In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper examines Crusader imagery on social media to show how creators are deploying the Crusader knight in new ways. By drawing on a shared image of traditional masculinity, the Crusader knight draws affinities between users from a variety of religious and national backgrounds. After a brief look at the history of the internet cultures that inform it, the second half of this paper analyzes widely viewed knight edits on TikTok, taking into account the captions, tags, and comments to get a better sense of how the Crusades have been memeified, communicating affect and vibe more than alignment with a particular religious historical narrative. Ultimately, I show that Crusader content is shaped just as much by internet culture as by the religio-political groups that deploy it. 

What is an ideal man? I explore this question through early Muslim depictions of the beard. Discourses on the appearance, treatment, quality or absence of beards reveal much about the underlying concerns surrounding the masculine roles and identities that were required to enact proper belief, righteous behavior, social status and communal care. Part 1 examines the beard as metonymy for male genitalia, and bearded men as essential begetters of life, patres familias, conductors of ritual, sources of wisdom, or warriors. Part 2 examines cases where facial hair or its absence troubled established associations between beards and men, which clouded patriarchal roles, gendered binaries, and ritual fulfillment. The conclusion suggests how fracturing traditional masculinities enabled men to express fragility, pain or grief, and proffered the revelatory message of care and inclusion to bodies on the margins, including the impotent, castrated or effeminate. 

Can a man be a mystic and a good father? The orthodox obligation to marry and have children meant Muslim men often had to navigate the equally weighty demands of fatherhood and mystical life. Hagiographies of medieval Sufi men have a curious tension: they often praise men who abandoned and ignored their children in pursuit of mystical insight, but also show vast Sufi family networks and discuss in-home Sufi education. While it seems that wayward fathers were idealized, the lived reality indicates that many “ordinary” Sufi men were likely quite active in attending to their children’s spiritual, emotional, and financial needs. Drawing on Sufi manuals, hagiographies, ethical, and legal texts, I begin to trace the major questions of the relationship between mystical fatherhood, saintly narrative, and how an “ordinary” father’s mystical achievement can be recovered and elevated for scholarly consideration.

The year 1526 was an important one for Luther’s liturgical reforms, with the publication of both the Deutsche Messe (German Mass) and the newly revised Taufbüchlein (Baptismal Booklet). Both these texts deal with ritual practices that incarnate and externalize Luther’s neighbourly theology (the move from freedom to service, which are the ethical implications of Luther’s Christology) by (1) prioritizing contextualization that prevents imposing uniformity, (2) making practices accessible to people across the spectrum of faith development, and (3) seeking unity and familiarity when they are done in love. This paper investigates how Luther’s liturgical reforms are concrete examples of Luther’s neighbourly theology and can continue to impact the proclamation of the gospel today. Embodying Luther’s neighbourly theology may mean expanding liturgical practices beyond inherited practices, keeping Luther's concerns in mind, so that freedom, unity, and love are held together in practice – “to the glory of God and the neighbor’s good.”

In his 1530 writing “On Translation: An Open Letter,” Martin Luther offers a theologically and morally rich account of translating the Gospel. Faithful translation concerns the accurate rendering of words into new languages, but it includes more. For Luther, faithful translation is also grounded in a theological commitment to Jesus as the Word made flesh and in a moral commitment in which the translator seeks life together with those to whom she translates. Taken together, these commitments result in Gospel speaking that is faithful, understandable, and lively.  This form of translation is evident in Luther’s sermons and biblical commentaries. It is also evident in the 20th century preaching of Helmut Thielicke and the contemporary liturgical poetry of Meta Herrick Carlson. 

This paper examines contemporary debates about the use of vernacular languages for worship in Adivasi (indigenous) Lutheran churches in North India, attending to the material implications of linguistic diversity for ecclesial unity and evangelism. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the material investments required to support vernacular language use in multilingual contexts strengthen churches and create unity through a shared imagination of reproducible vitality.

This paper reconsiders nineteenth‑century American scripturalization by shifting analytical attention from social relations and interpretive practices to scriptures as textual objects that work to support their own authority. While scholars have rightly emphasized scripturalization as a relational, metadiscursive process, this emphasis risks underestimating the work scriptural texts do for themselves at the level of form, content, and presentation. I argue these texts share a conceited self‑reference, explicitly instructing readers how they should be read, studied, cited, or prayed over. These moments of self‑reference allow texts to perform authority they do not yet possess and to obscure their own contingency. I further suggest that nineteenth‑century scriptural creativity was shaped not only by the Bible and post‑Revolutionary social disruption, but also by the American founding documents. Attending to scriptures as objects clarifies both why nineteenth‑century America proved so fertile a site for new scriptures and how textual characteristics contribute to scriptural authority.

This paper discusses three largely forgotten alternative gospels presented by nineteenth-century American Spiritualists. While Spiritualists often reinterpreted the Bible in unorthodox ways and supplemented it with or subordinated it to spirit communications, these new gospels were intended to supplant the canonical accounts, rationalizing them and making them conform to democratic ideals. All three accounts naturalize Jesus's miracles and fiercely attack priestcraft, authorizing Spiritualist understandings of true religion. These alternative gospels reveal tensions at the heart of Spiritualism and reflect anxieties about biblical historicity, scientific materialism, charismatic authority, and ongoing revelation. Dependent on the canonical gospels even as they sought to displace them, these gospels expose the paradox of an anti-authoritarian religious movement operating within a deeply biblicist culture. Through these neglected works, the paper illuminates the tensions that shaped Spiritualist engagements with scripture and, more broadly, the contested place of the Bible in nineteenth-century American religious life.

The Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) people, along with many other Native American nations, faced a genocidal removal in the early nineteenth century from their homelands in Illinois. Among the most important Kiikaapoi leaders of this period was Kenekuk, widely known as the Kickapoo Prophet, who long resisted removal but ultimately moved west to help his people rebuild their lives on a new reservation in Kansas. As a part of his ministry, Kenekuk carved wooden prayer sticks using Algonquian pictographic symbols to guide the prayers of his community. Kenekuk’s followers told outsiders that these prayer sticks were their Bible. Kenekuk himself taught that, although the “White Man’s Bible” was a holy book, his people had no need of it because God had given them their own instructions on how to live. His story offers new insights into scriptural practices in nineteenth-century North America, helping us see alternative forms of scripturalization and the imperial contexts in which they emerged.

bA Scandalous Ethics: Foucault’s Cynics, Sojourner Truth, and Parrhesia in the Flesh 

Not Light, but Fire: Frederick Douglass, St. Perpetua, and Reorientation

In the account of the martyrdom of Perpetua, a series of scenes maintains a steady insistence on manifesting the truth as a central claim and posture of the text – both for Perpetua before Rome and the text before its reader. This paper examines the mechanics and stakes of this posture of truth-telling through the analytic of Michel Foucault, to argue that the martyr account not only helps to illuminate questions Foucault asks of early Christian practices of truth telling, but that the text is also a site through which to configure the relationship between the early part of Foucault’s genealogical work on power, late work on ethics, and the role of Christianity in his critical project. This paper also raises the role of Perpetua’s pain, and the relationship between body, rhetoric, and text, to pose additional critical questions for religious studies and the contemporary afterlives of martyrdom. 

Abstract 

Why did slaveholding persist among members of the Religious Society of Friends long after biblical arguments against slavery were already circulating within the community? This paper argues that the delay cannot be explained by moral blindness alone. From the early eighteenth century onward, Quaker critics developed increasingly sophisticated scriptural critiques of slavery, drawing on texts such as Acts 17:26, Matthew 7:12, Isaiah chapter 58, and the commercial imagery Chapter 18 of Book of Revelation. Yet these arguments met a specific institutional obstacle: from 1718 onward, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's Overseers of the Press reviewed manuscripts for anything likely to raise contention, and by the 1740s at least five of the committee's seven members were themselves enslavers. This paper traces the friction between expanding scriptural critique and editorial suppression, arguing that what delayed Quaker abolitionism was less the weakness of the arguments than the organizational power arrayed against their circulation.

This paper analyzes the transition from seventeenth-century Puritan theocracy to the modern architecture of religious liberty through the lens of early Quaker persecution. It examines the experiences of Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson to argue that the violence towards the Quakers was a foundational disruption of sacrificial logic. It shows how the failure of Puritan scapegoating catalyzed a move toward a theological friendship and religious freedom.  By tracing the development from William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” to the twentieth-century contributions of the American, John Courtney Murray to Vatican II teaching on religious freedom, this paper demonstrates how the Quaker experience and theology anticipated modern religious toleration and the institutionalization of the right to exist.

Proposal

Abstract

In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, seven decades of crude oil extraction have produced severe environmental toxicity, yet residents continue to reshape their realities through meaning-making processes that generate diverse, entangled relationships with oil. Tracing these relationships to the integration of crude oil into indigenous environmental worldviews, this paper highlights the centrality of oil in everyday spirituality, arguing that beyond its status as a capitalist commodity, crude oil deeply informs extractive and healing ritual practices.

Keywords: Oily Lifeworlds, Everyday Spirituality, Extractivism, Niger Delta. 

This paper interrogates the dominance of techno-utopian imaginaries in contemporary ecological discourse. While climate transitions are often framed as technical problems solvable through renewable expansion and innovation, such visions frequently leave intact the colonial logics that produced extractivism. Drawing on Ronnie D. Lipschutz and Laurence Davis, I argue that eco-utopian futures can reproduce injustice when progress is equated with technological mastery and endless growth. The work of Imre Szeman, Mary-Jane Rubenstein in Astrotopia, and Terra Schwerin Rowe in Of Modern Extraction exposes the extractive imaginaries that underwrite such futurisms.

In response, I draw on Davis’s concept of grounded utopia and the decolonial intervention of the relational philosophy of Buen Vivir to argue that futures beyond extractivism must emerge from situated struggles, embodied practices, and decolonial cosmologies. Religion, I contend, is a crucial site for both sustaining and transforming ecological imaginaries.

What kind of subject can inhabit a post-extractivist world? Degrowth scholarship critiques growth not merely as economic policy but as a structuring ontology, yet it rarely articulates the alternative subjectivity its vision requires. This paper argues that Haitian Vodou's multi-soul philosophy and modular personhood (Strongman 2008, 2019; Daniels 2021) offers a practicable, politically actionable model of non-sovereign selfhood that directly challenges the liberal-productivist subject underwriting extractive regimes. Taking Clayton Crockett's "renewable materialism" (2022) as a point of departure, I show that ontological reframings of energy remain inadequate without confronting growth as an organizing metaphysics (Kallis 2018; Martinez-Alier et al. 2010). Vodou's ritually enacted counter-ontology, forged inside plantation extraction and the Haitian Revolution, provides what abstract philosophical frameworks cannot: a living tradition of collective, non-possessive personhood already practicing what degrowth theorizes. These are the "emergent lifeworlds" (Berlant 2020) materializing beyond extractivism.

For this panel I will draw on my recent book, Spirits of Empire: How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion, to offer cautionary tales about the hazards of “religion” as a frame for building heterotopian futures. I argue that the category of religion (and, by implication, the discipline of religious studies) has historically served to (re)inscribe a series of binaries and distinctions characteristic of colonial modernity—religion/politics, religion/science, religion/superstition, etc.—that continue to enable economies of extraction. As a provocation to the field, I want to further suggest that both the category of religion and its most determined critics have operated within the logics of what I call settler secularism to ridicule, condemn, or render illegible Indigenous and other non-extractive ways of doing and being in the world. 

Jewish thought has long been animated by two symbolic poles: the book and the sword, representing the ethical traditions that sustain Jewish life on one hand and military power on the other. This paper examines the tensions between these two poles in the contemporary moment, when Jewish identity is often conflated with Zionism and Israeli state violence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper analyzes three contemporary expressions of Jewish nonviolence: (1) Israeli conscientious objectors; (2) “safety through solidarity” initiatives in American Jewish communities seeking alternatives to armed security; and (3) Jewish activists engaged in protective presence and co-resistance in the West Bank. Framed through the dual legacy of the Warsaw Ghetto represented by the Ghetto uprising and the Oneg Shabbos archives, the paper argues that Jewish nonviolence is both a necessary strategy and an urgent ethical response to the political crises of our time rooted in Jewish traditions.

In May 2025, the Korea-Israel Bible Institute, one of the oldest Christian Zionist groups in South Korea, inaugurated the Holocaust Museum in Paju, a border city next to North Korea. The city is marked by Korea’s collective trauma from Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, and the division of North and South Korea. This paper investigates the theo-political objectives of South Korea's Holocaust Museum—the first such museum opened in Asia outside Israel: to commemorate Jewish suffering as exemplified by the Nazi genocide of six million Jews; to combat antisemitism globally; and to honor the Jewish sacrifices made for South Koreans during the Korean War. This analysis shows how the Holocaust Museum of Korea serves to localize Christian Zionism and disseminate its theo-political visions for the future, reflecting a complex interplay of religious and political narratives with historical remembrance.

Taking its cue from Edward Said’s essay, “Permission to Narrate,” this paper seeks to understand how the power of narrative, and the power to narrate, have impacted Palestinians in Gaza. It situates the violence in Gaza within an international security paradigm, demonstrating how the construction of the “terrorist” as an enemy-Other enables discursive and narrative strategies that reinforce binaries and serve as moral cover for political violence. Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac’s 2023 sermon “Christ in the Rubble” and the critical responses it elicited provide a valuable case study for deconstructing the innocent versus guilty binary by examining Jesus the (innocent) Christ child and Jesus the (guilty) insurrectionist. Read alongside the work of James H. Cone and Richard A. Horsley, I argue that decolonial and liberation theologies offer resources to deconstruct and resist these authoritarian doctrines of international security.

This paper highlights the intersection between Israeli forces’ sexual torture of Palestinian men and queer politics of sexuality. While violence against Palestinian women is frequently reported in the Gaza Genocide, a hallmark of this genocide is an inversion of the womanist framework of sexual shame: rights agencies have cited that Palestinian men were overwhelmingly subjected to sexual abuse through “specific persecutory acts” by Israeli forces, including forced undressing, battery on genitals, sexualized religious slurs, and rape during detention. The use of sexuality as torture modality by empire, aimed at emasculation through flouting of religious values and personal conscience of Muslim victims has precedence in Iraq, Syria, and former Yugoslavia. Feminist and de-colonial readings of wartime sexual torture against Muslim men speak of it as a physical culmination of Orientalist sex tropes of peacetime: Muslim men as homophobic, and thus immune to imperial tenets of emancipatory sexuality. This paper highlights the fluctuating moral emphasis of queer politics by Israeli forces – the dangerous and repressive deployment of queer acts against Palestinian men – and the overall problematization of the savage-civilized binary as thrown into relief by such a discourse. 

In the last decade, there has been renewed interest within political theology in a theory called integralism. On an integralist account, the coercive power of the state should be put at the service of the spiritual power of the church to promote a right relationship with God. What I will argue is that to the degree that integralists also identify themselves as classical theists, a contradiction emerges in how they wish to facilitate union with God. In particular, when we understand what classical theism takes to be the divine nature, we will see that the coercive methods proposed by integralism prevent humans from standing in right relation with the deity. My argument will proceed first by giving a general account of integralism, then by giving a classical theist account of the divine nature, and finally by looking at the implications of classical theism for integralism. 

As “counter-cultural” Catholicism grows in the United States, public universities are increasingly positioned as “battlegrounds for the minds and souls of young people,” and Catholic campus ministries increasingly reflect trends of theological orthodoxy and “conservative” political alignment. In this paper, I analyze data from Catholic teacher candidates in public universities in the US Midwest (n≈50) to examine: How do Catholic teacher candidates in US Midwest public universities describe their teacher education programs and their Catholic identities in relation to movements of “counter-cultural” Catholicism? I discuss how some participants oppose their public teacher education programs, describing them as “one-sided,” “biased,” and “liberal.” Others, however, align with the justice-oriented curricula in their teacher education programs and disaffiliate or “diminish the label of being Catholic” because of the perception of Catholicism as “conservative.” Through this analysis, I reflect on the implications of rising “counter-cultural” Catholicism on public university campuses for the Catholic Church.

The far-right movement known as Catholic integralism has received repeated media attention in the United States, owing in part to its connection to Vice President J.D. Vance. This paper diagnoses integralism as a politics of despair, seeking to assert for lack of persuasive power on the part of conservative Catholics, with policy planks that would need to be imposed rather than proposed. Key among them is pro-natalism which connects the largely male integralist intelligentsia to more women-oriented conservative movements such as the pro-life movement.

The testing ground for integralist politics has been (Protestant) Viktor Orban's Hungary, and despite its sponsorship of many integralist thinkers its lack of success on many stated goals demonstrates the limits of any such movement. It is difficult for reactionary authoritarian nostalgia to inspire in a world with many options. The paper will conclude by looking to the Augustinian tradition - which precisely emphasizes the limitation and eschatological nature of politics - as a potential corrective to integralism's Thomistic literalism.