In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper explores the possibility of resisting capitalism given capitalism’s seemingly totalizing effects on our formation as subjects. I address this problem by exploring the work of two scholars whose work in ethics take it quite seriously: Luke Bretherton and Alasdair MacIntyre. Exploring the tensions in Luke Bretherton’s use of Alasdair MacIntyre’s thought for his ethics and political theology, I argue that they differ in their assessments of the possibilities of and limits to systematic ethical critiques of capitalism – and structural analysis in general. This is in part due to their respective frameworks for social analysis: Augustinian cosmology for Bretherton and Aristotelian ethics for MacIntyre. After investigating these frameworks and MacIntyre’s post-Marxist trajectory, I use Fredric Jameson’s concept of utopia to re-read Bretherton’s Augustinian eschatology and MacIntyre’s practices within institutions in a way that opens both to the possibility of emancipatory politics and social transformation.

This presentation explores Ricoeur’s “endless” interpretation of Hegel’s hermeneutic of religion. I complicate Ricoeur’s reading of Hegelian “absolute knowing” as a (purely) epistemological goal, showing instead that the “reciprocal recognition that is absolute spirit” accomplished at the end of Hegel’s dialectic of morality is a practice (of forgiveness), as is the self-expressive “utterance” of the forgiving community that Hegel studies in his chapter on religion. Given this practical orientation in Hegel's text, we have reason to interpret “absolute knowing”—which Ricoeur summarizes as “the conceptual light within which each cultural context, and finally each religious representation, thinks itself”—likewise in practical terms. Thinking, then, does not dissolve our (religious) hopes in an open future in conceptual recapitulation; rather, it is the practice of “giving a reason for the hope that is within us” in the context of interreligious dialogue.

This paper argues that the secularization thesis, as a hermeneutical framework for interpreting modern temporality, performs a double reduction: it reduces time to abstract representations and religion to disembodied doctrine. This double reduction is not just descriptively inadequate: by classifying non-modern temporalities as "religious" or "pre-modern," the secular/religious distinction functions as a mechanism of political deactivation that forecloses the critical potential of temporalities that subvert the coloniality of time. Drawing on post-secular critique and decolonial theory—including Quijano, Maldonado-Torres, Wynter, and An Yountae—the paper shows that these traditions, despite their convergence, have not fully elaborated how the coloniality of time operates through a systematic and practical redeployment of the sacred. A practice-based framework, informed by Bourdieu and Vallega's account of the coloniality of time as an aisthetic disposition, reveals how this operation occurs. To identify how time is decolonized, I argue, we must decolonize the frameworks through which we read it.

Meditative visualization of corpses, cremation grounds, and the incorporation of foul bodily substances pervades the history of Indian Buddhism. Some of these macabre visualizations aim to cultivate disgust (aśubha bhāvanā) for benign objects; others, rooted in Tantric traditions, invoke similar imagery to eliminate disgust for foul, putrid objects. If disgust is fitting when it accurately evaluates its object as contaminating or putrid, both types of visualization seem to generate misfit emotions. Yet philosophers who discussed these practices saw the resulting emotions as fitting and rational. Taking their justifications seriously can inform contemporary philosophical conversations around emotional cultivation and rationality. I argue that some cultivated emotions are best understood as “retrofit” emotions with a complex structure, and that imaginative simulation has an important role to play in emotional retrofitting. 

This paper examines the role of vividness (sphuṭatva) in Jñānaśrīmitra’s and Ratnakīrti’s works on yogic perception. I argue that, for them, vividness does not, strictly speaking, play any epistemic role. Rather, its role is affective and motivational. An awareness-event’s degree of vividness is measured not in terms of how closely it corresponds to the way things are (after all, even hallucinations might be vivid), but in terms of how it motivates certain thoughts and actions. When an awareness-event gives rise to certain judgments, speech, and behavior automatically, it counts as vivid. The question of whether it counts as an instance of knowledge is another matter—one having to do with 1) the relation between the awareness-event in question and its object, and 2) the practical efficacy of the thoughts and actions it motivates. An awareness-event’s vividness and its knowledge-hood (prāmāṇya), then, are distinct issues that need to be treated separately.

This paper argues that the mad yogi’s laughter—an image of success in the Dzokchen practice of breakthrough (khregs chod)—reflects a radically unstructured attentional stance that constitutes a distinctive epistemic virtue. Contrasting this with two other images of attention, the skilled archer (endogenous, willful control) and the attentive listener (exogenous and open receptivity), and drawing on Longchenpa’s Treasury of Reality’s Expanse, this paper argues that this radically unguided stance is cultivated via the suspension of dran pa, or minding attention, that contorts the mind around objects as apparently determinate entities. The result is not epistemic deficiency but disclosure: Suspension of attentional framing reveals the very processes by which experience organizes itself into determinate contents. This is not a novel set of contents but a transformed relation toward attentional framing, a radical form of cultivating the virtues of epistemic humility and openness.

In this case study, scholar practitioners will share experiences leading "Multiple Belonging Circles" as a part of the Belonging Colorado project, a statewide effort to help people connect, participate, and collaborate across differences. Following ten people from diverse religious, political, cultural, racial, and gender identities, presenters will share stories, videos, struggles, and insights from the project. Additionally, logistical details will be shared, including funding, collaboration, and participant support.

The United States is plagued by rising polarization, misinformation, and threats to democratic pluralism. The need for empowered leaders with the practical skills and ethical frameworks to translate deeply held values into effective public action is clear. To address this pressing need, our institute is launching the “Values and Public Voice Network.” The primary goal of the VPV Network is to provide a practical, graduate-level public curriculum that equips clergy, nonprofit professionals, organizers, educators, activists, and other leaders to translate their deeply held values into tangible, justice-oriented frameworks for public impact. We are discussing this program as a case study for the "Publicly Engaged Scholarship in the Study of Religion Seminar" to expand relationships, share wisdom, and receive valuable feedback from leaders in other institutions who are engaging in similar work. 

How can scholarship on interreligious relations move beyond the academy to shape the future of relationships between religious communities? This paper examines a developing symposium initiative designed to translate academic research on Hindu–Christian relations into publicly engaged collaboration among scholars, Hindu organizations, and Christian communities in the United States. Building on foundational works such as The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations and Francis X. Clooney’s The Future of Hindu-Christian Studies, the project seeks to bring scholarly insights into practical community engagement.

Using this initiative as a case study, the paper analyzes strategies for building relationships across multiple scales: individual trust between scholars and practitioners, community partnerships between Hindu and Christian organizations, and institutional collaborations that sustain engagement over time. Reflecting on my experiences working with academic institutions and religious organizations, the paper examines how publicly engaged scholarship navigates institutional power structures while cultivating relationships necessary for pluralistic coexistence.

More than four decades after the AIDS crisis began, the history of Quaker responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis remains largely untold within American religious historiography. Similarly, the history of the first Quaker ceremonies of commitment for same-sex couples and Quaker advocacy for marriage equality is underrepresented in academic work about 20th century Quakerism. This paper responds to this lacuna by sharing highlights from an extensive body of research conducted by two researchers who have examined how Quakers grappled with both AIDS and marriage equality, often simultaneously, showing how these were not parallel crises but deeply intertwined struggles within the same congregations and across the many branches of Quakerism in North America. Additionally, by centering local congregational discernment rather than denominational pronouncements, this paper emphasizes how ordinary people transformed inherited theology through lived experience.

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Drawing on my embodied experience as a young woman survivor of clerical abuse, this paper critiques the limited embodied scope of victims of the clerical abuse crisis in the Catholic church as children, highlighting young adult women among the victims/survivors of clerical abuse. In this paper, I argue that the almost exclusive focus on abuse victims as children has prevented young women from seeing themselves in such dialogue, and that theologically reimagining the Eucharist can offer victims/survivors of clerical abuse a critical approach to a relationship with the Catholic tradition once more. In this sacrament, both trauma/abuse and healing/reconciliation are present, representing the need to denounce and critique unjust ecclesial structures and the need to find ecclesial space to open victims to God’s healing and reconciling love. This engagement is essential for the discourse to be expanded, for without this bodies will continue to be harmed and marginalized. 

This paper advances an intersectional feminist theological analysis of men’s ritual discourse in Malagasy communal life, examining patriarchy, postcolonial legacies, and culturally entrenched structures of silencing, including self-censorship and a culture of silence. Women’s absence in public speech is interpreted not as tradition, but as the outcome of interlocking systems that regulate authority, leadership, and communal decision-making, constraining spiritual, social, and political agency.

Drawing on intersectional feminist theory, the study situates male-dominated ritual speech in dialogue with the lived experiences of Malagasy women. Methodologically, it employs a qualitative and decolonizing approach, centering women’s voices as legitimate sites of knowledge and critical reflection.

By highlighting collective interpretation, leadership formation, and mutuality, the paper explores pathways through which women reclaim voice, agency, and authority, contributing to gender-just communal and spiritual futures, where women participate fully as agents of change and co-creators of shared decision-making.

Is diakonia a “women’s ministry”? And if so, how and when is that helpful, limiting, or problematic? This paper examines the historical and present relationships between gender and diakonia within Christian history and practice. As gender is constructed and shifting, so is Diakonia [diaconal ministry, deacons, deaconesses, and the diaconate]. It matters how and when we tell stories of women in ministry and in diakonia; the words we choose to justify, rationalize, describe, relate, and humanize such ministries. Practices of diakonia have been shaped by gender and likewise have shaped concepts of gender itself within Christian communities. Framed as gender-defined, gender-restrictive, gender-“blind”/-less, and gender-conscious, this paper identifies the historical gifts and limitations of coupling diakonia and gender. Understanding these can offer wisdom as we discern how to conceptualize and articulate the relationship between modern expressions of diakonia and gender in the 21st century, in North America and globally.

“The boke is not yet performed.” Fourteenth-century anchorite Julian of Norwich ends her Long Text with this admission. By the standards of modern academic religious discourse, this admission might be read as evidence for failure. And yet, Denys Turner’s 2011 reading of Julian takes up this admission as key to Julian’s theological systematicity, albeit a systematicity expanded to mean the alignment of form with content. In this paper, I read Julian’s Long Text alongside those of her modern readers, like Turner, whose refusal to mine this text for its argument serves as a crucial example of the stakes of reading for what a text does, or performs, as it unfolds before its reader. I argue for renewed readerly attention to textual form as a constitutive of the text and trace a lineage of women's theological writing that uses  form as an intervention into normative conceptions of knowledge as argument. 

David Koresh’s visits to Israel were crucial in shaping his theological development, self-conception, and apocalyptic prophecy. With each journey, both Koresh’s sense of purpose and the trust his followers placed in him intensified. His increasingly cohesive apocalyptic vision intertwined spiritual salvation with a radical political agenda. 

Despite the significance of these events, the specifics of what transpired during each visit remain inadequately understood. My research addresses this by both synthesizing the dispersed primary evidence and incorporating previously unutilized sources, including Hebrew-language publications and interviews with individuals who met Koresh during his visits.

In this paper, I will present my preliminary findings to construct a coherent picture of how Koresh’s pilgrimages not only solidified his self-conception as the Messiah but also delineated a striking political dimension in his vision – one that cast the modern State of Israel and the United States as pivotal players in an unfolding cosmic drama.

This paper examines an understudied dimension of "zine" culture of the 1980s and 1990s, namely, the religious theorization going on between NRMs across America and England. While zines are often discussed for their do-it-yourself ethics, aesthetics, and ‘subterranean’ politics (often attached to a music “scene”), little room has been devoted to analysis of those deriving from the religious underground. My analysis is centered around an archive housed at the Denver Public Library, that of Tom Hallewell—zine author, music promoter, and figurehead of the American network of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Hallewell’s archive brings together numerous small-press publications from a range of NRMs such as Satanists, O.T.O. branches, Gnostics, and magickal organizations. Communication between zine creators, and the shared ideas spawned within the pages of their zines, is illustrative of a unique kind of religious theorization stemming from the margins of culture rather than from academic discourse. 

This paper brings new insight to academic understandings of the bricolage of ideas L. Ron Hubbard assembled in his development of Scientology as a syncretic religion. It demonstrates that, in addition to having been influenced by science fiction, popular psychology and Western esotericism, as has been explored in the existing literature (Melton 2000, Lewis 2009, Urban 2011, Frenchkowski 2016), Hubbard was also influenced by certain popular post-WWII ideas about science, technology and the universe. In particular, the research presented here demonstrates that Hubbard’s 1951 development and introduction of the foundational Scientology doctrine known as the Theta-MEST theory, which establishes the religion’s basic metaphysical propositions as well as its soteriological logic, relied on ideas connected with the then-new field of cybernetics and explicitly drew from the work of the mathematician and author credited with naming and popularizing the field, Norbert Wiener. 

Religious globalization is commonly interpreted through two paradigms: centralized missionary expansion or diaspora transmission tied to ethnic community reproduction. This paper argues that I-Kuan Tao represents a third configuration: polycentric globalization within a transnational religious field. Originating in China and consolidated in Taiwan, the movement now operates across Southeast Asia, North America, Europe, and beyond without a singular governing center. Decentralized regional associations maintain ritual continuity and shared cosmological narrative while exercising contextual autonomy. Authority circulates through relational networks rather than hierarchical command. Drawing on scholarship on transnational religion, mobility, and networked governance, the study analyzes how ritual standardization, multidirectional flows, and negotiated coherence enable expansion beyond diaspora while preserving institutional stability. The case challenges assumptions that globalization necessitates either centralization or fragmentation and proposes polycentric governance as a distinct mode of contemporary religious expansion.

This presentation argues that the 1987 Harmonic Convergence—the first globally synchronized meditation event—played a pivotal but under‑recognized role in creating the conditions that enabled the rise of the “spiritual, but not religious” (SBNR) identity. Through an analysis of media saturation across newspapers, syndicated comics, and late‑night television, I show how ambivalent coverage—mixing fascination, irony, and critique—performed essential work of discursive normalization. Drawing on Foucault’s “field of the sayable”, I demonstrate how ubiquity generated familiarity, which generated intelligibility, and ultimately allowed SBNR to emerge as a socially intelligible identity. Constant coverage, in other words, ensured that the ideas and practices embodied in the Convergence—and later, SBNR identity—would become part what Stalnaker refers to as “the common ground”.  By tracing how public talk circulated across media, this paper reframes the Convergence not as a failed New Age prophecy, but as an essential inflection point in understanding the exponential rise in SBNR identities.