In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Recent U.S. political and advocacy discourse, including statements by Donald Trump, has labeled violence in Nigeria a “Christian genocide.” This paper argues that the genocide frame does more than misdescribe events. It reorganizes them. Drawing on eight months of research in Southwestern Nigeria, I show how residents interpret killings and kidnappings through overlapping logics of banditry, land disputes, electoral rivalry, and state neglect rather than sectarian extermination. Violence is lived as chronic insecurity, not religious annihilation. Yet transnational advocacy networks and international media compress this complexity into a single story of persecution, hardening Christian Muslim boundaries that are often fluid in practice and redirecting moral claims and resources. The analysis combines Nigerian media analysis, discourse analysis of U.S. reports and advocacy materials, and event level conflict data from ACLED, and treats naming as a social process with measurable effects, challenging genocide narratives as analytic defaults in the sociology of religion.

In Latin America, growing religious diversity has prompted calls to reform secular governance and rethink the status of minorities. Yet narratives celebrating pluralism rarely interrogate the category of “religion” itself. In Mexico, a predominantly Catholic country, this produces a paradox: while evangelical Christians are framed as vulnerable minorities, other non-Christian groups remain invisible, especially those outside the world religions framework. This paper examines how religious discrimination as a discursive regime is operationalized in Mexico’s 2022 National Survey on Discrimination (ENADIS). Drawing on a recoding of the survey’s religious identity variable and a multidimensional measure of discrimination, we compare patterns of exclusion across religious and non-religious groups. Contrary to prevailing diagnoses, Evangelical-Protestants don’t show higher discrimination than the national average, while secular individuals and subaltern spiritualities report significantly higher levels. These findings challenge prevailing understandings of religious diversity and call for renewed scrutiny of how religion is manufactured, measured, and governed.

How do organizational actors evaluate different types of clergy misconduct? The way organizational leadership misconduct is perceived has consequences for how that misconduct will be addressed, tolerated, or in extreme cases, even perpetuated. Through a preregistered survey experiment with a nationally representative sample (n=1,124), I compare how religious and non-religious individuals evaluate different forms of clergy malfeasance. While non-religious respondents view clergy sexual misconduct as categorically more serious than clergy embezzlement, religious respondents show no significant difference in their evaluations of these violations' severity. Further, religiously active people display greater confidence in their congregation's ability to "do the right thing" following misconduct. Simultaneously, religiously active people are less likely to recommend that people cease donating to or attending the congregation even when allegations of their clergy's misconduct are confirmed. 

This project explores the question, “How do government and social restrictions on religion impact human flourishing around the globe?” We merge data from the Pew Global Restrictions on Religion dataset with the data from the recent Global Flourishing Study out of Harvard-Baylor to examine the effects of religious restriction on human flourishing; further, we are interested in exploring predictors of flourishing under different levels of religious restriction, with particular attention paid to religious and irreligious minorities in the context of religious restriction.

The dramatic decline of Catholic affiliation in Latin America has often been interpreted as evidence of secularization. Drawing on the 2026 Pew Research Center report, this paper challenges that conclusion by arguing that the region is not becoming less religious but more religiously plural. While Catholic identification has fallen sharply across six major countries, belief in God, prayer, and supernatural worldviews remain remarkably robust—even among the religiously unaffiliated. 

Rather than signaling disenchantment, these patterns suggest the collapse of Catholic monopoly and the rise of post-institutional spiritual repertoires. Integrating secularization theory, religious economy models, and lived religion frameworks, the paper contends that Latin America exemplifies a distinct form of religious modernity characterized by institutional disaffection and spiritual diversification. By reframing Catholic decline as pluralization, the study positions Latin America as a critical site for rethinking global theories of religion and modernity.

The paper analyzes the role of the Catholic Church as an intermediator between popular discontent and state power in Cuba from two perspectives. First, it analyzes how Catholic institutions in Cuba have exercised resistance to punitive state power directed at the people. Second, the paper examines the role of Catholic charities in the humanitarian crises that have unfolded in Cuba and discusses religiously motivated charity as an extended form of outreach into civil society by the Catholic Church. Overall, the paper argues that Catholic institutions have increasingly acquired moral authority and occupied a distinct role of intermediation between the people, their discontent, and punitive, authoritarian state power. They have done so by employing various forms of strategic engagement, highlighting the polyvocality and hybridity of Catholic socio-ethical presence under diverse political and social conditions. 

What does it mean to heal in exile? This paper examines ritual healing among displaced Cuban communities in Miami, where Santería and Catholicism coexist not as competing doctrines but as interwoven threads of a single moral ecology. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and Latine theological ethics, I argue that ritual healing is not merely therapeutic or sacramental; it is a liberative process through which the traumatized reclaim agency over body, memory, and future. Situating the paper at the intersection of liberation theology, Afro-Cuban religious studies, and trauma theory, I draw on Gutiérrez, Isasi-Díaz, and De La Torre alongside Beliso-De Jesús’s treatment of ritual as epistemology and Lederach’s moral imagination to trace four ways Santería ritual enacts healing for the displaced: relational restoration, the holding of paradox, divine encounter, and the breaking of intergenerational trauma. Among displaced Cubans, the future is not an abstract horizon; it is ritually practiced in the present.

During Operation Metro Surge (December 2025–February 2026), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions targeting and terrorizing Latinx and Somali immigrants and refugees produced widespread fear, anxiety, and instability across Minnesota. Reports of racial profiling, surveillance, aggressive tactics, and economic hardship created an environment where many residents felt unsafe participating in daily public life.

In this context, Minnesota’s long-standing interfaith relationships—built through years of dialogue, trust-building, and shared civic engagement—served as vital social infrastructure. Faith leaders from diverse traditions mobilized to provide pastoral care, public witness, and coordinated moral leadership, helping communities facing fear and uncertainty respond collectively rather than in isolation.

This proposal examines how interfaith networks function as civic infrastructure during crises, focusing on the Minnesota Multifaith Network and collaborating organizations during Operation Metro Surge. It argues sustained interfaith relationships strengthen resilience, support leadership, and transform strain into solidarity.

Instances of religious discrimination are not always clear, ranging from overt acts to subtle microaggressions. While research distinguishes these types, we know little about how the physical context shapes these experiences. Drawing on 44 in-depth interviews with victims of religious discrimination, drawn from a national U.S. survey sample, we examine how narratives of religious discrimination vary across regulated spaces (with formal rules and boundaries, such as workplaces/airports) and unregulated spaces (such as parks and sidewalks). We find that victims felt more uncertain about whether an incident constituted discrimination in regulated spaces. Conversely, they expressed greater certainty and fear regarding incidents in unregulated spaces. These findings shift the focus from the individual to the context of discrimination, highlighting the power of place in shaping how discriminatory interactions are experienced. This expands the field beyond workplace studies on discrimination, comparing how the nature of the physical place itself shapes the victim’s experience.

Interreligious and interfaith studies have emerged over the past several decades as a dynamic multidisciplinary field responding to changing global religious realities. Increasing religious pluralism, the growth of religious nones, intensifying political polarization, and the destabilizing rise of social media and AI have created new challenges for religious communities and scholars who seek to understand and cultivate constructive engagement across difference. Within this context, the future of interreligious and interfaith studies will depend not only on theoretical reflection but also on careful attention to local practices in which religious communities learn to live together amid diversity. This paper argues that local interfaith initiatives can serve as laboratories for the future of applied interreligious studies. Drawing on qualitative research with members of the Alachua County Faith Leaders Alliance (ACFLA) in Florida, this study explores how interreligious collaboration contributes to grassroots peacebuilding and offers emerging models for the field.

This paper presents a case study showing an emerging trajectory for the future of interreligious encounter: an Interfaithless Beach Party (IBP) held regularly between 2014 and 2022, which was a striking example of the growing number of initiatives in the United States in which exes from different high-demand religious groups navigate the difficult process of religious exit together. Using data from surveys and interviews conducted with IBP attendees, I argue that associating so-called interfaithlessness with interfaith becomes legible by thinking of interfaithlessness not as peripheral to but rather as a transposition of interfaith. Through this lens, the IBP allowed for interfaith encounter at its best, fostering not just proximity between exes from different religions, but meaningful interreligious exchange that complicates assumptions about America’s growing nonreligious population. The analysis suggests that the current age of religious exit may bring about not less but more opportunity for meaningful connection across (ex)religious difference.

This paper examines children’s literature about Jewish women in the labor movement in order to analyze what story about the Jewish past this particular body of work tells, and what kind of Jewish future it wishes to shape. I argue that this children’s literature overwhelmingly erases the politics of the Jewish labor movement, particularly ignoring socialism, communism, and often even unionization, while amplifying the graphic violence of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The resulting stories become moral tales of doing the right thing in line with capitalist American values, rather than ones of Jewish left radicalism which has the potential to inform a future of principled labor activism and working-class solidarity. Ultimately, this paper questions what happens to the past, the present, and the future of American Judaism and of the American labor movement when the radicalism is erased but the violence remains. 

This paper examines what might be described as the slow cancellation of the cooperative movement’s promised future. Drawing on examples from multiple contexts, cooperative institutions increasingly diverge from the emancipatory visions that once animated cooperative thought. In Indonesia, the cooperative model championed by Mohammad Hatta has gradually been absorbed into state apparatuses serving neoliberal development agendas. In Europe, some co-ops survive but adopt managerial practices that dilute their role as schools of democracy. Even thriving co-ops face persistent internal conflicts, splintered visions, and member dissatisfaction. Rather than treating these developments as failures of an inherently harmonious cooperative ideal, this paper reinterprets them through Foucault alongside the post-Marxist framework of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. It argues for radical negativity as a working ontology, viewing adversarial conflicts within and with the state as constitutive of democratic economic institutions. Using an agonistic model of politics, the paper reconceives cooperative economies as sites of ongoing political struggle and resubjectification.

The renovation of San Salvador’s Historic Downtown (Centro Histórico) is a central collective dream of postwar Salvadoran society. At its heart is the hyper-modern National Library (BINAES), functioning as a secular cathedral for President Nayib Bukele’s future-oriented, religious-infused politics. Drawing on Laurence Davis, I analyze this urban spectacle as “transcendent utopianism,” a top-down vision demanding an ideological faith in capitalist progress that ultimately drives speculative dispossession. In contrast, I examine an alternative renovation process led by the Salvadoran Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperativism (FECOSVAM). Rooted in the labor movement, these cooperatives provide dignified housing to working-class families formerly in precarious tenements (mesones). Following David Bell, I conceptualize FECOSVAM’s cooperative labor as “utopia-as-place”: an immanent space continuously reproduced through shared governance, solidarity, and convivencia. Theorizing this praxis as utopianism renders visible a contesting horizon of social dreaming, challenging the state’s elite, linear model of development.

On July 3rd, 2025, Donald Trump announced that a UFC Event would be held on the South Lawn of the White House as part of celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the USA. The announcement came after multiple key appearances of Donald Trump at UFC Events and the inclusion of key UFC personnel in major Republican moments, such as Dana White’s appearance and speaking on election night 2024. Using current research into the enactment of ritualized violence within sport from within religion and sport studies, this paper will explore the UFC as a site of sportswashing. However, by focusing on the growing participation of women in sport categorised ‘violent’, and specifically women UFC fighters, it will show how women fighters use evangelical-nationalistic sportswashing to buffer against the ongoing project or normalising gender and sexuality that places their identity under threat at the hands of both the state.

Donald Trump and his administration are intimately tied to the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA), with the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) “Freedom 250” event on the White House Lawn being the most obvious illustration. With Trump’s presence in the sport, his Christian nationalist supporters have sought to capitalize on this relationship and integrate MMA into their larger socio-religious projects. While previous scholarship has noted how Muscular Christianity appears within MMA, this paper explicitly argues that MMA has become a vital part of the larger Christian nationalist project’s masculine domination, populist rhetoric, and violence. To understand this dynamic, this paper makes the case for seeing the Christian nationalist embrace of MMA within an adaptive methodology on both the national and local levels. To conclude, this paper highlights how MMA requires greater attention thanks to its place within the larger extremist ecosystem.

Scholars of white Christian nationalism most frequently train their analytical lens on elections, voter blocs, culture war stances, and the words and actions of famous conservative religious leaders. Yet in doing so they miss how the values, aesthetics, and practices of white Christian nationalism become embodied. As a corrective, we draw on our fieldwork in CrossFit and with combatives (i.e. Mixed Martial Arts fighters) as a way to bring bodies back into conversations about processes of political formation. Beyond commonplace theoretical metaphors of a “body politic,” our analysis more aptly addresses what we call a “political physiology” of the body and the role that fitness and physical cultural practices play in forging right wing political identities and imaginaries. We argue that beyond the pews and pulpits, white Christian nationalism is formed and circulated through seemingly mundane spaces like the gym.

The leitmotif of the exiled legitimate cleric was more than rhetoric in the Egyptian non-Chalcedonian polemics of the fifth-through-eighth centuries.  This paper analyzes exile and expulsion of non-Chalcedonian leaders as a trope in hagiographies, as well as a galvanizing factor in connecting various Egyptian localities through epistolary correspondence with non-Chalcedonian leaders in exile.  The analysis accounts for expulsions appearing in Christian non-Chalcedonian hagiographical texts (such as Makarius of Tkow, Daniel of Scetis, and Samuel of Kalamoun); and in the letters of Pope Timothy II Aelurus (d.477), written in exile to the faithful in Egypt. The paper discusses the ironies of exilic displacement, showing how: 1) it was subverted, transformed into a credential of authentic authority, and 2) it served to make non-Chalcedonian orthodoxy unexpectedly mobile.  This paper draws significantly on the unpublished files of David W. Johnson, S.J. (†2011), who serves posthumously as a co-author.

In American Coptic Orthodox parishes, the Synaxarium is often treated as inherited devotional reading, yet it is increasingly becoming a frontline site where the church’s future is negotiated with younger generations. This paper argues that the Synaxarium functions as a technology of ecclesial formation: it scripts models of holiness, suffering, gender, vocation, and communal belonging, and thereby shapes how youth imagine what “Coptic” Christianity can be in the United States. I examine how second- and third-generation Copts receive, contest, or re-narrate Synaxarium figures amid American moral sensibilities, digital media habits, and inter-Christian proximity. Particular attention is given to pedagogical settings (Sunday school, youth meetings, retreats, and online clips) where hagiography is condensed, moralized, or contextualized. I show how these interpretive moves implicitly revise ecclesiology—redefining authority, identity, and continuity—by determining which saints remain credible, and why.

Mkhitar Gosh, one of the most influential figures in the history of the Armenian Church, was born around 1140 in the city of Gandzak (present-day Ganja in Azerbaijan) and was educated at some of the most prominent monasteries in the northern region, eventually attaining the rank of vardapet (given to scholar monks, roughly equivalent to an archimandrite). After receiving this rank, which designated him as scholar and gave him the right to teach, he traveled to the Cilicia region. At the time, the two regions were starkly divided intellectually, theologically, and culturally. This paper argues that this very literal mobility and Gosh’s monastic trajectory influences the characteristics of Gosh’s intellectual and theological approach. It suggests that Gosh’s mobile trajectory between these two regions can serve as an example for a recurring theme and problem in the Armenian experience: the disjoint between Armenian life in the traditional homeland and in diaspora.

This paper examines the historical and hagiographical materials pertaining to Wei Huacun (252-334), the purported first matriarch of the Shangqing current of medieval Daoism. The question that it attempts to answer is how Lady Wei came to occupy a place of such prestige within the tradition. It will argue that this was due in no small part to her familial situation. She was a daughter of a powerful minister, a widow, and a mother of two successful officials. All these facts significantly strengthened her position within the community of practitioners where the Shangqing revelations arose. However, it was Wei’s role as a mother in particular that likely played an outsized role in her recognition in the male-dominated early Shangqing milieu. The paper will conclude by discussing how the traditional understanding of motherhood in China provided a source for female empowerment in Daoism more generally.

The Scripture of Original Deeds is a fifth century Lingbao Daoist text that consists of a series of narratives of the prior lives of the gods of this world, which are heavily indebted to Buddhist jataka tales. In several of these Daoist tales the prior life of the god is that of woman, who wish to shed their female form and transform into male, as indeed occurs at the climactic moment of their apotheosis and appointment to divine rank. While we may see this as a wholesale adoption of Buddhist misogyny and a demotion of the status of women in the Daoist communal tradition, archeological and epigraphic sources from the sixth to the eighth century reveal a more complex response among Daoist women, who saw these tales as inspirational to their own aspirations and practices.        

Hagiographic accounts extoling Daoist female adepts circulated in China from the early medieval period, becoming more systemized in the Tang and Song periods. These hagiographies frequently highlighted their subjects’ religious devotion by underscoring their unattachment to commonplace feminine worldly affairs such as wifehood and motherhood. In contrast to the such depictions, Sun Bu’er (1119–1182), the only woman among the early founders of School of Complete Perfection (Quanzhen), is portrayed as a reluctant and doubting adept. Her hagiography in Orthodox of the Lineage of the Golden Lotus (Jinlian zhengzong ji) underscores her initial distrust of Master Wang Chongyang, the Quanzhen foremost patriarch. It also links her hesitance about becoming an adept to her familial attachments. Maintaining that Sun Bu’er’s hagiography deviated from antecedent depictions of female adepts, this paper suggests that her representation as ultimately devoted, albeit initially reluctant practitioner, offered a more accessible model for Daoist female practitioners.   

This paper examines the historical and hagiographical materials pertaining to Wei Huacun (252-334), the purported first matriarch of the Shangqing current of medieval Daoism. The question that it attempts to answer is how Lady Wei came to occupy a place of such prestige within the tradition. It will argue that this was due in no small part to her familial situation. She was a daughter of a powerful minister, a widow, and a mother of two successful officials. All these facts significantly strengthened her position within the community of practitioners where the Shangqing revelations arose. However, it was Wei’s role as a mother in particular that likely played an outsized role in her recognition in the male-dominated early Shangqing milieu. The paper will conclude by discussing how the traditional understanding of motherhood in China provided a source for female empowerment in Daoism more generally.

The Scripture of Original Deeds is a fifth century Lingbao Daoist text that consists of a series of narratives of the prior lives of the gods of this world, which are heavily indebted to Buddhist jataka tales. In several of these Daoist tales the prior life of the god is that of woman, who wish to shed their female form and transform into male, as indeed occurs at the climactic moment of their apotheosis and appointment to divine rank. While we may see this as a wholesale adoption of Buddhist misogyny and a demotion of the status of women in the Daoist communal tradition, archeological and epigraphic sources from the sixth to the eighth century reveal a more complex response among Daoist women, who saw these tales as inspirational to their own aspirations and practices.        

Hagiographic accounts extoling Daoist female adepts circulated in China from the early medieval period, becoming more systemized in the Tang and Song periods. These hagiographies frequently highlighted their subjects’ religious devotion by underscoring their unattachment to commonplace feminine worldly affairs such as wifehood and motherhood. In contrast to the such depictions, Sun Bu’er (1119–1182), the only woman among the early founders of School of Complete Perfection (Quanzhen), is portrayed as a reluctant and doubting adept. Her hagiography in Orthodox of the Lineage of the Golden Lotus (Jinlian zhengzong ji) underscores her initial distrust of Master Wang Chongyang, the Quanzhen foremost patriarch. It also links her hesitance about becoming an adept to her familial attachments. Maintaining that Sun Bu’er’s hagiography deviated from antecedent depictions of female adepts, this paper suggests that her representation as ultimately devoted, albeit initially reluctant practitioner, offered a more accessible model for Daoist female practitioners.   

This paper focuses on the emergent aesthetic and political formation of the “caste-Hindu Museum” in the current moment of authoritarian capitalism in India. I examine two sites which have imagined themselves as museums: a) the Gobardhan Museum in the largest cow-shelter in Delhi, run by Hindutva activists and b) the museum of the Akhil Bharatiya Agarwal Sammelan (a nationwide association of baniyas) within a temple compound in the “holy” site of Agroha in Haryana. The Gobardhan Museum contains cow-dung artefacts made by a young “entrepreneur and cow-dung artist” while the Agarwal Museum memorializes “notable baniya men” in Indian history and politics. Through an ethnographic inquiry and visual analysis, I explore what Kajri Jain calls the “sensible infrastructure” of a “Hindu India” and  the meanings and motivations behind the museumization of the “sacred cow” and baniya caste pride, and the stakes of naming and creating them as museums.

This paper examines astrology as a form of lived religion within a transnational spiritual organization called the World Teacher Trust, a movement rooted in the esoteric teachings of the early twentieth-century yogi Master C.V.V. and institutionalized by Ekkirala Krishnamacharya in the 1970s. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in India and in online study networks, including participant observation in astrology classes, English mantra recitation, and study groups, the paper explores how practitioners translate planetary principles into ethical discipline and everyday practice. Within this community, astrology functions not simply as a predictive technique but also as a primary cosmological framework through which individuals interpret karma, cultivate self-regulation, and orient their actions within a wider cosmic order. While planetary cycles sometimes become linked to narratives of cultural or national destiny, the movement’s emphasis on celestial relationality and flux also produces a cosmology that complicates fixed notions of identity and belonging.

For over a century, elite and middle-class audiences in the United States and elsewhere have engaged with Hindu traditions, but today new frontiers of Hindu religiosity are increasingly negotiated through digital platforms, podcasts, and motivational media. This paper examines the work of prominent wellness figures including Jay Shetty, Shubh Vilas, and Gaur Gopal—public personalities whose teachings draw on their connections to the Vaiṣṇava tradition of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). While they invoke secular wellness idioms, their teachings subtly extend one form of modern institutional Hinduism into new global publics. The paper analyzes how they navigate tensions between representing a specific devotional lineage and cultivating a marketable brand of corporatized spirituality. In doing so, their public personas reconfigure power relations that have long structured the figure of the “Oriental monk,” mobilizing global wellness discourses and persistent tropes of “virtual Orientalism” to position Hindu traditions as sources of universal wisdom and spiritual expertise.