In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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

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. 

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.

This paper examines the emergence and impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) fatwa generators, also known as fatwa engines, in and on contemporary Islamic belief and practice. It contributes to the arena of digital humanities due to its use of humanistic research into digital objects and culture, and to the field of digital Islam by offering a survey and analysis of these fatwa-generating applications. It uses small-scale data mining as well as visual and textual content analysis to understand the characteristics of these fatwa generators, and draws upon relevant literature in both fields in its analysis. It argues that the disclaimers offered by each application reveal a reticence to fully blur the historical distinctions between fatwas as authoritative, actionable jurisprudence and all other religious advice, no matter how well intended or grounded in scripture.

The Mega Masjid is both a physical space and an institutional variety. It boasts key features of Sunni masajid, producing a sense of universality while iteratively reimagining the American Masjid as a location of placemaking and cultural innovation. This paper explores how the Mega Masjid responds to and adopts features of American Protestant congregationalism to produce a unique and culturally salient masjid model. Through a comparative analysis of the Mega Church, the Mega Masjid emerges as more than a product of Protestant Hegemony, but rather a space aimed at meeting the ever-evolving spiritual and material demands of an American Muslim future. It is designed and redesigned to serve as an oasis retreat for American Muslims, a break from the aggressive heat of protestant hegemony, secularist pressures, and anti-Muslim racism. A ‘one-stop-shop’ for the American Muslim Family, Mega Masjids reimagine and redefine masjid space, programming and amenities beyond traditional ritual worship.

This paper retrieves the Platonic and Neoplatonic metaphysics of participation, as developed by Augustine and Aquinas, arguing that their accounts of the fulfilment of creatures in contemplative ascent offers a constructive alternative to impasses in contemporary models of eschatology. Augustine inteprets the creature’s longing for beatitude through a participatory ontology shaped by his Plotinian inheritance, in which all beings proceed from and return to a transcendent source. Aquinas extends this trajectory, integrating Dionysian elements within his account of creation to produce a metaphysics in which creaturely being remains ultimately ordered towards its source. Together these accounts offers a profoundly Platonic vision of participatory being which resists naturalistic eschatology or the collapse of the distinction of creatures from the Creator. Their synthesis illuminates the metaphysical depths and theological fecundity of creaturely dependence, ascent, and contemplation in ways that contemporary eschatologies–shorn of these resources–struggle to do.

This paper unveils a Neoplatonic grammar of “energy” (energeia) in Richard Hooker’s (1554–1600) account of humanity’s creative “participation” in God. His articulation of a “sacramental poetics” in his Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie has drawn attention from scholars aiming to re-enchant the post-Enlightenment world. They often read Hooker as supporting a participatory metaphysics grounded in Christian panentheism. This paper argues instead that Hooker retrieves from church fathers like Dionysius and Damascene a Neoplatonic tradition that connects the Aristotelian language of energeia with human acts of divine participation. I demonstrate this through his participative use of terms like “working” in Book One of the Lawes in relation to human acts of poesis, and then in Book Five in relation to Christ’s sacramental presence. I argue that “energy” operates as a mediating category in his thought, allowing Hooker to articulate a participatory ontology that avoids both panentheism and undue metaphysical complexity.

Plato’s Timaeus makes the cosmos intelligible by positing a world soul: a mediating intelligence that binds the visible world to intelligible order and renders it a living whole. This paper takes that account as a conceptual baseline and reads the Gospel of John in its light. This paper does not argue that John depends on Plato. This paper argues that John addresses a comparable problem—how cosmic order and knowability relate to divine agency—while refusing a key Platonic solution. In the Timaeus, intelligibility is secured by an immanent cosmic soul. In John, the work of mediation and disclosure is assigned to the Logos (and, secondarily, to the Spirit) within a doctrine of creation. The comparison clarifies what the world soul contributes in the Platonic tradition and what changes when mediation is relocated from the cosmos to the divine Word.

Henry More’s Spirit of Nature, or hylarchic principle, is well-known as one of the signature doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists by means of which they navigated between materialist atheism and hylozoic pantheism. Anne Conway’s Middle Nature occupies a similar position as it mediates between God and creatures, but it operates within a seemingly quite different, less dualist and more gradualist metaphysics. The relationship between the two, and to the deeply Plotinian panentheism of More’s early poetry, is a complex one. This paper will re-examine this relationship, arguing that Conway’s gradualist metaphysics, devised in part to overcome the difficulties of More’s dualism, approximates the metaphysics of his poetry, and there is evidence that More too, late in his career, inclined hestiantly back toward his earlier positions. Conway emerges not so much as departing from More as completing her teacher’s original system more thoroughly than he himself was able to achieve.

This paper examines the figure of the Indian yogi in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century within the intertwined histories of mesmerism, hypnosis, and psychology. In Western scientific and popular media, Indian yogis and fakirs were repeatedly represented as “mesmerists” (c. 1830-1860s) and later “hypnotists” (c. 1880-1920s), masters of attention and suggestion at a time when science and technology were increasingly revealing the fragility and vulnerability of the mind and will. This paper shows how the extraordinary figure of the yogi was interpreted through the new categories of mesmerism, hypnosis, and psychology, and how the modern Western mind (and self) was understood and enacted through engagement with the yogi.  Through the yogi, Western audiences both explored and distanced themselves from the unsettling possibility that the mind is more permeable, the self more suggestible, and the will more limited than the dominant ideal of the rational, self-transparent liberal subject would admit.

There is a curious trend that appears in the teachings of several prominent twentieth-century gurus: samskaras, or mental dispositions born of accrued from the imprints of past action (karma), are increasingly articulated as residing in the energy wheels (cakras) or subtle channels (nadis) of the visionary yogic body. This is hardly out of step with modern wellness culture, which has long embraced the idea that “the body keeps the score.” But it is fairly unprecedented in pre-modern South Asian sources where such concepts generally represent two parallel, if not directly competing, models. This paper examines the key moments of innovation and synthesis in both South Asian and Euro-American sources that yielded this trend, paying especially close attention to conceptual overlap between the evolving models of Kundalini and the unconscious.

Based on ethnographic “fieldwork” conducted during a 75-hour online course on Indian, or “Vedic” astrology (also called jyotish), this paper explores how astrological thinking among yoga practitioners serves as a contemporary diagnostic language of the self, and notably a hybrid form in which jyotish is refracted through twentieth-century psychological astrology. Rather than relying on the predictive possibilities of a classically-Indic astrology, the version of jyotish taught in this course posits a Jung-inspired worldview where cosmic forces are not agents of change but archetypal energies to be adjusted, strengthened, or stirred. Here, I trace the contours of this hybridized psychological astrology–part Indian, part Jungian, and entirely compatible with the ethos of interiority and self-care that dominates the discourse of the global yoga industry.