In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

The figure of Kamala Khan as Ms Marvel across two media—graphic novel and Disney streaming series—provides a novel means of teaching topics related to Islam, gender, and women.There has been a rich outpouring of interpretation and scholarship around the publications of the early graphic novels.However, there has been less discussion of the ways in which representation of the superheroine has changed in subsequent media.An analysis of the central character of Kamala Khan with reference to the use of political and religious history in identity formation is followed by an exploration of how themes of immigration and assimilation, Muslim American identity and values, and narrative lines that explicate a Muslim religious identity have changed in the move from graphic novel to mini-series. A gendered analysis points to differences in physical representation, a devolution in personal agency, and a move of focus from religious identity in the graphic novels to ethnic identity in the Disney series.  

Since 2018, the Pakistan Aurat March has been a site of intense controversy, garnering the critique of a number of religious organizations in the country. In this proposal, I use the slogans used by protestors at this annual march as a pedagogical tool to help students think about broader themes pertaining to Islam and gender. Specifically, I aim to teach students about the politics/challenges surrounding women’s movements in Muslim majority countries, the complicated ways in which Muslim women engage with feminism, and the types of arguments religious groups use against women’s movements.

Teaching Islam, sex, and gender in courses that examine Judaism, Christianity, and Islam presents distinctive pedagogical challenges, especially when students encounter the academic study of religion for the first time. This presentation introduces a framework for engaging questions of sex, gender, authority, and interpretation across Abrahamic traditions through three strategies: religious deidentification, comparative textual analysis, and pedagogies of play. Students temporarily bracket confessional commitments, analyze sacred texts across traditions, and experiment with interpretive perspectives through structured activities such as Power Bingo, debate simulations, and role-play exercises. Multimedia resources (including video, visual art, and digital texts) provide accessible entry points into contested topics, while an interactive syllabus helps students trace recurring themes across traditions. Together, these approaches cultivate intellectual curiosity, interpretive humility, and collaborative dialogue when teaching Islam, sex, and gender in interreligious classrooms.

Our Males and Females (dir. Ahmad Alyaseer, 2023) is a short film (11 minutes), filmed in Jordan, and packs a complicated, moving, and timely storyline into its economical run time. The simplest film summary could be: A mother and father have received their deceased daughter from an unidentified “abroad,” and aim to wash her for a proper Muslim burial. However, this would miss the balance between causality and choices, surprises, stripped down scenery, and intensity that this story contains. It is quickly revealed that the child is a transgender young woman who has undergone breast augmentation. The father remains committed to affirming his son’s maleness, while the mother at first uses male pronouns in her recitation of the janazah (funerary) prayer, but elegantly and seamless adjusts to identifying her daughter as such by the end of this gripping and emotional presentation. 

From the first act of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis, to an abundance of metaphors and images employed by rabbis, kabbalists, and philosophers to describe wisdom and godliness, light illuminates the Jewish path of knowledge. In this paper, I will consider light as a physical phenomenon and follow up with a discussion of the significance and meanings of the various lights in the Torah, Midrash, and Jewish philosophy.

This paper considers the symbolism of light in Islamicate discourses of spiritual intellectuality, identifying ways that the Sūfī figure ʿAlā al-dīn al-Mahāʾimī (d. 1431CE) made ambivalent use of the earlier metaphysics of light identified with the Illuminationist (Ishrāqī) school of Islamicate philosophy, founded by Shihāb al-dīn Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī (d.1191CE). Within the historiography of Islamicate intellectual thought, Suhrawardī's Illuminationism offers an image of the immediate spiritual knowledge of Sufism and rationalism of Avicennan Scholastic discourse converging in an epistemological synthesis mirrored by that of Ibn ʿArabī's (d.1240CE) school of the Unicity of Being (waḥdat al-wujūd).  Heuristically, both proffer a vision of a singular, gradational reality accessible through spiritual practice and expressible through a technical discourse, while disagreeing on the nature of that reality.  While Mahāʾimī's criticizes Illuminationism from his position within Ibn ʿArabian existentialism, he utilizes a symbolism of light to solve problems where 'existence' is insufficient.

The mysticism of light is a common feature of early Christian spirituality. This paper will focus on one case study in this larger tradition, namely, the spiritual perception of the nature of the world as blue, sapphire, or turquoise. In Christian contemplative traditions, the sky is experienced as the outer image of God’s infinite horizon, in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). After sketching this tradition from Origen (c.185–264) and Evagrius Ponticus (345–99) to Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), the paper will conclude by touching on the role of sense perception in contemplative experience, the ways that such contemplative states mirror and invert normative sense experiences, and what makes the spiritual senses primordial or properly transensory in these Christian traditions.

This paper examines the Tibetan Buddhist contemplative theory of the rainbow body (’ja’ lus), according to which the material body transforms into multicolored light at the culmination of awakening. While widely known in Tibetan Buddhist communities and cultures—and increasingly referenced in popular spiritual discourse—the doctrinal mechanism underlying this transformation remains insufficiently understood. I provide an example from the eleventh–twelfth century Great Perfection Heart Essence (rdzogs chen snying thig) corpus, in which the rainbow body phenomenon is theorized as an alchemical resolution of the body’s elemental constituents—earth, water, fire, and wind—into their purified mode as “clear light” (’od gsal). I further connect this theory to contemplative practices involving meditation on entoptic visions of luminous forms, typically experienced in dark retreat. The paper thus presents a model of religious light understood as the latent ontological condition of the body disclosed through contemplative perception.

This paper examines the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light as a form of inward illumination that grounds ethical community beyond institutional authority. Drawing on early and modern Quaker sources, the study argues that the Inner Light articulates a pre-religious grammar of spiritual capacity that precedes formal doctrinal systems. Through historical-textual analysis of writings by George Fox, Margaret Fell, William Penn, and Rufus Jones, the paper traces how inward experiences of illumination are translated into shared ethical responsibility and communal witness. Fox’s accounts of direct revelation, Fell’s defense of women’s preaching, and Penn’s political theology demonstrate how divine illumination authorizes moral action independent of clerical mediation. The analysis concludes with Jones’s twentieth-century reinterpretation of the Inner Light as a universal structure of human consciousness. Taken together, these sources show how Quaker spirituality transforms immediate inward experience into enduring ethical communities grounded in shared illumination rather than external authority.

In this paper, I primarily attend to practices of forgetting, particularly in relation to institutions of higher education. I do so, first, to make sense of the current theo-political context and second, to raise two considerations for reflection if colleges and universities seek to continue in their role as keepers and sustainers of collective memory. Although colleges and universities often emphasize their role in the preservation of memory, I start by sketching a legacy of forgetting to better understand present realities. I then explore a couple of Presidential Executive Orders which witness troubling enactments of remembering and forgetting. Finally, I turn to James Crockford’s 2022 article, “Contested Memorials and the Discipleship of Christian Memory,” to think through the role of higher education in relation to memory, attentive to current challenges and perennial moral obligations. 

What is the role of higher education in the current theo-political context? This paper offers a constructive, political-theological vision of higher education as a locus for the negotiation and clarification of collective thoughts and memories that can both build up and transform the contours of existing communities. A better appreciation of epistemological pluralism and the power dynamics of knowledge-production requires going beyond reflexivity, enacting substantial institutional reforms that more strongly embeds scholarship within local communities while also providing the space for transformative encounters that can reconfigure the tensions and bounds of those communities.  I present this vision as a contrast to the "liberal university" and the particular politics of knowledge that it instantiates in both its 'dogmatic' and 'critical-reflexive' modes, highlighting the significance of religious studies in particular by means of a counter-reading of a key figure at the foundation of the discipline and the modern university: F.D.E. Schleiermacher. 

In his late political vision, Pier Paolo Pasolini declared the foreclosure of all outsides to capitalist developmentalism. It followed for Pasolini that socialism had suffered a seemingly final defeat and the Italian State no longer needed the Catholic Church to secure hegemony among a population of otherwise divided peoples. Even so, in a series of articles on the Church, Pasolini concedes a persistent ability of the Church to conjure excessive and shocking feelings when it “address problems that the community is familiar with.” How can an irrelevant and marginal institution still shock? The language of excess is a throughline between Pasolini’s Catholic articles, his earlier writings on aesthetics and cinema, and key texts from his major influences: Erich Auerbach, Georges Bataille, and Norman O. Brown. These thinkers share an association between this excessive experience and what Steven Ozment calls “the permanent possibility of historical novelty” in Mysticism and Dissent.

Drawing on hauntological insights, this paper examines the abuse of specters—the practice of domesticating and reproducing the stories of the dead for display and consumption. This problem is exacerbated by the rapid development of technologies for virtual spaces, which not only mediate but also create and distort narratives. With attention to youth radicalization across the globe, this paper focuses on a case study of the gaming company Roblox to illuminate how the abuse of specters shapes moral agency. The player-generated content “Gwangju of the Day” reconstructed a distorted narrative of the 1980 South Korean pro-democracy movement in Gwangju city. By drawing on hauntology, theological ethics, and scholarship on artificial intelligence, this paper offers guidelines for cultivating ethical relationships with the dead. The paper facilitates a conversation about how religious educators and faith communities can contribute to the formation of moral agency to engage counter memory for a liberatory future.

This paper asks: Do queer Zimbabwean Exists? as an extension of Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s book title - Do Zimbabweans Exist? - in which he deploys postcolonial nationalism through frames such as ethnicity and violence in Zimbabwe. This study uses sexuality to deconstruct the official nationalism undergirded and articulated through alliances between state power, religious conservatism, and heteronormative constructions of citizenship. As such, I examine instantiations where queer persons and movements destabilise political and religious symbols deployed in the making of the postcolonial nation in Zimbabwe. 

How do religious communities teach people to understand sexuality, and what kinds of futures do those teachings imagine? Within conservative American evangelicalism, sexual knowledge has often been framed through purity culture, complementarian theology, and instruction on marriage and gender roles. These teachings do more than regulate behavior. They provide an interpretive matrix through which believers learn to understand desire and self-sovereignty. This paper examines evangelical sexual literacy through memoirs by former evangelicals (exvangelicals), including Jamie Lee Finch, Glennon Doyle, Matthias Roberts, and Linda Kay Klein. Reading these narratives together, I explore how sexual teachings were internalized and later reenvisioned through deconversion. Methodologically, I treat memoir as a site of religious reflection in which former evangelicals wrestle with earlier instruction and emerge with new meaning-making. These narratives not only reveal how evangelical sexual literacy is formed, but how it is contested and reworked in a post-evangelical future.

This paper argues that kink, understood not as sexual transgression but as an embodied practice of negotiating power, vulnerability, and pleasure, offers a critical site for theorizing "demonic possibilities": the capacity of liminal peoples to create joy, relationality, and livable worlds within and against systems designed to render them invisible. Drawing on Black studies, Indigenous thought, and queer theory, I propose that kink enacts a demonic ethics born from outside the dominant order, seeping through its fissures. The paper grounds this argument theologically, revealing how Christian moral frameworks imposed normative sexuality as a colonial project, and refuses to theorize kink as universally liberatory, instead attending to how race, gender, and coloniality shape access to erotic world-making. I offer demonic kink ethics as a framework that refuses the reproductive, marital, and national logics through which religious traditions have organized sexual meaning.

This paper proposes a 4E cognitive framework to analyze gender transition as a fundamental reconfiguration of the agent-environment interface. Moving beyond discursive models of performativity, I argue that gender is a primary mechanism of enactive sense-making and a key depth dimension of existential flourishing. Drawing on Tillich and Merleau-Ponty, I frame gender transition as a state of functional ease where the physical body and social position align.

Then, utilizing a Haslangerian lens, I position the body as an active participant in cognition rather than a passive substrate. Transitioning is thus an enactive resolution to existential dislocation, utilizing medical and social re-tooling to create necessary affordances for action. Finally, I characterize transgender communities as essential affective scaffolding and frame anti-trans legislation as environmental enclosure—a systematic attempt to render the world un-grippable, obstructing both the material and cognitive foundations of integrated wholeness.

This paper engages the intersection of affective neuroscience and medieval philosophical theology by comparing Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion, specifically the role of interoception, with Thomas Aquinas's account of phantasms in shaping human affect. Barrett argues that emotions are constructed concepts emerging from interoceptive bodily signals, while Aquinas argues that phantasms are sensory representations generated by the sense appetite and stored in the intellect, which enable human passions. Despite radically different metaphysical frameworks, both recognize that emotion depends on a structured interplay between body and cognition. I argue that interoception and phantasms function in both frameworks as analogous mediators in the formation of human affect, highlighting an unexpected convergence between contemporary cognitive science and Thomistic theological anthropology. This comparison underscores that insights from medieval theology can still illuminate contemporary discussions about embodiment, affect, and the nature of human emotion. 

This paper analyzes CSR theories of agency attribution to supernatural agents (SAs), specifically the extent to which specific properties (psychological vs physiological) result in human-like versus nonhuman-like understandings. To test the relationship between properties and agential understanding, we analyze 40 native Tagalog (Filipino) speakers who currently reside in the Philippines. Tagalog is distinct in that it linguistically differentiates between human and nonhuman agents through case markers and determiners. It is therefore offers a productive opportunity to explore the extent to which these speakers label a given supernatural agent as human-like or not based on specific properties. In addition to using a non-WEIRD dataset and a linguistic analysis rare in the field, this study builds on recent work both analyzing Tagalog in the context of CSR and investigating the properties generally assigned to God and other SAs.

The standard model of the cognitive science of religion “puts all its eggs in the basket” of supernatural agents. This has resulted in the neglect or denial of nonpersonal and nonagentive powers and meanings with respect to magic, for both magical thinking and practice, for hunter-gatherer, ancient, and contemporary manifestations of magic. Embodied cognition offers a corrective to the standard model’s assumptions about magic. It recognizes the very obvious bodily involvement in rituals involving magic. It recognizes that not all patterns in the natural world involve conscious intention by agents and that all societies acknowledge the reality of some of those patterns. The paper analyzes imitative/sympathetic, contagious, divination, apotropaic—warding off evil, healing, transformation of status, and some Christian sacramental rituals. It evidences the highly significant role that magic rituals enlisting nonpersonal and nonagentive processes have played in religions through the ages.

This paper examines two kinds of transformations of shame (zanki) in late Heian Pure Land discourse through the contrasting ideas of emotion and affect. First, subjective remorse was formalized into standardized rites of repentance (sange). This formalization generated a strong emphasis on ritual expression of shame, as opposed to the internal emotion itself. It effectively converted invisible individual feelings into an intersubjective affective field accessible to other individuals. Second, the perceived lack of shame was paradoxically redefined as a performative gateway to spiritual success. By self-portraying as shameless, practitioners strategically aligned themselves with a particular category of people expounded in Pure Land teachings as an object of salvation, thereby ensuring their position within the soteriological system. This paper argues that the emotion of shame functioned not merely as a psychological state but as a conceptual matrix for ritual embodiment and performative self-definition.

This paper examines the emotion of rage as expressed by Tokugawa protest martyrs (gimin) and complex affective landscapes their rage engenders. Although individual circumstances differ, stories of early modern protest martyrs largely hinge upon the sacrificial deaths of virtuous peasants who engage in “illegal” protests against corrupt feudal lords. The prototypical example of this narrative pattern is Sakura Sōgorō, a seventeenth-century peasant executed by the Sakura domain for the crime of making a direct appeal to the Shogun. Moments before his death, Sōgorō expresses his rage at the corrupt domain lord and makes a vow of vengeance, no matter how many lifetimes it may take. Sōgorō thus articulates his rage in trans-corporeal and trans-temporal terms, assuming that his rage will live on even after his body perishes. This paper argues that it was the trans-corporeal, trans-temporal conception of Sōgorō’s rage that informed his postmortem apotheosis as a kami.

This paper analyzes emotion, religious cultivation, and pacifism in Konkōkyō war commemoration rituals. Drawing on textual testimonies and fieldwork, I examine how adherents of Konkōkyō—a Sect Shinto new religious movement (NRM) that was both oppressed and privileged in the 1930s and 1940s—create, share, and transform war emotions through memorial rituals. I focus on two rituals: spirit pacification (ireisai) in Konkōkyō peace conferences, and war remains repatriation (ikotsu shūshū) in Okinawa. Konkōkyō participants recall a range of emotions and experiences evoked by the ritual; negative feelings of guilt and suffering are interpreted as opportunities to cultivate gratitude and pacifism. I show how adherents of a marginalized religion grapple with loss, suffering, and responsibility through communal rituals that mobilize war experiences toward goals of self-cultivation and pacifism. My paper theorizes these rituals as pulling participants back in time as a way to cultivate new emotional capacities in the present.

Anne Allison introduced “sensing precarity” in her influential 2013 book, Precarious Japan which argued for precarity as an emotional status, one characterized by an insecurity and desociality that pervades contemporary Japanese society. Sensing precarity, then, can be interpreted as an inability to move within social worlds, what Gilles Deleuze (1978) defined as sadness. Yet Allison did not consider the role religion plays in sensing precarity through practices that enable movement, what Deleuze saw as joy. In this presentation, I draw on Buddhist women’s experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic to revisit Allison’s sensing precarity in light of Deleuze’s concepts of joy and sadness to understand the ways that women negotiated their extreme senses of sadness through their active Buddhist practices of joy. These women turned to Buddhist teachings and practices to craft a quasi-communal life of joy that helped them battle the precarious emotional tides that threatened to overcome them.

A burgeoning body of evidence documents how Black women in higher education are disproportionately impacted by adverse outcomes pertaining to their physical, mental, and social wellbeing as compared to their white counterparts in academe. While some research has examined why Black women exit the academy, far less attention has been paid to why Black women remain in institutions that are increasingly marked by epistemic violence, gendered racism, and unequal access to promotion. Bridging womanist thought with the Public Health Critical Race (PHCR) praxis of critical storytelling, this study draws on survey data and semi-structured interviews with womanist scholars at various stages of their careers (i.e., students, junior scholars, and senior scholars) to demonstrate how a sense of calling in the lives of Black women may function as a mechanism of self-sacrifice even as it is reconfigured as a weaponized tool of anti-Black violence in academe. 

This paper argues that carcerality is a more adequate and generative theological metaphor than crucifixion for naming Black women's survival in America. Ignacio Ellacuría's "crucified people" and James Cone's theology of the cross are event-based, male-coded, and easily spiritualized into redemptive suffering. Drawing on Sarah Jobe's carceral hermeneutics, Hortense Spillers' analysis of the captive body, Kelly Brown Douglas's account of criminalized Black womanhood, and Sylvia Wynter's decolonial critique of the genre of the human, this paper contends that carcerality names what crucifixion cannot: a system of ongoing bodily confinement, intimate and gendered violence, and colonial construction that extends from the Middle Passage to the present. Working constructively within womanist theology, and grounded in Delores Williams's survival ethics and Katie Cannon's moral wisdom, the paper proposes a womanist carceral theology adequate to the task of dismantling, not merely enduring, the structures that confine.

This paper develops a womanist pastoral-theological framework for understanding Black women’s depression as a relational, embodied, and justice-related reality rather than an individual deficit. Based on my qualitative study of seven Black Christian women with persistent depression, it treats their narratives as theological texts and sources of wisdom. Combining trauma theory and ecosocial approaches with self-psychology and womanist theology, the paper interprets depression as a bodily response to multilevel trauma—historical, structural, communal, and personal. It critically examines controlling images such as the Strong Black Woman, Platonic body–spirit dualisms, and sacrificial atonement theologies that over-spiritualize mental health and sanctify Black women’s suffering. In dialogue with Alice Walker’s womanism and influential womanist theologians, it offers embodied reinterpretations of incarnation, the cross, and salvation that affirm Black women’s depressed bodies as sacred and deserving of care. Finally, it provides trauma-informed, practical recommendations for Black churches aiming to foster more just and liberating ministries.