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.
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:
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Join us for a relaxed happy hour where you can meet our editors to chat about a book project before your dinner plans!
What if intelligence comes from within, comes from before - the formal structures of educational systems? These papers address the possibilities of decolonial, multicultural, and multireligious forms of pedagogy and praxis within and outside the academy/classroom.
This paper proposes Dal pedagogy as an intersectional pedagogical framework rooted in the historical experiences of Dalit communities in India. The Sanskrit word dal means "broken," "split," or "crushed," reflecting the structural marginalization of Dalits within the caste system. Emerging outside the academy, Dal pedaogy draws upon the wisdom of Dalit ancestors whose conversion to Christianity is a site of imagination, protest, and resistance against caste-based dehumanization. Yet, contemporary political developments, including Hindu nationalist movements and campaigns such as Ghar Wapsi, complicate Dalit Christian identity by reinforcing Dalit Christians to negotiate their caste and religious identities. Engaging intersectionality and Dalit feminist scholarship, this paper examines how Dal pedagogy continues to generate imagination, protest, and resistance in contemporary India.
A multicultural theological classroom is increasingly part of the visible future of theological education, especially in the U.S. context. Drawing on personal experience, this presentation proposes a pedagogy centered on decentering, decolonial awareness, inclusivity, and critical reflection. Using preaching courses as a case study, it illustrates how such practices cultivate students’ attentiveness to foster equitable, belonging-oriented communities and shape future ministers’ theological imagination. These classroom practices may extend beyond the academy, influencing students’ work in congregations, academic institutions, and broader social contexts.
This paper presents teaching using the circle-keeping process as not only a restorative and critical pedagogical approach, but a returning to Indigenous and ancestral wisdom that promotes alternative decolonial futures inside the theological academy. The first section briefly traces the history circle-keeping in public schools and the steps for holding circles recommended by restorative justice practitioners like Kay Pranis. The next section highlights the similarities between various Indigenous principles that inform circle practice and proposes that embracing those values reframes the goal of theological education from individual to mutual flourishing. The next section posits this reframing as a process of deconstruction and reconstruction for decolonial futuring in theological education as proposed by interreligious theological educator Christine Hong. The paper concludes with an application of the circle-keeping process to a hybrid-synchronous ministry class about the socio-political implications of the sacraments.
In times when the future of the humanities within the academy feels increasingly uncertain, this paper proposes the concept of “feminist chains of transmission” as a framework for understanding how women scholars sustain intellectual traditions and illuminate scholarly futures. Drawing on traditions of scholarly lineage within Judaism and Shiʿi Islam—particularly the concepts of shoshelet and isnād—this paper examines how knowledge is transmitted through relational networks of mentorship, care, and intellectual responsibility. While religious studies has often emphasized texts, institutions, and canonical authorities, this study argues that mentorship itself functions as a central site of intellectual transmission. Through feminist and decolonial perspectives, the paper highlights how women scholars, especially those working within minority religious traditions, cultivate networks of mentorship that sustain emerging generations of scholars. In doing so, these mentors act as beacons of light within the academy, illuminating pathways through which future scholars carry forward traditions of knowledge while imagining more inclusive scholarly futures.
This session examines three features of comparing religions: religious maps, religious futurity, and prophetic speech. The first paper develops religious ideology displayed in geographic lists as the first “maps,” which shaped cosmological depictions of the divine in the development of maps.
The second paper addresses apocalypticism as a grammar across cultural and chronological boundaries as a strategy for conceptualizing sacred time, enabling religious communities to recalibrate deferred endings within the span of their history.
The third paper illuminates the textual legacies beyond political crises by demonstrating that wisdom literature and prophetic speech are cross-cultural tools for communities seeking to construct just, alternative futures in the face of corrupt temporal power.
Before the advent of cartography, maps in the form of topographic lists were utilized by the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations to convey a religiously based understanding of the world. Texts, such as Akkadian and Egyptian campaign texts, elucidate land taken by a king on behalf of their deity, and thereby understood as created and owned by said deity. Other texts, such as those in the Hebrew Bible and Greek genealogical texts, display mythic elements interwoven into an understanding of the land as divinely given, and, in some cases, then requiring it to be reclaimed from other deities. This paper will summarize the religious ideology displayed in geographic lists before the advent of cartography as the first “maps,” and then analyze how their theology was maintained and shaped in the development of their maps as cosmological depictions of the divine realm.
This paper argues that apocalypticism is best understood not as a historically confined literary genre but as a recurring cross-traditional strategy for organizing religious futurity. Through a comparative analysis of Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, and contemporary East Asian redemptive movements, it identifies what I term “apocalyptic grammar”: a patterned set of operations that compress time, intensify moral polarity, consolidate remnant identity, and recalibrate expectation under conditions of delay. Rather than assuming genealogical transmission, the study focuses on structural correspondences that emerge when communities confront crisis and deferred hope. Close textual attention demonstrates how anticipated endings are reinterpreted without abandoning expectation. By foregrounding conceptual tools and methodological transparency, the paper contributes to Comparative Studies in Religion by showing how disciplined structural comparison can illuminate recurring strategies for inhabiting uncertainty. Apocalyptic grammar thus emerges as a durable architecture of religious futures rather than a relic of ancient sectarianism.
This paper blurs the lines demarcating the categories of Hebrew prophet and Chinese sage. By analyzing the political situations of Confucius and Jeremiah during the Axial Age, this paper will demonstrate that both were forced to confront corruption among rulers in political climates where they were often personally in danger. Both used wisdom traditions unique to their own traditions but similar in sapiential tactics to hold kings accountable to a higher divine order and construct a vision of a renewed society. It will note seven points of intersection, among them: a sense of internal compulsion from Heaven/God, a reliance on an idealized kingship from the past to judge the present, and the transmission of this subversive, future-oriented hope through a band of disciples. Confucius uses China’s golden age as a model to repristinate the present to create an ideal future. Jeremiah’s vision points forward to a new eschatological day.
This papers session will offer four presenters discussing a diverse range of research projects on drugs and religion. From yoga and coffee to the war on drugs, Sufi consumption of cannabis to entheogenic substances and Zoroastrianism, the questions raised about these intersections bring new perspectives to the sacred and drugged life. In addition to topics and diverse religious cultures, the panel also includes explorations of different time periods.
This paper will explore how coffee culture and yoga intersect in anglophone postural yoga with reference to the lineage of the formative guru T. Krishnamacharya (1888-1989) and his disciples B.K.S. Iyengar (1918-2014) and K. Pattabhi Jois (1915-2009). Iyengar’s Light on Yoga (1966) famously recommends drinking coffee—even on an empty stomach—before practicing yoga postures (āsana), and Jois is famously quoted as having said “no coffee, no prāṇa (life energy).” These attitudes are reflective of the shifting social and cultural ethos that modern yoga was situated within and of deeper Indian philosophical conceptions regarding the use of herbs (oṣadhi) as an exogenous adjunct to the endogenous self-discipline of yoga. This duality is evident in the late 20th century embrace of postural yoga by coffee-friendly upwardly mobile North Americans and in the framing of coffee as an invigorating āyurveda-like herb (oṣadhi) providing a remedy to physical dispositions antagonistic to yoga practice.
From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, poets, physicians, historians, and jurists writing in Arabic devoted literary efforts to the new psychoactive drug, cannabis. In these texts, the Sufis, orders of Islamic mystics, are closely associated with weed, both in its origin story and in its spread westward. Their enthusiasm for eating cannabis – it wasn’t yet typically smoked – was contagious, and out from Khorasan it becomes a well-known mind-altering edible.
In this paper, part of a larger project on weed texts in Arabic, I will draw on texts in both prose and verse, for the most part never translated before, to offer a survey of Sufis and weed in these texts. I will investigate questions such as the role of Sufis in the discovery of weed as a psychoactive drug, the characterization of weed as a Sufi drug, and weed’s effect on dhikr (remembrance of God).
This paper examines the convergence of two late-twentieth-century moral panics, the War on Drugs and the Satanic Panic, arguing that they functioned as a symbiotic project to police American consciousness. While the 1980s "Just Say No" campaign is often viewed as a secular public health initiative, this paper demonstrates how the Religious Right weaponized anti-drug rhetoric to validate theological fears of demonic infiltration. Drawing on the history of occult drug use (from Aleister Crowley to the psychedelic era), I analyze how the "drug-fueled occultist" became the central villain of 1980s folklore, exemplified by the Ricky Kasso case and D. Corydon Hammond’s conspiracy theories. I argue that for the Reagan-era Religious Right, the War on Drugs was a form of spiritual warfare: a crusade to sanctify sobriety and criminalize altered states as inherently demonic, reframing the drug war as a contest over the legitimacy of religious experience.
This paper examines the role of entheogenic substances in Zoroastrian ritual, literature, and visionary theology. While the tradition is often framed primarily in ethical and doctrinal terms, textual and ritual evidence reveal a history of altered states associated with sacred plants and narcotic preparations. Focusing on the ritual use of haoma, references to intoxicants such as bang, and visionary narratives like the Arda Wirāz Nāmag, the paper explores how these substances functioned as ritual technologies enabling spiritual perception and otherworldly travel. These practices are analyzed alongside broader traditions of visionary intermediaries in Zoroastrian literature and interpreted through ritual theory and the anthropology of religious experience. By situating entheogenic practice within Zoroastrian cosmology and esoteric discourse, the paper argues that such experiences are understood in Zoroastrianism as legitimate means of accessing divine knowledge and perceiving the spiritual realities underlying the material world.
