In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper studies the Brahma Kumari tradition in Canada and in global space. The focus is on the issue of globalized identity and female religious authority of the followers. I examine several aspects of the globalization of Brahma Kumari in Canada and its complex links with South Asian religions in India. It seems that the tradition is at crossroads, just as the devotees’ cultural identity is at crossroads – being simultaneously Western and at the same time South Asian. What happens when traditions and identities are at crossroads? Do globalized traditions produce globalized identities? Are there any other transformations that happen in this cultural mobility? By means of analysis of texts and data from interviews with Brahma Kumari followers, this paper seeks to reframe the Brahma Kumari tradition in a global context, a truly global movement, which has made home in Canada while maintaining links with the spiritual homeland in India. 

This this paper will explore the presence, vitality, and active worship of two Hindu goddesses in the Tamil diaspora in the San Francisco Bay Area. While Lakshmi is very well known, representing wealth, health, and auspiciousness, the earth goddess Bhudevi is not as focused upon. Recent wildfires in California wrought havoc, raising questions connecting devotion and ecology. How does environmental catastrophe affect Hindu Americans’ worship of Bhudevi or Lakshmi? Are there caste distinctions or class differences to note, and how do these shape the perceptions of the Hindu diaspora? These questions will be investigated through the interlaced lenses of 1) economics and the varying notions of “value”; 2) the Hindu sacralization of the natural world and its relationship to environmental knowledge; and 3) transformative individual and community action about climate chaos. This research will be based on ethnographic fieldwork situated around two temples: Concord Siva-Murugan Temple and Livermore Siva-Vishnu Temple. 

This paper addresses the creative expansions of the god Jagannath as he travels from his origins in the state of Odisha into the US Hindu diaspora. Despite the popularity of Jagannath’s Ratha Yatra festival, far less attention has been paid to his other travels and his continuous material re-creations. De-centering Puri and its more orthodox Hinduism, this paper confronts some lesser-known movements and dwellings of the god in the San Francisco Bay area. These more imaginative adaptations of the god address the concerns and very lives of the devotees who live there. As a result, the god has moved and transformed—including in his material forms—into American Hindu communities and the homes of everyday devotees. Relying on material culture studies and ethnography, this study delves into more marginal aspects of the god’s transformative reality that allow him to be present to devotees across time, place, and culture. 

This paper presents testimonies from Thai-American restaurateurs whose businesses function not only as sites of commerce but also as spaces where distinctive modes of engagement with Hindu deities emerge. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Thai communities in the northeastern US, the study examines the growing presence of Hindu deities such as Ganesha and Krishna in restaurant interiors. These visual arrangements reflect recent religious developments in Thailand, where Hindu gods have gained prominence as patrons of entrepreneurial success, and reveal how Thai migrants carry these practices into North America. By examining how restaurant art and décor mediate encounters with Hindu imagery, the paper argues that Thai Buddhist restaurateurs emerge as unexpected stewards of Hindu devotion in North America. In doing so, the study highlights how migration, religious materiality, and interreligious borrowing invite us to reconsider familiar narratives about Asian American religion while helping decenter India in the study of global Hinduism.

How can social-scientific inquiry and systematic ecclesiology be brought into constructive dialogue? This paper explores the relationship between lived Ecclesial imagination and theological models of the Church by placing empirical research into conversation with classical ecclesiology. Drawing on mixed quantitative and qualitative methods—including a congregational survey and follow-up interviews in a Taiwanese church—the study identifies “the church as home” as a dominant lived Ecclesial image shaping belonging, care, worship, and communal identity. Engaging Avery Dulles’s Models of the Church as a theological framework, the paper argues that classical ecclesiology has tended to privilege institutional and corporate metaphors while under-theologizing domestic and relational dimensions of ecclesial life. The findings demonstrate how empirical research can function not merely as illustration but as a generative partner in ecclesiology, prompting the refinement of theological models by attending to operative ecclesial imaginaries within lived Christian communities.

The 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada identified ongoing structures that continue to enforce oppression against Indigenous peoples across Canada and deform the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Scholars in the Americas describe these structures as coloniality and recognize their overt and subtle embeddedness within Western culture. As a part of a larger research project investigating coloniality in Canadian Anglican liturgy, this paper focuses on one ethnographic tool to reveal the subtle manifestations of coloniality: drawing. While the drawings were initially used as a starting point for interviews, they emerged as a source of data themselves, demonstrating the unconscious ways participants conceived of Anglican worship. This research analyzes selected drawings to demonstrate the ways in which they manifest domination, Eurocentric liturgical practices, and binary classifications, showing that coloniality remains a subtle and pervasive force in liturgical practice.

This paper explores ongoing research that examines the intersections of trauma, theology, and creative writing within the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver (DTES). Grounded in trauma theory, ethnographic, and practical theological methods, this paper recognizes the ways in which collective and individual trauma impacts theological imagination and faith practices and explores the role that spirituality can play in survival and meaning-making post trauma. At the same time, it takes seriously the potential of creative writing—not merely as a method, but as a practice of resistance and healing. This research aims to understand how theological meaning emerges in and through trauma, and how creative writing functions as a site of theological reflection. Its aim is to bring more voices into theological conversations about trauma, and in doing so, open a wider scope of how theology is constructed, the settings that shape it, and whose voices are recognized and amplified.

This paper addresses the Future/s theme by interpreting KPop Demon Hunters (KDH) as a meditation on Korea’s contested religious past that imagines a global future in which shared musical experiences exorcise literal and metaphorical demons by uniting religiously and culturally diverse audiences. KDH celebrates but does not merely represent Korean “shamanism,” creating a hybrid cosmology that cross-references elements from Christianity, Buddhism, and popular culture. Specifically, the film’s conceit of music as exorcism connects centuries-old kut (musical rituals to appease spirits) to pre-Pentecostal Protestant uses of hymn-singing and modern Pentecostal megachurch worship as techniques deployed first to demonize indigenous religions and then to exorcise spirits identified as demons. KDH is sufficiently non-specific about this religious history to attract diverse audiences, bringing together established fan bases for Hallyu (Korean wave) and exorcism media. Mobilizing ambiguous meanings of “idol,” KDH idealizes a global spiritual community fueled by fan devotion to popular cultural artists.

This paper argues that the “Jesus Birthday Cafe” (Jesus Saeng-ca), organized by Korea Campus Crusade for Christ, refashions Christian devotion through the affective and participatory grammar of K-pop fandom. Modeled on the K-pop “Idol Birthday Cafe,” the event transforms Christmas into an Instagrammable pop-up devotional space structured around Jesus photo cards, a photo zone, and limited-edition goods. These material forms make faith tangible, emotionally resonant, and culturally legible for a digital-native generation. Yet they also mediate encounter with the divine through commodified signs shaped by a white, Eurocentric, male image of Jesus. The paper contends that the Jesus Birthday Cafe does more than popularize Christianity; it reveals how evangelical belonging is increasingly produced through consumer aesthetics, affective participation, and visual mediation, while simultaneously reproducing colonial Christian visuality. In doing so, it exposes tensions among accessibility, devotion, commodification, and postcolonial critique in contemporary South Korean evangelical culture and practice today.

The US-made animated film KPop Demon Hunters, released on Netflix in 2025, has broken viewership records and won milestone awards. Its breakout popularity has meant greater attention by American and global audiences to Korean culture and religion. This presents a challenge, but also an opportunity to use the current popularity of that film, and the interest it generates, to teach wider audiences about Korean religious culture. This paper explains and argues that KPop Demon Hunters can and should be used as an effective teaching tool. I explain ways in which Korean religion and culture are used in the film. Then I describe examples of the pedagogical application of KPop Demon Hunters, including an account of my public lecture on the History Behind KPop Demon Hunters given at the Ann Arbor District Library and incorporation into other lessons and works on Korean religion by myself and other scholars.

Black contemporary gospel music provides a womanist method for spiritual care and physical healing. However, little scholarship has examined the capacity for gospel music to heal Black women against the health-reducing factors necessitating their healing, especially the physically and spiritually deleterious effects of stress and, upon accumulation, moral injury. Black women within the United States face particular psychological-spiritual distress resulting from intersectional stress due to the multidimensional oppression imposed on them along race, gender, class, and age. Given that music interventions offer a scalable, cost-effective approach to alleviate physiological stress and psychological stress, this paper proposes the first-ever framework and evidence-base identifying the stress-reducing qualities of Black contemporary gospel music in order to guide the development of gospel music interventions specifically tailored to Black women’s lived experiences with intersectional stress and moral injury. 

This paper engages Miranda Fricker's framework of epistemic injustice and Jonathan Shay's theory of moral injury to examine the intersections of epistemic injustice, moral injury, and moral repair in diasporic contexts.

This paper examines the moral injuries experienced by American Protestant missionaries during the Nanjing Massacre and the Nanking Safety Zone (1937–1938), arguing that their suffering reveals moral injury less as an individual pathology than as a sign of systemic failure. Drawing on diaries, letters, and reports by Minnie Vautrin, Miner Searle Bates, George Fitch, and Robert Wilson, the paper analyzes how humanitarian and spiritual labor under conditions of occupation, scarcity, and violence produced distinct forms of moral injury, including guilt over exclusion, indirect collusion, remorse over misjudgment, and anguish under impossible triage. In conversation with current debates over defining “moral injury disorder,” the paper argues that pathologizing moral injury risks shifting attention away from institutional betrayal and structural violence. The Nanjing case shows that spiritual caregivers themselves may be uniquely vulnerable, and that moral injury can function as an embodied political and theological critique. 

This essay follows the historical and ideological veins of U.S. biopolitical violence against Mexican bodies, drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics and the legacy of Malthusianism. I analyze how nineteenth-century figures like Josiah Strong fused racist pseudoscience, religious rhetoric, and populationist discourse to legitimize colonial expansion, which necessitated the disciplining of racialized bodies. These frameworks persist in contemporary practices, such as the forced sterilization of Mexican women in 1960s Los Angeles and the ongoing War on Drugs, which disproportionately harms Mexican and Latinx communities. Drawing on scholars like Jade S. Sasser and Oswaldo Zavala, the paper argues that U.S. governmental policies continue to be informed by a logic of “survival of the fittest” and Anglo-Saxon exceptionalist theology, constructing Mexican populations as threats. This rhetoric is used to justify state violence as a project of security and progress, ultimately obscuring the ongoing project of extermination.

Foucault argued that fear of the ineluctable criminal was one means through which state power expanded in the late 1800s. This suggests that power works through affect and emotion, but Foucault does not delve into exactly how populations are made to experience fear, or how that fear is channeled towards the criminal. This paper aims to fill that gap through an examination of detective fiction, part of what Foucault called the "literature of criminality" that spreads fear. It focuses on the affective content of Sherlock Holmes stories, demonstrating how both the form and content of Sherlock stories inspired particular forms of fear in audiences, channeled that fear towards criminals, and then, in solving the crime, transmuted fear of the criminal into love of the state. It concludes with a discussion of how religious studies hermeneutics shed light on the operations of power. 

Canguilhem, Foucault, and the Concept: A Discursive View of 'Biological Sex' in Trans-exclusive Radical Feminism.

This paper considers artist Khalil Rabah’s long running, parafictional art project The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (2003–ongoing). Rabah uses exhibition-making strategies and display conventions to satirize the violent worldmaking projects that museums are called upon to uphold. I join visual analysis of Rabah’s artwork with decolonial critiques of the museum and state, specifically Israel. During the decolonial and revolutionary post-World War II context of the mid-twentieth century, many newly sovereign nations opened museums. In the case of the Zionist settler-colonial project, the museum pre-dates the founding of the nation-state, paving the way for future statehood. These museums legitimize the terms of possession so that by the time the nation-state is declared, the argument for its existence was already made. Rabah indexes the historical to envision the future of Palestinian sovereignty and simultaneously interrogates the veracity of the museum as an institution of objective truth.

This paper examines calls to save Palestine that were made over a decade before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. This research focuses on the works of Muṣtafa Sadiq al-Rāfiʿī (d. 1937), a renowned figure in the 20th reform movement against colonialism in the Middle East. Although he died in 1937, al-Rāfiʿī warned against the approaching threat which Palestine faced. He called upon citizens of the Arab and Muslim world to claim moral responsibility and to act to halt the impending threat. Born in Egypt to parents of Syrian descent, al-Rāfiʿī is known for his social commentaries that focused on ethical reflections related to the lived realities of his time. This paper explores the articles al-Rāfiʿī published in major newspapers in Egypt and the Levant in the 1930’s, studies the context of his appeal, and analyzes the nature of his moral call for action. 

This paper explores the role that public performance of ritual played in demonstrations of cross-cultural and interfaith solidarity, especially between antizionist Jewish students and Palestinians, during the 2024 student encampment uprising. Through stories taken from the authors' lived experiences and from direct interviews and conversations with student organizers at schools such as Columbia, Northwestern, University of California Los Angeles, and others, this paper argues that public performance of traditionally private ritual was a profoundly essential solidarity tactic to the success of the student movement, and in many cases actually served to deepen student's connections to their cultural and faith traditions at a moment of profound uncertainty. By so doing, the act of the performance of these rituals became not just a spiritual practice, but a compelling and necessary political tool.

Scholarship on evangelical women has boomed over the past decade, offering insight into the American Christian Right and its politics of gender and sexuality. But a major gap within this sub-field remains: historical analysis of evangelical girlhood(s) and the nuanced power structures therein, especially as separate from a theological or confessional approach. Building on the work of Heather Hendershot, Emily Suzanne Johnson, and Sara Moslener, and utilizing a Foucauldian framework of power, this paper examines Focus on the Family's Brio Magazine and argues that evangelical girls exist at specific nexus of disenfranchisement and unique authority that constitutes them as a particular type of subject in both religious and political discourses. Girlhood is a unique position that cannot be earned nor disposed of; Indeed, it is impossible to fully grasp the trajectory of contemporary evangelicalism without understanding the role that teenage girls play in the evangelical imagination and American political realities. 

"The child" as constructed by the Early Church and inherited via colonization by the West is not, in fact, a child at all. A reflection and manifestation of adult cultural and spiritual anxiety, the child in Christian political discourse has often served as a tool for the consolidation of power as opposed to furthering the interests of concrete children themselves. While attempting to attenuate the impacts of such instrumentalization through positive discourse attending to children as actual persons is of certain value, this paper proposes that the greatest good might be done by removing children from political rhetoric altogether. Children, and indeed all those whom their lives touch, would be better served by encouraging Christian communities to resist their urges to consolidate power in moments of anxiety and lean into the faith they proclaim they possess.

This paper explores the ways that Unitarian-Transcendentalist and social reformer Caroline Wells Healey Dall, in her children’s book series Patty Gray’s Journey, broadly, and its second book, specifically, translated slavery, the Civil War, and the aftermath of both for young readers.  Her insistence that children, especially white, Northern children, must know what slavery was and what war was and what both left behind is a reflection of her belief that resilience is forged through knowledge—a belief rooted directly in her Unitarian and Transcendentalist principles. When, Dall prompts us to ask, does the privilege of childhood innocence give way for real-worldly resilience?