In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This presentation examines the Ghana episode of the docuseries The Art of Theology, which traces how Ghanaian Christianity reclaimed indigenous aesthetics through Adinkra symbols, Kente cloth, and Symbolic Theology. The episode itself raises methodological questions for the digital humanities. To visualize historical moments where no archival footage exists, AI-generated imagery is incorporated , prompting consideration of whether AI has a legitimate place in scholarly storytelling or risks distorting ancestral memory. Additionally, the series lives on YouTube, a platform that challenges conventional academic distribution by making theological inquiry publicly accessible. The presentation argues that AI, deployed transparently, can function as digital iconography, a tool for imagining what written archives cannot hold, and that digital platforms expand rather than diminish scholarly reach. Together, these dimensions model new forms of public humanities practice and invite critical conversation about authority, memory, and the future of religious knowledge in an algorithmically mediated age.

As AI-generated material has continued to increase in quality, speed of production, and integration into daily life, much of the conversation around this material in church has focused on the potential problems of AI as replacement for religious leaders. Though this may be a future concern, the integration of artificial intelligence into church spaces is already underway. During this past Christmas season, a Catholic Church in Durham, North Carolina displayed an AI-generated image of the Nativity scene. In this paper I combine material studies and ethnographic research to understand the significance of such a display for both the generator of the image and the community who encountered it.

I use the example of The AI Bible on Instagram to model an approach that analyzes both religion and AI as disciplinary technologies. First, I survey scholarly approaches to and popular discourses on AI-image generators and biblical texts, highlighting debates over accuracy, evaluations of quality, and an emphasis on autonomy and personalization. I then provide an overview of The AI Bible account on Instagram, analyzing the human/machine collaboration in content creation and the affordances of the AI models and algorithm-driven platforms. Finally, I explore concepts of content collapse and platform governance in order to highlight the ways in which hyperconnectivity disciplines us. The AI Bible shows how the myth industry is shaped by the logics of platform capitalism—templated creativity, attention economies, and circulation governed by opaque, proprietary algorithms.

This study compares how viewers emotionally and analytically engage with biblical art of human origin versus art generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Using a single-blind focus group protocol and crossover design, we presented participants with human and AI-generated biblical scenes, subsequently subjecting the transcripts to sentiment and qualitative analysis. We found that AI art often achieves immediate and stronger emotional spikes due to its dehistoricized and optimized aesthetics. However, this impact is limited; while AI-generated imagery privileges affective immediacy, it frequently results in an interpretive plateau where viewers struggle to synthesize symbols into coherent narratives. Conversely, human-authored art, though initially less accessible, reveals increasing depth over time. We argue that while AI simulates the affect of the sacred, it lacks the generative capacity for sustained narrative and symbolic intentionality. This suggests that AI religious art flattens the sacred into atmosphere, swapping historical and symbolic depth for immediate, convenient affect.

The communicative culture created by generative AI has produced several problematic digital byproducts, identified as "AI slop"—low-quality, data- and image-based content—and “brainrot”—nonsensical or chaotic AI-generated content. Concerns have been raised about how these mutated images and video clips present false narratives and representations of reality that influence human perceptions of truth. However, what if this created content represented more than just digital noise or problematic deep fakes? What if the fragmented images created by AI GPTs’ literalist interpretations of user prompts pointed to new ways of understanding human-machine relationships and meaning-making?  This presentation reframes current concerns about AI slop and brainrot beyond alarmist “moral panic.” It suggests that these transgressive AI media forms represent a “Theater of the Absurd” that mirrors contemporary existential uncertainty about our emerging technoculture. The paper explores how AI platforms and image-based content contribute to a new aesthetics of belief through the case studies of “Shrimp Jesus,” “Exploding Exorcism,” and Italian brainrot characters such as Tung Tung Sahur, I examine how AI slop and brainrot offer unexpected sites for the exploration of new religious imaginaries about the spirituality of emerging AI culture.

This paper argues that Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane trouble dominant narratives of Black religion, music, sexuality, and Afro‑futurism by centering a Black, womanist‑inflected spiritual imagination that exceeds church and nation. Positioned at the intersection of Afro‑futurism and spiritual jazz, it shows how their sonic and "fashion‑forward" experiments recast Black sacred sound as a laboratory for Black futures in the mid‑ to late‑twentieth century. Drawing on historical and interdisciplinary archival methods—including recordings, liner notes, film, interviews, Arkestra ephemera, and materials from Coltrane’s ashram—alongside Black religious thought, womanist theology, and Afrofuturism studies, the paper traces how experimental music, Black religious curiosity, and transnational spiritual currents reshape U.S. Black religious formations from the 1950s to the 1980s. Interpreting Sun Ra’s cosmology and Alice Coltrane’s devotional jazz and sanctified harmonies, it proposes a multimedia presentation that demonstrates sound, image, and performance as a theological method and highlights Black women’s spiritual labor and queer‑adjacent aesthetics.

This paper explores the religious biography and musical career of acclaimed R&B singer and sex symbol Teddy Pendergrass as a means for articulating how the entanglement of black musical and religious performances gives shape to a mutual pursuit of feeling, affect, intimacy, and ecstasy. By way of his 1978 “For Women Only” concert series, I argue that Pendergrass enacts a contemporary reiteration of the black religious choreography indexed by W.E.B. Du Bois’ paradigmatic framing of the preacher, the music, and the frenzy. Through the synthesis of the spiritual and performative pedagogies of black Pentecostal experience and the sonic orchestration shaped by Philadelphia International Records, Pendergrass generates a material and ritual encounter that is at once sexual and spiritual. In this way, his performative repertoire can be interpreted as a vital repository and archive for the intersecting genealogies of black religious and musical invention. 

When Prince converted to the Jehovah's Witnesses in 2001 and released The Rainbow Children, he did not retreat from the radical erotic vision that defined his earlier career — he deepened it. I argue that The Rainbow Children is a sustained act of spiritual self-authorship in which religious devotion and sexual possibility are not in tension but are mutually constitutive. Drawing on J. Kameron Carter's theorization of the archē of colonial modernity, Ashon T. Crawley's concepts of the choreosonic and enfleshment, and Jayna Brown's framework of Black speculative vision, I center the track "Mellow" to demonstrate how Prince's erotic lyricism and sonic practice perform what I call a "religioerotics of the crossroads": a mode of Black sacred life that refuses the separation of the carnal from the holy, centers Black feminine pleasure as spiritual ground, and reaches toward an Afro-futurist elsewhere beyond the terms of the present world. Prince's conversion was not the end of his radicalism. It was its most profound expression.

"Please Don't Stop The Music" analyzes the rise and eventual ostracism of Anthony Charles Williams II, also known as Tonex, who disrupted heteronormative gender and sexual politics through his musical artistry, clothing, and embodiment as a black male gospel artist in the early 21st century. In response to the Afro-American Religious History Unit's 2026 theme of "Black Religion, Music, Sexuality, and Afro-Futurism," this paper raises gospel music as a site of both religious constraint and quare liberatory potential. Covering the years between 2000 and 2011, this work offers a historical account of a career that constitutes a watershed moment for contemporary Afro-Protestantism, one discussed largely in popular cultural terms amongst Black Pentecostals and that lends itself to the academic study of Black Religion.