In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book
The 2026 November Annual Meeting in Denver, CO: Friday, November 20 - Tuesday, November 24. All times are listed in Mountain Time Zone. For more information about the November Annual Meeting, co-hosted with the Society of Biblical Literature, click here.
Please note that this is the preliminary schedule and is subject to change. We anticipate a mostly final schedule in mid-August. If you have any questions, please contact annualmeeting@aarweb.org. For Other Events, your event is not confirmed until you received notification from AAR staff.
Join us for a discussion of Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s new book Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States (University of Chicago Press, 2025). This timely work argues that borders are religious as well as political objects and that Americans share a “bipartisan border religion,” which includes reverence for national security, a liturgy for immigration, and an eschatological foreign policy. In this panel, scholars in religious studies, sociology, and anthropology will discuss the work and its implications, with a response from Prof. Hurd.
Pragmatists and Empiricists often present what seems like an optimistic philosophical and/or theological worldview. They tend to believe the world can be improved through human effort, even if such progress is piecemeal and imperfect. However, such melioristic optimism is challenged in our time as we face rising authoritarianism, war, mass death, and the threat of environmental collapse among other tragedies. In a time when many people feel locked in a repeating cycle of hopelessness, this panel investigates resources for continued hope while maintaining realism about difficult circumstances. Beauty is the common thread that unites the papers in this session as they develop accounts of meliorism as a ethical ideal, a poetic vision of reality, and the capacity to imagine new possibilities in a fragile world.
Papers
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 will it mean to belong in the future church—and who gets to decide?
This session explores how emerging forms of ecclesial life are reshaping the meanings and practices of belonging. Drawing on empirical and ethnographic research, these papers examine how belonging is being reshaped across migration, digital mediation, and ecumenical practice, inviting us to rethink belonging as fluid, contested, and newly configured for the future church. This conversation will open new possibilities and raise urgent questions about identity, authority, and community.
Papers
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.
This book panel explores Matthew Thomas Miller's new book, Feeling Like Lovers: Affect in Medieval Sufism. The session will feature two panelists who will reflect on the book, followed by a response from the author and further discussion.
Over the past decade, the concept of ‘sanctuary’ has emerged as the single most important political and cultural term in debates about American immigration. This panel convenes scholars of religion, civil rights, and immigration for a review and discussion of Sanctuary in America (Oxford University Press, 2026). Moreover, recent disputes over the legality, boundaries, and meaning of sanctuary places of targeted immigration enforcement in cities like Charlotte, Chicago, and Minneapolis serve as clear markers that over the past decade, the concept of ‘sanctuary’ has emerged as a paramount political and cultural term in debates about immigration.
Over the past decade, the concept of ‘sanctuary’ has emerged as the single most important political and cultural term in debates about American immigration. This panel convenes scholars of religion, civil rights, and immigration for a review and discussion of Sanctuary in America (Oxford University Press, 2026). Moreover, recent disputes over the legality, boundaries, and meaning of sanctuary places of targeted immigration enforcement in cities like Charlotte, Chicago, and Minneapolis serve as clear markers that over the past decade, the concept of ‘sanctuary’ has emerged as a paramount political and cultural term in debates about immigration.
This roundtable brings together leading scholars who are helping to shape the next phase of conversation around Sino-Reformed theology. The panel centers three interrelated areas:
the distance—sometimes productive, sometimes disruptive—between the Dutch and European traditions of Neo-Calvinism and the ways those traditions are received among Chinese-speaking Christians;
the translational, curricular, and institutional channels through which Reformed sources move; and
ecclesiology and theological education as arenas in which communities imagine, contest, and materialize future possibilities.
Framed by the AAR theme “FUTURE/S,” this panel treats Reformed futures not as a single trajectory but as multiple, sometimes competing, visions shaped by location, memory, language, and lived ecclesial practice across mainland China, Taiwan, and the diaspora.
In recent decades, decolonial theory and practice have become increasingly incorporated within academic institutions as an effort to recognize the immense degree to which the academy is both constructed through colonialism and perpetuates colonial domination. This awareness is now accompanied by an increasing emphasis on the ethically urgent task of decolonizing the academy. As is always the case, however, a common strategy of power structures for preserving themselves is to co-opt the language of liberatory movements for its own purposes. This session considers whether and how the language of “decolonizing the academy” is vulnerable to such cooptation, what the ramifications are (especially for those who are already significantly disenfranchised within academia), and how the work of decolonization can continue effectively amidst this kind of obfuscation. The slate of presentations includes both conceptual critique and analysis of present decolonial practices suited for future cultivation.
Papers
In recent years, the language of “decolonizing the academy” has moved rapidly from the margins of activist scholarship into the institutional center of many anglophone universities. While this shift signals an important recognition of the colonial foundations of modern knowledge, it also raises a critical question: what happens when the language of decolonization becomes institutionalized within the very structures it seeks to dismantle? Engaging Latin American decolonial thought—particularly the work of Nicolás Panotto—this paper argues that contemporary academic uses of “decolonization” risk reproducing a second-order coloniality in which decolonial discourse itself becomes institutionalized. Bringing Panotto into conversation with dissenting Baptist and Anabaptist epistemologies rooted in forms of border thinking, the paper suggests that radical ecclesial traditions reveal both the possibilities and limits of escaping coloniality. Decolonization does not begin on a blank slate but amid the shards of inherited colonial histories, requiring rhizomatic and communal forms of theological knowledge beyond the academy.
Drawing upon Andreotti et al.’s work mapping interpretations of decolonization in higher education and de Sousa Santos’ concept of abyssal thinking, I offer an autoethnographic account of my experiences as a female-identifying, queer Latina teaching religiously diverse white students in a progressive, historically and currently eurodominant, mainline Protestant theological school. From this account, I argue that progressive theological institutions rhetorically perform decolonization by asserting that they exist within/execute from a radical-reform or even beyond-reform space. In turn, students mirror these rhetorical performances of decolonization within and beyond the classroom in ways that perpetuate interpersonal and institutional colonial dynamics and processes through a reliance on abyssal thinking. Ultimately, I conclude that colonial epistemologies are too tethered within the arena of theological education to truly decolonize, especially when those who say that the institution, individual, or community is decolonizing still operate from fixations on the abyssal line.
A new course, "The Lives of Holy Objects: Himalayan Buddhist Images as Art and Presence", first invites students to compare objects from museum and art historical perspectives, with field trips to a museum installation, with the living Buddhist community temple's sacred space, and then to launch a cataloguing project and docent training program, producing educational and spiritual materials for the general public and in service to the practitioner community, holding and honoring multiple histories and ways of knowing, sometimes in tension, but enlivening relationships to these beings/objects.
By exploring Afrofuturist album Dirty Computer and the Cantonese worship conference Raw Harmony Worship Live, the panel explores musical meaning-making through reorientation of religious analytical frameworks. In the case of Dirty Computer, womanist theology is centered in the exploration of science fiction, whereas in the Raw Harmony Worship Live experience, psychoanalysis displaces theology to understand worship music as the breeding ground of God-centered fantasy. This session will conclude with the business meeting for the Music and Religion Unit.
Papers
In 2018, Janelle Monáe released the album and film “Dirty Computer” to critical acclaim. The work features themes of gender, sexuality, sex, racism, conformity, totalitarianism, technology, and brutality in an Afrofuturist setting. This paper analyzes both the album and the film through a womanist theological lens, drawing on the works of womanist and black feminist scholars and theologians. By interpreting the soteriological implications and religious imagery of “Dirty Computer,” this paper demonstrates how the work provides a vision of salvation relevant to the experiences and imaginations of queer black women. Continuing the tradition of Afrofuturism as a tool for communicating theology, Monáe promises her audience a model of thriving achievable through relationship and self-actualization, even in the most apocalyptic of circumstances, through her story of queer androids and a memory-erasing police state.
This article develops an interpretive method for reading worship music as the material infrastructure of ideological fantasy rather than a neutral vehicle for theological meaning. Through a parallax analysis of the Cantonese worship conference Raw Harmony Worship Live (Hong Kong, 2026), this study demonstrates how a radically consistent "Wall of Sound" generates non-overlapping economies of enjoyment depending on the orchestration of the subject's fantasy space. The parallax gap thus disclosed reveals the libidinal infrastructure of contemporary therapeutic religion, where the same technical hardware functions alternately as ecstatic fullness and a contemplative void. Both assemblages perform a similar structural operation by translating socio-economic trauma into manageable interiority, a process that forecloses political questions by converting structural conditions into therapeutic occasions. The article concludes by asking whether worship music might traverse rather than merely service the fantasy, offering a methodology that repositioned musical arrangements as ideology's hardware rather than its decorative surface.
