This roundtable session examines the unfinished manuscript written by Mary Daly, Catholicism: End or Beginning. Now published as a volume, the roundtable brings together its contributors to extend the conversation started by this text. The central conviction of this panel is that Daly is indeed a part of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition – whether Daly and Roman Catholic scholars would claim one another or not. As such, this panel hopes to bring Daly back into conversation with Catholic theologians. In so doing, the panel will explore two major elements of Daly’s life and intellectual journey: (1) her time as an observer at the Second Vatican Council (2) the significance of her engagement with Catholic theologians in Catholicism: End or Beginning (CEB) as well as the points of intersection between Daly Studies and Catholic Studies. The panel will conclude with a reflection on the ecclesiological challenges her thought offers the church today.
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.
This session honors the extraordinary contributions of Carrie Doehring, a leading scholar in the psychology of religion, pastoral psychology, pastoral theology, and chaplaincy; a licensed psychologist; a theological educator; and a Presbyterian minister. Doehring’s work has profoundly shaped the field through her commitment to teaching and researching interreligious, socially just, and research-informed spiritual care. Her scholarship has been especially influential in advancing trauma-informed spiritual care, addressing moral injury and moral stress, and exploring spiritual struggle, all while integrating clinical practice with theological reflection. This session celebrates her enduring impact by engaging her intellectual legacy and exploring how her contributions continue to inform contemporary approaches to spiritual care, pastoral theology, and the psychology of religion. In this session, Doehring will present a paper on lamentation and spiritual reflexivity, followed by responses from a panel of scholars who will engage both the paper and her broader contributions to the field.
This roundtable asks how karma-informed phenomenologies of world-making might reframe existing conversations about structural violence, collective responsibility, and the shared creation of just and plural worlds. The six panelists engage Buddhist karmic frameworks as resources for understanding how collectives – communities, institutions, movements, pilgrims, memorializers, consumers – participate in the ongoing making/unmaking and maintenance of shared worlds. Scholars working at the intersection of Buddhist philosophical and practice traditions, critical social analysis, social organizing, phenomenology, and ethnography broadly engage questions to consider how inherited karmic formations unfold prereflectively to naturalize structures of harm and constrain our collective imagination; and what forms of practice, memorialization, or political and community organization demonstrate the possibility of karmic transformation at a more expansive scale.
Sponsored by Innovations in Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care, this session brings together three presenters exploring how chaplains are reimagining spiritual care to meet emerging forms of collective suffering and transformation. One paper examines transdisciplinary approaches to chaplaincy that foster resilience amid ecological and social crises, expanding spiritual care into community and organizational settings. A second presentation investigates the expanding field of animal and interspecies chaplaincy, highlighting how practitioners sustain ethical presence in contexts of human–animal grief and transition. The third paper offers a compelling vision of labor solidarity as a spiritual and vocational commitment for healthcare chaplains, grounded in feminist and Catholic social ethics. Together, these papers illuminate new frontiers of chaplaincy practice—shaping compassionate responses to ecological, interspecies, and labor realities of our time.
Papers
We are living in a time of global meta-crisis marked by ecological disruption, social instability, and widespread emotional, physiological, and spiritual distress. As uncertainty deepens, the role of chaplains becomes increasingly vital. This paper explores how chaplains can expand traditional forms of spiritual accompaniment by integrating resilience, innovation, and relational skills to support organizations addressing social suffering. Drawing on my lived experience as a case study, I examine how chaplaincy skills—such as group facilitation, reflective practices, grief work, and meaning-making—can support communities beyond religious institutions. Examples of collaborations with climate nonprofits, public health departments, schools, libraries, and community initiatives demonstrate how spiritual care can address burnout, anxiety, ecological grief, and loss of meaning. I argue and present transdisciplinary thinking and creative approaches to chaplaincy are essential for meeting emerging spiritual needs and fostering collective resilience to prepare for our future(s). (AI was used to support summarizing the abstract in a concise manner)
How is spiritual care evolving in response to human–animal relationships? This paper presents findings from a mixed-methods study that maps the emerging multifaceted field of veterinary chaplaincy, animal chaplaincy, and interspecies spiritual care. Drawing on survey and interview data from 43 chaplains and chaplaincy educators in the United States and Canada, this research foregrounds the voices of chaplains working in a wide range of human-animal contexts, including homes, veterinary practices, animal shelters, wildlife sanctuaries, ecological habitats, and religious institutions. These chaplains provide a range of spiritual care interventions, creating rituals for transitioning animals, offering grief support for caregivers, and companioning animal-care professionals experiencing occupational and moral distress. This dialogical session will focus on key insights from the findings: how practitioners prepare for the work and how they sustain their practice.
This paper agues that healthcare chaplains should become more actively involved in organized labor as part of their vocation and as a strategy for sustaining the future of chaplaincy. Drawing on Catholic social thought, feminist ethics, labor history, and ethnographic interviews with chaplains in healthcare contexts and nurses involved in the 2026 New York City nurses' strike, I develop a pragmatic account of solidarity as both moral virtue, social practice, and professional call.
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Papers
This paper examines Martin Luther King Jr.’s theology of nonviolence through a transnational Christological genealogy linking E. Stanley Jones and Mahatma Gandhi. Challenging interpretations that treat Kingian nonviolence as a derivative ethical strategy, the study argues that King articulated a transnational Christological praxis shaped by postcolonial moral imaginaries. Jones’s reconfiguration of Jesus—detached from Western ecclesial authority and imperial power—created a space in which Gandhi could appropriate Jesus as an ethical guide without abandoning his Hindu identity. Gandhi, in turn, mediated this Christology through indigenous traditions of ahimsa, embodied suffering, and disciplined moral action, a vision that deeply influenced King’s understanding of nonviolence and the beloved community. Engaging the AAR Presidential Theme FUTURE/S, the paper argues that King’s emphasis on moral agency, embodied suffering, and refusal of technocratic power offers a theological alternative to contemporary forms of dehumanization, algorithmic governance, and political abstraction.
This paper explores how Reinhold Niebuhr influenced the theological and organizational underpinnings of King’s non-violence. A major problem in the literature and public consciousness is the straight line drawn between Mahatma Gandhi and the non-violence of King and Lawson, which represents a fundamental misunderstanding of this syncretism and cultural translation. Historians question Andrew Young’s claim that King regarded nonviolence as “a Niebuhrian stratagem of power,” as King did not explicitly state this. However, if we take a closer look at what Young is saying and the theological and philosophical developmental of non-violence in the Kingian context, we see some undeniable truth in his assessment. Understanding Niebuhr’s influence on King allows scholars to disentangle the complexities and roots of King’s relationship to non-violence, liberal Christianity in America, and foreign policy.
This paper reconstructs Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of global justice by examining the political theology underlying his positions on war abolition and international boycotts. While recent scholarship emphasizes King’s political thought, this paper argues that his theological imagination remains central to understanding his approach to global justice. Against portrayals of King as merely a latecomer to war abolition, an absolute pacifist, or Christian realist, the paper situates his views within a distinct tradition of African American Protestant Liberalism and its internationalist vision for global justice. The paper reconstructs King’s account of war abolition and international boycotts and the theological commitments that shaped his arguments. It concludes with a critical assessment of the tensions, problems, and contemporary relevance of King’s political theology.
This authors-meet-critics session introduces a book co-authored by three scholars representing religious studies, environmental humanities, and the history of science. Responding to calls to reconsider human-nonhuman relations in a time of global polycrisis, the book offers a novel framework for imagining connections between animated matter and political action through case studies focused on animated films, ritual practices, and robotics. Rather than studying animism as a specific cultural tradition distinct from non-animistic cultures and their supposedly disenchanted worldviews, the authors argue that practices of animation are universal, even as they stress that specific methods of animation differ according to time and place. The authors investigate how humans make persons through rituals, use the technique of compositing to construct worlds in illustrated films, and evoke feelings to forge intimacy with robots. Additionally, they show how humans deanimate entities that have become unruly, dysfunctional, or unwanted.
What happens to human futures when they are organized around the possibility of contact with beings who are, by definition, unknowable? This panel brings together three scholars working at the intersection of religion, science, and culture to examine how extraterrestrial life and intelligence–scientifically speculated, culturally contested, and personally experienced–function as sites where alternative futures are imagined, struggled over, and made livable. Each paper examines communities operating at the margins of both institutional science and mainstream religion that are nonetheless engaged in urgent, consequential work to open new horizons: epistemically, cosmologically, and therapeutically. Together, the papers illuminate how UFO subcultures, alien abduction communities, and the scientific practices of SETI researchers function as laboratories for the anthropology of the future–spaces where competing imaginations contest the shape of what is possible, who has the authority to say so, and what forms of life will be viable.
Papers
This paper examines how SETI practitioners use game theory, historical analogy, and policy protocols to predict and control the fundamentally unknowable event of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of scientific literature, I argue these methods constitute scientific divination that transforms radical uncertainty into managed risk while simultaneously generating new forms of enchantment. Game-theoretical models depend on non-empirical axioms that conjure particular futures into calculable existence. Historical analogies mobilize sanitized colonial narratives as predictive tools, reading futures in the past. Post-detection protocols impose bureaucratic order onto speculative scenarios, promising control without eliminating surprise. Rather than opposing enchantment, these rational methods produce meta-empirical otherness—potential alien presences that structure present action despite their unknowability and speculative nature. SETI's predictive practices are existential technologies for navigating decisions with species-ending consequences, revealing how prediction operates and enchantment intensifies precisely where empirical grounding fails and rationalization appears most complete.
This paper will provide an overview of the lineage of thought, treatment, and community building that anomalous experiencers have engaged with to make meaning of what has happened to them. Drawing from archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper reframes the lives of experiencers, and often their most traumatic moments, not as cultural curiosities but as sites of lived meaning and care within the context of psychiatric history and religious experience.
How do meaning-making strategies surrounding the “UFO phenomenon” intersect with “religion”? This paper explores the call-and-response between mainstream institutional UFO denial and grassroots subcultural knowledge production. The UFO phenomenon and associated notions of non-human intelligence destabilize hegemonic Western paradigms. Those in the UFO community navigate this fraught terrain through four distinguishable truth-seeking orientations: 1) speculative-political, 2) investigative-scientific, 3) communicative-spiritual, and 4) reconstructive-experiential. Symbolic boundaries and appeals to authority, experience, and science position UFO knowledge relative to mainstream institutions. Communicative-spiritual knowledge production, the third mode, is oriented vis-à-vis the spiritual-but-not-religious milieu as well as religious orthodoxies. In the U.S., UFO communities bypass both cautious Catholic openness and fundamentalist Christian demonization of UFOs to improvisationally bricolage Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, esoteric, and New Age elements into UFO-based spiritualities. The paper will conclude with two subcultural case studies of attempts at communication with non-human intelligences and the hierarchies of knowledge thereby reproduced or subverted.
What happens to human futures when they are organized around the possibility of contact with beings who are, by definition, unknowable? This panel brings together three scholars working at the intersection of religion, science, and culture to examine how extraterrestrial life and intelligence–scientifically speculated, culturally contested, and personally experienced–function as sites where alternative futures are imagined, struggled over, and made livable. Each paper examines communities operating at the margins of both institutional science and mainstream religion that are nonetheless engaged in urgent, consequential work to open new horizons: epistemically, cosmologically, and therapeutically. Together, the papers illuminate how UFO subcultures, alien abduction communities, and the scientific practices of SETI researchers function as laboratories for the anthropology of the future–spaces where competing imaginations contest the shape of what is possible, who has the authority to say so, and what forms of life will be viable.
Papers
This paper examines how SETI practitioners use game theory, historical analogy, and policy protocols to predict and control the fundamentally unknowable event of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of scientific literature, I argue these methods constitute scientific divination that transforms radical uncertainty into managed risk while simultaneously generating new forms of enchantment. Game-theoretical models depend on non-empirical axioms that conjure particular futures into calculable existence. Historical analogies mobilize sanitized colonial narratives as predictive tools, reading futures in the past. Post-detection protocols impose bureaucratic order onto speculative scenarios, promising control without eliminating surprise. Rather than opposing enchantment, these rational methods produce meta-empirical otherness—potential alien presences that structure present action despite their unknowability and speculative nature. SETI's predictive practices are existential technologies for navigating decisions with species-ending consequences, revealing how prediction operates and enchantment intensifies precisely where empirical grounding fails and rationalization appears most complete.
This paper will provide an overview of the lineage of thought, treatment, and community building that anomalous experiencers have engaged with to make meaning of what has happened to them. Drawing from archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper reframes the lives of experiencers, and often their most traumatic moments, not as cultural curiosities but as sites of lived meaning and care within the context of psychiatric history and religious experience.
How do meaning-making strategies surrounding the “UFO phenomenon” intersect with “religion”? This paper explores the call-and-response between mainstream institutional UFO denial and grassroots subcultural knowledge production. The UFO phenomenon and associated notions of non-human intelligence destabilize hegemonic Western paradigms. Those in the UFO community navigate this fraught terrain through four distinguishable truth-seeking orientations: 1) speculative-political, 2) investigative-scientific, 3) communicative-spiritual, and 4) reconstructive-experiential. Symbolic boundaries and appeals to authority, experience, and science position UFO knowledge relative to mainstream institutions. Communicative-spiritual knowledge production, the third mode, is oriented vis-à-vis the spiritual-but-not-religious milieu as well as religious orthodoxies. In the U.S., UFO communities bypass both cautious Catholic openness and fundamentalist Christian demonization of UFOs to improvisationally bricolage Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, esoteric, and New Age elements into UFO-based spiritualities. The paper will conclude with two subcultural case studies of attempts at communication with non-human intelligences and the hierarchies of knowledge thereby reproduced or subverted.
Many people who play games understand their actions as political. This session examines the role of games and sport in creating space for political expression, forging a humanistic outlook, and informing theological understandings.
Papers
My paper pexplores the humanizing ethic of sport that counters the weighing imposition of authoritarian governments. I suggest that viewing sports through the philosophy of humanism provides a window into speaking about and addressing difficult topics like religion and politics in sporting spaces. Humanism is a lifestance that envisions and practices living well without organized religion, typically amongst individuals in a loose collective of nonbelievers. I argue that humanism can act as an interpretive framework through which sport becomes a site of ethical resistance. I draw upon humanist insights from religion and sport theorists like Eric Bain-Selbo, the theory of Olympism in conversation with early modern humanist philosophers like Albert Camus, values conveyed from prominent atheist professional athletes, and compare between the story of Springboks role in addressing the aftermath of the South Africa apartheid and the targeted effort amongst American female professional athletes against unjust governmental structures.
Responding to C. Thi Nguyen’s recent work on the philosophy of games, I argue that both the history and form of the fantasy tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons have profound lessons for theological doctrine. I critique Nguyen’s brief treatment of D&D and argue that his own distinction between a ‘dish’ and a ‘recipe’ reveals the danger — navigated by players, religious studies scholars, and practitioners alike — of reducing games to rules, and theology to doctrine. This is a particularly salient danger for theological education, wherein students are familiarizing themselves not just with doctrines but what doctrine itself is and can do. Drawing from recent work on theological education and method, I argue that students must be brought to terms with the constitutive ambivalence of doctrine, and work to gain a more capacious understanding of doctrine’s varied uses, contexts, politics, and corresponding — but never containable — ways of life.
This paper illustrates the ways American Muslim teen girls in the U.S. heartland respond creatively, playfully, faithfully and politically to the precarity of their world through playing basketball. I map the various authorizing forces which impact girls’ ability to play basketball and how the girls play authorities against each other to achieve their goals. I show that they do this by playing up or downplaying basketball as a serious endeavor. Their desire to play is very serious, but they play to have fun. While some girls "fight to play" by finessing the meritorious and beneficial aspects of playing basketball to parents skeptical of their daughters “wasting time,” other girls "play to fight," using their platform as esteemed athletes for anti-war activism. I argue that through playing, Muslim teens recover a girlhood for themselves in a context bent on denying it to them while transforming the community around them.
Respondent
This session examines the concept of “the world” in the thought of Tupac Shakur as a space structured by the negation of Black life through sexual stigmatization, carceral surveillance, and Black male vulnerability. Through close readings of tracks such as “F*** the World” and “Blasphemy,” it argues that juridical power and media function as mechanisms that render Black men objects of suspicion and punishment.
Situating Shakur within broader traditions of Black critique, the paper engages the notion of “thingification” to show how Black male life is constructed as inherently culpable. It further argues that Shakur articulates a form of racial eschatology, drawing on dispensationalist discourse while reorienting it toward present conditions. In this account, hell is not deferred but lived. Against this “world,” Shakur gestures toward a counter-eschatological horizon of Black peace and release.
Papers
With the approaching 30th anniversary of the tragic passing of Tupac Amaru Shakur, an appraisal of how Shakur conceived the idea of “future” is warranted, particularly in light of his consistent articulation and expectation of his early death. This paper explores Shakur’s notion of death as liberative against the terrors of modernity and its commitments to the subjugation, early death, and disappearance of Black persons. Within this framework, I pay particular attention to how Shakur critiques the organized vision of the future articulated within dispensationalist eschatology, a framework through which Black futures are rendered unavailable under the terms of modernity. Rather than imagining the present as a site where Black flourishing is possible, Shakur calls for the end of the world and its dominating logics while visually and sonically depicting Black flourishing in a deferred future—a Black heaven. This paper reads these themes through the song “Blasphemy” from The Don Killuminati: The Seven Day Theory and the video for “I Ain’t Mad at Cha.”