In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

In December 2021, Alex Hinton published “70 Years Ago Black Activists Accused the U.S. of Genocide. They Should Have Been Taken Seriously.” Instead, "We Charge Genocide” was not taken seriously, as “The New York Times and Washington Post mentioned the petition in brief stories buried in the back pages. The Chicago Tribune condemned it for ‘shameful lies.’ Raphael Lemkin… publicly disagreed with the whole basis of the petition, saying it confused genocide with discrimination.” The basis of Lemkin's dismissal of "We Charge Genocide" also helped shape the establishment of the UN Genocide Convention. The Global South tried to introduce more progressive and expansive legislation to the Genocide Convention. including forced displacement, Apartheid, and cultural genocide.  This paper explores “We Charge Genocide,” the establishment of the UN Genocide Convention, and their contemporary ramifications, including our understandings of structural racism in the United States, ongoing structural genocides, and the erosion of international law.

Western perceptions of Buddhism are often shaped by the Dalai Lama’s version of peace and compassion, a view that warrants critical scrutiny. Such perceptions obscure the political realities of Theravāda Buddhist societies in Southeast Asia. Using Myanmar as a case study, this paper examines how Buddhism has become deeply entangled with civil war and violent nationalist projects targeting ethnic and religious minorities. It shows how the state, sangha, military, and monks collaborated to promote a centralized Buddhist nationalist movement that marginalizes minority rights while civilian resistance has remained largely decentralized. It identifies three distinct forms of resistance: decentralized, interreligious, and diasporic. It examines Buddhism’s paradoxical role: legitimizing exclusionary nationalist politics while also inspiring interreligious solidarity between moral Buddhists and prophetic Christians seeking a democratic future grounded in justice, peace, and respect for human rights. Diasporic mobilization sustains both hidden and public forms of decentralized and interreligious resistance to the regime. 

Typically, questioning religious community’s right to fully practice their religious freedoms is preceded by (and resulted in) widespread disinformation and stereotyping: religious community may be widely known yet misunderstood, which calls for empirical clarification. Maintaining a constructive dialogue between religious communities and officials, and the legislative, is more challenging if the religious context is not properly understood in a secular society. 

This paper gives a summary why emphasis in strengthening religious literacy is needed in order to secure religious freedoms. The paper analyses recent court cases involving Jehovah's Witnesses in Norway and Belgium. The goal of these case studies is to show what specific religious concepts are seen as problematic and what approach the courts have taken in their judgments. 

The rise of Hindu nationalism within the Indian political system has reshaped relations between the state and religious minorities, affecting even the Christian-majority state of Nagaland. Although constitutionally part of the Indian republic, political life in Nagaland remains deeply structured by Indigenous village councils whose decisions often guide communal and electoral participation. As a result, voting frequently follows collective resolutions rather than individual choice, challenging liberal democratic assumptions about autonomy, conscience, and rights-based citizenship.

Drawing on the social conflict approach of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, this paper analyzes how religious authority, customary governance, and party politics intersect to shape democratic representation. These overlapping structures influence who speaks and who participates, sometimes limiting individual political voice—especially for women and younger citizens. The study argues that the issue is not a simple conflict between tradition and democracy, but a deeper struggle over authority and accountability, calling for ethical renewal through inclusive and transparent public engagement.

This paper ethnographically examines dialogues of European Christian representatives in the context of a 2025 ecumenical meeting in Paris that was focused on building dialogue across religious and cultural difference. While the values of dialogue across difference might appear antithetical to Christian nationalist values, this paper analyzes how Christian leaders – despite expressing concern over the rise of religious nationalism – can still participate in its historical logics. In their evocation of world war memory, the speakers cast Christianity as central to an exceptional Europe. Ultimately, the paper suggests that secular governance – both in its institutional mode of interfacing with Christian representatives and as a rhetorical alternative to religious nationalism – does not preclude these affinities. The paper therefore concludes with a consideration of how appeals to “Christian heritage” would need to account for its history of exclusions. 

When U.S.–Israeli strikes hit Iran’s Shahran oil refinery, toxic black clouds covered Tehran and turned daylight into an apocalyptic dusk. Media commentators described the scene using biblical imagery of a cosmic catastrophe. But who—or what—is the agent of this apocalypse? This paper offers a materialist rereading of Iranian political history by treating petroleum but as an active historical agent. Drawing on Reza Negarestani’s fictional demonology of oil in Cyclonopedia and Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, it argues that petroleum has functioned as Iran’s most persistent adversary. From the Abadan oil strikes of the 1940s to the 1953 coup and contemporary geopolitical conflicts, oil has repeatedly structured political violence, economic dependency, and environmental devastation. Apocalypse is thus reframed not simply as a theological image or geopolitical narrative, but as a material condition produced by petroleum itself—a form of petropolitical destiny in which the nation’s adversary lies embedded beneath its own soil.

This paper examines how digital prophetic media interpret political events as sacred conflict and shape religious visions of the nation’s political future. It analyzes Give Him 15, a daily prayer platform led by Dutch Sheets that blends devotional practice, political commentary, and online mobilization. Drawing on a computational analysis of 2,992 posts published between 2016 and 2025, totaling roughly 2.8 million words, the study tracks recurring frames such as spiritual warfare, mobilization, national identity, and persecution. Results show that the platform stabilizes follower participation by narrating both victories and setbacks within a larger framework of divine struggle. Conflict oriented framing intensifies during elections and other high salience political moments, while grievance and mobilization language correlate with higher audience engagement. The findings show how digital charismatic leadership converts political uncertainty into a durable system of religious interpretation and mobilization within contemporary Christian nationalist movements.

This paper articulates an Augustinian account of hopeful expectation or future thinking that acknowledges its limits and is shaped by exemplarity to imagine and hope otherwise. 

First, I argue that since our imaginations of the future are conditioned by and indexed to our memory, Augustine’s use of consuetudo (i.e., "custom"/"habit") provides resources for thinking through the historical contingencies and burdened pasts that shape our present and future expectations. Then, I note how our hopeful expectations of the future are inextricably perspectival and limited given the distorting effects of temporality. I argue that this means we need resources and perspectives other than just our own to coherently imagine hopeful futures, particularly in pluralistic democracies. Finally, I suggest how Augustine’s sermons on the martyrs provides resources for reflection on how exemplarity cultivates imaginative excellences towards expecting and hoping for a liberatory future that exceeds what we alone remember and think possible.

MarthaNussbaum describes emotions as arising from our “neediness and lack of self-sufficiency.” They are eudaimonistic, occurring only in imperfect individuals pursuing the perfective good. Nussbaum observes this same understanding in Augustine’s account of affectivity.  In City of God, Augustine speaks of emotions – especially negative ones like grief and fear – as those which “belong to this life, not to the life we hope for in the future,” while simultaneously defending their moral significance, for responding rightly to good and evil. In this paper, I affirm Nussbaum’s understanding of Augustine’s treatment of earthly emotions, labeling them restless affectivity; then, I inquire about the possibility of emotion in the eschaton. Repeatedly, Augustine refers to love and joy as constitutive of eternal felicity. In contrast to the restless affectivity emerging from postlapsarian incompleteness, then, I propose another category of affectivity in Augustine’s account, that of restive affectivity, proceeding from fullness and completeness in grace. 

In this paper I argue that progressivist and realist Augustinians mischaracterize Augustine’s theology of hope in ways that diminish its significance for contemporary Christian ethics and politics. Progressivist Augustinians attribute Christian hope’s realization to God’s empowerment of creation’s historical advance, compromising its credibility when environmental and technological developments provoke profound pessimism. Realist Augustinians avoid this vulnerability by ascribing Christian hope’s realization to God’s supra-historical consummation of creation, yet they construe this hope primarily as consolation for inevitable moral failure and so strip the Christian life of its teleology. By contrast, I contend that Augustine presents hope as structured by two anticipations: God’s unilateral consummation of creation and humanity’s participation in that consummation. Moreover, since such participation is constituted by love, this second anticipation orders hope to love. Augustine’s account therefore sustains hope amid historical pessimism with the realists while summoning people to do what good they can with the progressivists.

This paper offers a case study in the history of Jewish assimilation through the lens of female Jewish experience. The apparent “success” of Jewish women’s conversions to Christianity in the nineteenth century obscures a more complex picture of Jewish women’s self-expression and religiosity. I argue that while a potent combination of antisemitism and misogyny led to increased conversions, Jewish women's participation in Christian spaces was a meaningful form of religious activity. 

Focusing on the writings of Rahel Varnhagen, the paper situates female conversion within broader debates about gender and Jewish assimilation. In the early nineteenth century, conversion was often considered more socially acceptable for Jewish women than for men. I argue that Varnhagen’s correspondences and eventual baptism engage Christian symbolic frameworks while remaining connected to Jewish identity, revealing conversion as a layered, dynamic process rather than a singular act of assimilation.

This paper examines Jain responses to Christian missionary critiques in late nineteenth-century India through the writings of the Jain monk Vijayānanda Sūri. Focusing on his Hindi text Īsāīmata Samīkṣā, written as a defence of Jainism against the Gujarati missionary tract Jainamatanī Parīkṣā, I explore how theological debate became a space for negotiating questions of religious identity, authority, and colonial power. In particular, the paper analyses Ātmārāmajī’s critiques of Christian theology, especially his engagement with the problem of evil and the attributes of the Christian God. I argue that these arguments, beyond defending doctrine, helped articulate a new Jain self-understanding within an emerging pan-Indian intellectual and political context. By situating Vijayānanda Sūri’s critiques of the problem of evil in the Christian context, the paper shows how theological criticism of Christianity became intertwined with broader anti-colonial concerns and contributed to the formation of a more self-conscious Jain identity in colonial India.

On 28 June 1825, in the Prussian town of Heiligenstadt, a young law student – a Jew – opened his mouth and took an oath. He recited the relevant creed, was brought to some water, and was pronounced baptised. Harry became Heinrich – Heinrich Heine. Little has been made of the legal dimensions of Heine’s conversion.  To acquire this, through a ritual Heine would create a new self, one which exited Jewish law and entered into German Recht ("Right" or "Law"). In this paper, I contend that what brought Heine into this act of conversion was his way of thinking about law: specifically, its liturgical and philosophical dimensions. I wish to propose that Heine saw the Bürgerrecht (bourgeois-Right or "law") that he gained access to in converting as comprised of both a spiritual Recht and a literary Recht.