In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Using Springtide Research Institute’s mixed-methods findings on 15–22-year-olds, this presentation reframes the AAR theme “Future/s” around a practical-theological question: what communal conditions make faith livable for teens and emerging adults? The data suggest a connection–communion gap: many retain religious/spiritual identity while worship attendance and embedded participation are uneven, and older youth participate less frequently in both religious and nonreligious groups. I propose “threshold community” as an analytic construct for ecclesial spaces that lower entry barriers while building pathways to belonging, meaning-making, and agency. Interpreted through koinonia, mystagogy, accompaniment, and charism-centered leadership formation, the argument treats young people as diagnosticians of formative infrastructures rather than deficits to be fixed. The session introduces a compact Connection–Communion Diagnostic to map threshold costs, communion practices, and agency pathways. Participants generate a one-page “communion pathway map” to locate where ministries leak connection into disengagement, and identify redesign options for co-responsible leadership and hopeful futures.

This paper draws on qualitative research exploring God-experiences among Protestant adults who were raised in Korean residential child care institutions. Participants’ childhoods were marked by abandonment, violence, and structural marginalization, situating them in what I term borderland spaces—lived realities close to death, on the periphery of society, and in positions of powerlessness. Yet their testimonies of survival and the ways in which God-experiences functioned within these conditions—both death-dealing and life-giving—reveal theological wisdom for sustaining the present and envisioning futures from within trauma. The analysis demonstrates that coerced religious experiences became life-giving when four conditions interacted: the exercise of agency, coming to be situated within a safe space, corrective embodied experience, and the naming of these experiences as God’s presence. By listening to their lived experiences, this project proposes a pastoral theology of Salim that recognizes children and young adults as theological agents, articulating grace as it emerges in borderland spaces.

“Young people are not the future of the church. We are the church now.” This proposal is based on the Young People and Christian Worship (YPCW) study, a mixed-methods, multisite, binational, and ecumenical research project that listens deeply to how teenagers and emerging adults (aged 13–29) experience public Christian worship (95 qualitative interviews, 25 focus groups representing approximately 215 participants, and participant observation at 45 worship services, alongside a 1,420-person national survey). Rejecting problematic deficit frameworks and instead engaging in collaborative constructive theology, we ask “What can we learn about worship from young people?” Our research addresses three distinct liturgical traditions—Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical Protestant. Initial findings highlight holistic formation: young people are shaped by and for specific traditions of worship in multiple ways—intellectually, emotionally, and actively. What we are learning about formation is significant for the future/s of the church, and the church today.

Digital culture is a major factor in contemporary children’s lives. It shapes all aspects of their days, from education and relationships to free time and physical health. This paper will explore several ways that digital culture and artificial intelligence influence spiritual well-being and faith formation. It will suggest that digital experiences provide opportunities for kids to expand their spiritual horizons, make connections with diverse others, experiment with authentic identity formation, and engage in creative religious activities. It will also discuss how uncritical exposure to AI, excessive engagement with social media, and other problematic elements of digital culture pose threats to spiritual health, especially for children already at risk because of cultural marginalization and discrimination. Along the way, the paper will explore how faith formation practices can incorporate digital opportunities while teaching children how to resist digital threats.

Children of missionaries (often called missionary kids or MKs) occupy an understudied place in practical theology, despite their outsized influence on the theological academy and the church. This paper examines storytelling practices among MKs at a Christian summer camp, asking how these practices help MKs make theological sense of their cross-cultural lives. Drawing on ethnographic research, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews, it argues that the camp's formal and informal storytelling practices facilitate identity construction by immersing participants in a community of others who share similar experiences of migration and cross-cultural living. More specifically, MKs learn to interpret their own experiences by listening to other MKs narrate theirs, "apprenticed" by older peers into shared practices of meaning-making. The paper concludes by asking what kind of theological future becomes possible when we not only listen to young people's stories, but help them tell those stories well.

This study rethinks Christian asceticism through the lens of hunger, drawing on Simone Weil’s work. For Weil, hunger is not something to be overcome but a concrete exposure of human vulnerability, where bodily need, spiritual truth, and ethical responsibility converge. The paper proceeds in three parts. The first section situates her view of renunciation—not as a pursuit of spiritual advantage but as relinquishing all that is not grace—within the history of ascetic mastery, emphasizing consent to human vulnerability. The second section examines Weil’s account of hunger on multiple interrelated levels: as a physical reality, as an expression of desire, and as a source of ethical awareness. The third section proposes a reimagined Christian asceticism that distinguishes genuine need from manufactured appetite, reorients practice from mastery toward consent, and extends personal discipline to an awareness of structural oppression and systemic injustice.

Peter Thiel states that death is a problem to be solved. He routinely frames his transhumanist ideas through theological language, highlighting resonances between his vision of immortality and the Christian eschatological body. But beyond an external motivator for innovation, there is little room in Thiel’s proposal for dying one’s own death; that is, our deaths do not seem to inform us about life, finitude, or even mortality itself. As such, this paper offers a pedagogical interpretation of death by way of the ascetical rule of John Climacus. Through a constructive reading of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, I demonstrate that death operates paradoxically for Climacus, by inverting expectations on spiritual maturity with the goal of constituting the ascetic’s relation to the world by reorienting them back to their finitude. 

This paper examines Emmanuiel Mounier’s account of personalist asceticism as a social practice. Mounier articulates the human as a relational being, irreducible to her social, historical conditioning and yet organically and constitutively embedded within living communities. Asceticism, in his view, becomes the practice by which the human becomes fully personal and creates healthy social bonds. In our precarious ecological and capitalist moment where human beings are too easily reduced to producers and consumers, I argue that Mounier offers a vision of ascetic practice that can synthesize the hopes for personal flourishing with social justice. This demands a reconceptualization of asceticism and refusal not as an acceptance of lack or as a necessary sacrifice but as the very path to personal flourishing and, thus, social wholeness.

This paper engages apocalypse not as genre, ideology, or eschatology, but as praxis. Drawing the three-fold way of perfection from the Christian spiritual tradition, it proposes an account of the apocalyptic as a renunciation of the world as it is, an imaginative vision of the world as it might be, and a practice of creaturely care in the meantime. In the practices of purgation (lament, renunciation, conversion), illumination (vision, imagination, thanksgiving), and unity (care, indifference, discernment, praise), apocalyptic praxis allows Christian to engage the endings of the world with hope. Under such a description, the apocalyptic is less a predictive tool and more a spiritual practice. And in this way, apocalyptic praxis becomes a guide and challenge for Christian spirituality as the world seems to be ending.

This paper explores Śivasvāmin’s 9th century Sanskrit poem, the Kapphiṇābhyudaya (The Rise of Kapphiṇa), as a case study in novel literary representations of the Buddha generated through Hindu-Buddhist literary encounters in Kashmir. Specifically, it investigates how the poet’s uptake of a specific poetic structure, a description of a mountain, is used to aid his telling of an avadāna narrative in a courtly poetic (mahākāvya) form. It argues that the poem’s description of the mountain creates an extended comparison between the mountain and the Buddha through the literary devices of pun (śleṣa) and suggestion (dhvani). Thus, what appears to be merely the fulfillment of a generic staple of the courtly poetic genre, is in fact an opportunity to explore the nature of Buddhahood and devotion to the Buddha. Overall, this paper illustrates how literary innovations in early medieval Kashmir produced strikingly new representations of the Buddha in Sanskrit poetry.  

Newar Buddhism, a unique tradition in Nepal, has remained a living tradition while Buddhism in  other parts of South Asia declined after the 15th century. This paper examines the survival of Newar  Buddhism, with a focus on the financial support and patronage it received through donation  inscriptions from the Malla era (1201–1779). The key questions explored are: Who were the  patrons of Newar Buddhism in terms of caste and occupation? How were resources allocated? And  how did Nepal’s patronage system differ from other part of South Asia? 

I argue that, alongside royal patronage, the continuous donations from ordinary lay Buddhists were  vital to the survival of Newar Buddhism. By analyzing medieval patronage patterns, this study sheds light on Newar Buddhism’s creative strategies for sustaining community support. It  contributes to the broader understanding of Buddhist economics, religious sustainability, and the  dynamic interactions between Buddhism and surrounding religious traditions in South Asia.

This paper examines how Mount Jizu in Dali, incorporated into the Ming empire’s southwestern frontier in 1371, came to be identified with the Indian mountain Kukkuṭapāda, where the Buddha’s disciple Mahākāśyapa is believed to guard Śākyamuni’s robe while awaiting the future Buddha Maitreya. I argue that local elites, Ming state, and Chinese Buddhists collectively produced a new frontier sacred site. Dali elites sought to enhance ethnic prestige by linking their homeland to the sacred geography of Indian Buddhism, while the Ming state promoted Buddhist institutions as part of its broader effort to culturally integrate the southwestern frontier. At the same time, identifying Mount Jizu with Kukkuṭapāda allowed Chinese Buddhists to address a longstanding “borderland complex” arising from Buddhism’s Indian origins by situating the residence of the first Chan patriarch Mahākāśyapa within Ming territory. The case demonstrates how frontier regions could generate new sacred geographies that reshaped the wider Buddhist world.

This paper examines a purported “borderland Buddhism” along Tibet’s Mangyul Gungtang corridor, a trans-Himalayan conduit for trade, transportation, and religious exchange between Tibet and South Asia since the seventh century. Focusing on the hermitage of Drakar Taso and its nineteenth-century abbot Chokyi Wangchuk (1775–1837), the paper develops the concept of the “frontier lama”—a religious exemplar whose authority and institutional practice are constituted through work from the margins rather than proximity to centers of power. Drawing on Chokyi Wangchuk’s extensive writings, and engaging scholarship on medieval European frontier monasticism, the paper argues that the frontier lama’s defining features—border mobility, stewardship of endangered lineages, and synthesis of doctrinal traditions—represent a coherent pattern of Tibetan religious activity in the southern borderlands. It further contends that the borderlands functioned not as passive periphery but as an active site for the formation, preservation, and transmission of religious culture.