insights into an AI framework that can be operationalized within current and near-term AI system development. I argue that compassionate AI in healthcare requites modeling multiple dimensions of human suffering and health agency in support of phronetic attention and compassionate response, and that eldercare provides both a rich context and urgent test case.
Artificial intelligence and augmented reality are transforming healthcare technologies, including the development of virtual autopsy systems that reconstruct the human body using high-resolution imaging and three-dimensional visualization. While these technologies may reduce the need for invasive postmortem examinations, they also introduce new bioethical questions concerning bodily integrity, digital representation, and the moral status of postmortem data. This paper examines how religious ethical traditions—including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Shamanism—interpret emerging technological practices surrounding death investigation. Some religious communities may view virtual autopsy technologies as more acceptable alternatives to invasive procedures because they preserve bodily integrity. However, AI-generated digital reconstructions of the deceased body raise new ethical concerns about postmortem dignity, privacy, and the governance of digital bodily data. Drawing on perspectives from religious bioethics, this paper argues that religious traditions provide important ethical resources for addressing emerging questions about death, technology, and the future of healthcare.
