In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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.

In Lorraine Hansberry’s posthumous speculative play What Use Are Flowers?, an elderly hermit confronts the destruction of civilization after a catastrophe and struggles to teach feral children the rudiments of a lost culture through the idea of “use.” Asked to explain the use of flowers, he answers: “the uses of flowers were infinite.” I argue that this enigmatic homage expresses a tragic-pragmatist expansion of ‘use’ from instrumental availability to inexhaustible possibility. Drawing upon Jonathan Lear’s idea of radical hope and the prophetic pragmatism of Cornel West, I suggest that Hansberry challenges accounts of ethical survival that depend on the continued legibility of stable value systems. Instead, the play proposes that beauty may protect from despair even when conceptual structures of meaning collapse. This paper will not attempt to define beauty positively, but rather considers it as the condition under which experience may still answer to something beyond pure survival.

This paper discusses the relationship between beauty and meliorism in the thought of Charles Peirce and Robert Neville, with passing discussion of Jonathan Edwards, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey. It argues that all things are beautiful or good, and that this is a realistic metaphysical claim. The metaphysics of goodness, however, does not presuppose that all things will grow together or progress (synechism). Synechism (and agapism) or meliorism present an ideal to guide our actions, but that guidance comes from an appreciation of an axiologically laden landscape, which presupposes the metaphysics of goodness. The paper presents a metaphysical realism (along with an epistemological realism), a cosmological materialism, and a moral or ethical idealism.

Pragmatist thinkers often express a hopeful outlook on the world. This paper argues that such optimism might be rooted in a cosmological aesthetic, that the universe itself possesses an underlying beauty that inspires creative and practical engagement with reality. To explore this idea, the paper examines the work of Etty Hillesum and Alejandro García-Rivera, two figures who demonstrate pragmatic sensibilities in different contexts. Hillesum, a Jewish mystic and diarist who died at Auschwitz, maintained a deep affirmation of beauty and prayerful spirituality despite immense suffering. García-Rivera, a theologian of aesthetics, argued that beauty plays a central role in shaping authentic communities, particularly among marginalized groups. Their thought is interpreted through the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, who described the universe as a “great work of art.” The paper concludes that many pragmatists are drawn to a poetic vision of reality that nurtures hope and optimism, especially during tragedy and loss.

What becomes of ecclesial belonging when the immigrant congregation that formed you can no longer hold you? Drawing on a hermeneutic phenomenological study of eight Indonesian American emerging adults raised in two Southern California evangelical congregations, this paper argues that departure from the immigrant church is not the failure of an ecclesial imaginary but its reconfiguration. The study surfaces several collective themes spanning the affirmative (resourcing, closeness, formation) and the critical (otherness, differences, schisms), revealing how participants carry the formational imprint of their ethnic faith communities into new contexts—from pan-Asian fellowships to “exvangelical” disaffiliation. Deploying a kinopolitical notion of imagined communities for non-linear faith identity development (Anderson [1983] 2016; Gin 2009; Nail 2015), the paper positions these departures as ecclesial flows rather than mere congregational losses—to reimagine belonging as circulation rather than enclosure—and hears in them echoes of Deus Migrator (Phan 2016), the God who travels with the (ecclesial) migrant.

“Ecumenical shared ministries” (ESMs) result from two or more congregations merging resources and worshipping together while retaining distinct denominational affiliations (Beardsall et al. 2018). In 2025, I conducted a qualitative study of two ESMs in neighbouring rural communities. Adapting Sarah Dunlop’s method of “narrated photography,” I collected photos of each ESM’s worship space (Dunlop 2024). I then conducted semi-structured interviews to explore how congregants engage in receptive ecumenism to discover “what each tradition might…fruitfully have to learn from the other” (Murray 2008).

My qualitative data suggests that the messy work of receptive ecumenism happens for ESMs through real-time encounters between differently ritualized bodies in a shared worship space. One ESM models receptive ecumenism by bringing differently ritualized bodies into the same space for a shared liturgy. The other ESM rarely engages in receptive ecumenism because differently ritualized bodies take turns using the same space instead of worshipping together in it.

This paper explores the emergence of AI-generated Christian influencer characters circulating on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. In a viral TikTok video with over 30 million views, an AI-generated Moses recounts the Exodus narrative in the style of a POV influencer vlog. Accounts such as holyvlogsz, followed by 450,000 users, portray biblical figures—Daniel narrating the lion’s den or Mary announcing her pregnancy—as social media personalities addressing contemporary audiences. Through content analysis of these viral videos, the paper interprets the phenomenon through the lens of mediatization theory, which examines how media logics increasingly structure religious communication. The paper also analyzes the racialized aesthetics of AI-generated biblical figures, showing how visual conventions derived from Western Christian imagery and global platform culture shape representations of sacred characters and influence emerging forms of digitally mediated religious authority. The paper investigates the merging of histories and futures in the AI Christian influencer.