In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This opening session will cover a broad range of issues related to the nature of ritual studies. It will primarily focus on Grimes’s contributions to ritual studies but will also move beyond them to include topics such as the development of ritual studies over the past fifty years and the ways in which the field has changed, as well as discussions of ritual criticism, the craft and creativity of ritual, and the interdisciplinary nature of ritual studies. The dialogue will conclude with a discussion of the future of ritual studies, including emerging questions, neglected areas, and new possibilities for interdisciplinary work.

Ronald L. Grimes’ typology of masking in Beginnings in Ritual Studies (1982) identifies fourphenomenological moments in the act of masking: concretion, concealment, embodiment, andexpression. This paper argues that the typology, for all its analytical power, does not account for afifth moment: one that has become structurally prominent in late-modern ritual contexts. Drawingon a decade of fieldwork at the Basel Carnival of Fasnacht (Switzerland) and on first-handaccounts of ritualists’ experiences of the Laarve (an oversized mask enclosing the entire head) wepropose enstasis as this fifth moment. Where Grimes’ embodiment moment is ecstatic and orientedtoward the dissolution of the interior-exterior boundary, enstatic masking is meditative andinward-oriented: the mask amplifies rather than dissolves the self’s distance from itself. We arguethat enstasis is phenomenologically irreducible to any of Grimes’ four moments and warrantsformal recognition in the typology.

In his essay “Performance is Currency in the Deep World’s Gift Economy: An Incantatory Riff fora Global Medicine Show” (2002) Ronald Grimes argues that too much environmentalism focuses on formulating ethical principles. Rather, as Grimes suggests, following poet Gary Snyder, “performance” is the currency we should be using to address our current environmental crises. We should be trying to figure out what actions, “rightly performed,” might save the planet. This argument was provocative to me and I began to wonder what “rightly performed” and “saving the planet” might mean in the context of ecological restoration practices, such as prescribed fire. In my current research, I draw on Grimes’ writing on ritual and the environment, using ritual as a lens through which to analyze cases where Indigenous and non-Indigenous practices around intentional fire converge on northern California’s wildfire-prone landscapes and burn scars. “Ecologically attuned rites,” to borrow Grimes’ phrase in “Ritual and the Environment” (2003), around intentional fire both express and constitute relationships with the more-than-human world. I explore the ways in which these attuned practices make, re-make, erode, transcend, and cross relational boundaries in both creative and destructive ways.

The paper presents the broad contours of major directions in the study of religious ritual, particularly cultic ritual, with reference to the role played by Ronald Grimes in the study of ritual in the 20th–21st centuries.
In order to contextualize his work, and more generally the achievements of ritology as an academic field of inquiry on a broad historical canvas, it begins by identifying three major analytical frameworks within ancient emic analytical discourses on ritual:
relational, ergic, and syntactic.
Examples of these analytical frameworks are demonstrated from intricate scholastic ritual literatures in South Asian, Mesopotamian, and Mediterranean contexts (Śābara-bhāṣya on Jaimini-mīmāṃsā-sūtra; Sifra and Babylonian Talmud; Iamblichus).
Proceeding to early modern contexts, this paper examines the role that the study of ritual played in the “New Science” of religion, and finally positions ritology within adjacent contemporary academic discourses. Finally, inspired by Grimes, it sketches out future directions in ritual studies.

Jamie Brummitt’s Protestant Relics in Early America (2025) offers a vital exploration of "supernatural memory objects," arguing early American grief and politics were rooted in holy matter. However, Brummitt’s work also highlights a pervasive tension within Religious Studies: an "autobiographical refusal." While Brummitt illuminates the vibrant emotional lives of her subjects, the academic demand for "objectivity" often flattens the scholar's own life-narrative. I argue that scholars are constrained by a form of academic secular privatization, trained to excise personal histories from the page. Beneath the critical prose lies a Durkheimian "effervescence"—dreams, affections, and indeed a life woven through communion—that electrifies the writing yet remains unacknowledged. By examining the book itself as a memory object, I contend that integrating autotheoretic reflection would strengthen the critique against secular reductionism. Acknowledging the "life" beneath the scholarship renders the study of religion more compelling and only deepens the complexity of the book's argument.

What effect does it have on us when the voices of the dead resurface? How can we engage with the traces and voices of our families in once-lost, analogue, and dead media? This presentation is an ethnographer’s reflection on the discovery of decades-old family oral histories recorded on cassette tapes. The cassette is an outdated and frail, yet durable medium for preserving voice. Through the voices of her maternal ancestors and the imperfect medium of a tape player, she explores Nuyorican family histories of forgetting and the pain and comfort found in women’s silences and their refusals to remember. 
 

This paper explores the relationship between grief, material culture, and scholarly method through reflections drawn from my forthcoming book, When God Is Silent: Love, Lament, and the Work of Staying (Cascade Books, 2026). Focusing on what may be called “memory objects of the dead”, ordinary items that become charged with meaning after loss, the paper examines the methodological challenges of writing about such objects within academic disciplines that often treat them as inert artifacts. Drawing on theology, ethics, and material culture studies, I argue that prevailing scholarly approaches can overlook the relational dimensions that give these objects their power for those who grieve. Through the example of “The Box,” a collection of personal items belonging to a deceased child, the paper reflects on how memory objects mediate presence, absence, and longing; proposing a more relational approach to studying material culture and death.

This paper examines the tensions of writing about personal experiences of death and grief within academic disciplines that privilege emotional distance over intimacy. Focusing on material artifacts belonging to my deceased loved ones—particularly my mother—I interrogate how scholarly conventions render such objects as lifeless rather than relational. Writing from intimate proximity becomes a methodological challenge to dominant modes of scholarly analysis that require emotional detachment. In do so, this paper explores what it means to take seriously the afterlives of material objects as sites of memory, presence, ongoing personal relational formation, and as counters to biological and academic disappearance.

This paper examines how memory objects associated with the dead are interpreted in Akan and Ga communities in Ghana and how these interpretations challenge the limits of academic language. In West African cosmologies, death is understood not as the end of existence but as a transition of the deceased who continue to participate in social and moral life. Objects such as blackened stools in Akan traditions and symbolic coffins in Ga funeral practices are therefore not simply relics of the past but important artifacts to remember the dead, by defining or preserving identity, and maintaining connections with ancestors. However, academic writing usually frames such objects as symbolic evidence, overlooking how communities understand them spiritually. The paper argues for a community-centered approach, allowing scholars to study these objects academically while also explaining the spiritual meanings attached to the relics by the communities that created them.

Recent work in Christian ethics, including the work of Paul Scherz, has explicitly linked questions of AI governance to the Christian doctrine of providence. While this connection is apt, there is far more to be explored in AI’s providential parallel here than just questions of governance and prudential action. Employing the tripartite structure of providence borrowed from the Reformed scholastic tradition of preservation, concurrence, and governance, I argue that the former two aspects of providence are just as crucial to understanding the uses of LLMs by consumers. A close reading of AI marketing reveals the urge to make use of AI to fulfill similar narrative-structuring aims that have been a part of Christian talk of providence since Augustine’s Confessions. A Christian virtue ethical response then, must contend not only with talk of prudence, but also courage, accounting for narrative, affective, and relational aspects of the AI age.

In dominant AI debates, "alignment" names the problem of making models conform to human values. This paper inverts the question. Drawing on ethnographic research among a community of immigrant Iranian AI scientists in Silicon Valley, I ask how human values, affects, and ethical dispositions are themselves being aligned—and misaligned—through AI work and discourse. Through two ethnographic encounters, this paper shows how the epistemic vocabulary of AI becomes a medium through which my interlocutors work on themselves, negotiating the affective remainders of authoritarian religiosity against the self-improvement imperatives of liberal ethical life. I argue that alignment discourse is not a neutral technical framework but a liberal technology of governance historically continuous with statistical population management, and that the affective unruliness my interlocutors exhibit marks precisely where its logic reaches its limits.

Many applications of artificial intelligence (AI) rely on a technocratic ideology that breeds an “obsession… to increase human power beyond anything imaginable, before which nonhuman reality is a mere resource at its disposal.” This paper argues that Western technologists exercise significant power through algorithms that reshape human desire, material opportunities, and moral character. I draw on a variety of Christian theological resources to argue that algorithmic power reshapes political life according to an ethic of control that caricatures God’s omniscience and omnipotence, in turn enabling the oppression of marginalized communities while diminishing accountability within democratic political systems for algorithmic harms. Yet Christian political theologies that (1) emphasize personal and social responsibility for harmful moral actions and (2) elevate the possibilities of local forms of political action may provide fertile ground for re-imaging algorithmic governance.

When tech companies describe their products as in “alignment with human values,” an immediate red flag should be raised. I argue that AI alignment discourse reproduces the same perfectionistic, technocratic and implicitly eugenic logic underwriting Silicon Valley’s multitudinous transhumanistic endeavors. Behind the veil of human values hides an insidious mythos treasured by a powerful technocratic minority. Encoding these particular human values will intensify existing structural inequalities and reifies the (im)morality of the technocratic elite. This paper investigates the motivations behind Silicon Valley’s definition of the human and which human futures will be prioritized as a result. In the following sections, I outline the current discourses within Silicon Valley, already prioritizing an idealized human who is in the image of the technocrat, leaving the disenfranchised even more vulnerable.

Carter Snead criticizes public bioethics for being based on a thin and therefore problematic anthropology that he calls “expressive individualism.” For Snead, expressive individualism emphasizes individual autonomy as an end-state and ignores other relevant moral concepts, for example, bodily fragility, neediness, and vulnerability. Snead’s criticism implicates an important topic for public bioethics: namely, what kind of anthropology does public bioethics require? This paper responds to Snead. 

Since it is concerned with the formation of public policy amidst cultural and religious diversity, public bioethics must remain neutral regarding the final ends that Snead believes must inform a thick and therefore adequate anthropology. This paper argues that a liberal conception of bioethics aims to reconcile respect for diversity with moral judgments about public policy. But reconciling respect for diversity with moral judgments about public policy neither entails individual autonomy as an end-state nor precludes anthropologies that incorporate Snead’s concerns into public bioethics. 

Personality disorders occupy a contested space at the intersection of psychiatric science, moral responsibility, and theology. Contemporary psychiatric models describe enduring patterns of cognition, affect, and behaviour that shape relational and social functioning. These conceptions contrast with traditional theological understandings of the human person, which assume moral agency, freedom, and the capacity for virtue. This divergence raises pressing questions: if traits are persistent and resistant to change, how can theology address culpability, sin, and moral formation?

This paper argues that theology must engage psychiatric insights to develop a nuanced account of moral responsibility, recognising the role of psychological constitution and relational context. At the same time, theology offers frameworks for moral progress and sanctification, emphasising incremental transformation, the cultivation of virtue, and the work of grace. By dialoguing with psychiatry, this paper explores how contested understandings of personality illuminate ethical responsibility, pastoral care, and social inclusion.

The future of religion and bioethics is unfortunately a return to the past. Because public health and health policy have become pivotal sites of contestation in the U.S., dominant methods of empirical reasoning and knowledge production are coming into increasingly direct tension with populist anti-intellectualism, distrust of expertise, and conservative theological moral reasoning as seen in the U.S.'s foreign policy decisions (WHO, USAID, Davos). The contemporary entrenchment of neo-conservative Christianity and the Trump administration requires bioethicists to engage conservative Christian ideology if we desire to reclaim the positive efficacy of public health and health policy as measures aimed at improving communal health outcomes. Understanding these organizing logics and their role in this administration’s public health approach helps us better craft new ethical arguments to help others rethink the negative actions against public health within and beyond our borders.