In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper argues, following Bataille, that there is a deep relationship between sacrifice and the constitution of the domain of the sacred. This logic, we argue, derives from the structure of the cosmos itself, which produces a sense of the sacred through continual sacrifice and destruction via a general economy of entropy. We contrast this way of producing the sacred with a different impersonal political form of sacrifice that grounds what Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben call biopolitics, a logic of restricted economy that manifests through both the state and the economy. We argue that whereas the sacred in Bataille works through a direct relational encounter with death, intimacy, and the immanence of general economy, biopolitics works by displacing the death and intimacy inherent to sacrifice to the domain of the profane, generating a boundary between the human and the non-human that is built upon the sacrifice of ecological life and the racialized body. This biopolitical sacrifice props up Man as a restricted (rather than general) economy of the sacred.

“A paschal banquet in which Christ is consumed.” This description of the Mass, drawn from the Vatican II constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, holds in tension the ideas of feast and sacrifice that are central to Catholic Eucharistic theology. In the postconciliar Church, particularly in elite Catholic culture, this tension has fissured into competing “horizontal” and “vertical" theological perspectives, each carrying divergent ecclesiological and political commitments. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, this paper examines how the routine celebration of the Eucharist in the contemporary United States generates an excess that overflows, but also reinforces, the restricted economies through which it is interpreted. Bataille’s framework of general economy, I argue, illuminates what theological discourse struggles to name: that both camps draw on the same sovereign expenditure, and that their conflict depends on that shared foundation remaining unacknowledged.

The Pacific Northwest “potlatch” cultures were found by Boas, Mauss, and Bataille to engage in profligate “waste” and “destruction” of wealth, from the viewpoint of our capitalist addiction to production and accumulation. The sacrificial, feasting, and shamanistic cultures of Bronze Age China shared this ethos of excessive ritual expenditures. These acts of celebratory consumption and destruction of wealth are now greatly diminished in the age of modern capitalist self-discipline and utilitarian harnessing of labor for endless production, utility, and efficiency. In contemporary China, despite the state developmentalism and capitalism, surprisingly, one finds that the spirit of wasteful consumption and sacrifice to the gods is still alive. The sun, noted Bataille in The History of Religion, showers all life on Earth with its inexhaustible energy. In the Age of the Anthropocene, can we tap into this abundant solar energy and sparks of archaic effervescence, for a flourishing and renewable planetary life? 

Poststructuralist ethnology in Lowland South America can be said, without exaggeration, to be founded on the twin rejections of “sacrifice” and “gift exchange.” These concepts are not merely considered empirically absent; they are taken to express logics of hierarchy that are actively refused. By contrast, anthropologists of Mesoamerica see in sacrifice the foundation for the unification of political and cosmic authority. In this presentation, I take up Amerindian sacrifice alternately as a political remainder and as a political concept. Beginning with Pierre Clastres' argument that Amerindian political hierarchy historically emerges from religion, I then compare the religious and political dimensions of captive-taking in South America and Mesoamerica. Beneath superficial similarities in the killing of war captives lie different political functions and religious leadership, such that sacrifice operates as a plastic political technology for organizing the relation between cosmology, violence, and sovereignty, working with and against state formations.

This paper asks how the inauguration of the Khalsa, a sacred military-spiritual order in the Sikh tradition, can be understood from the standpoint of human sacrifice. Conventional approaches construe this order from the standpoint of identity, as if the purpose of its institution were to create a distinct sense of self. However, a concern with identity violates other commitments to ego-loss that are replete in the tradition. This paper instead argues that a logic of sacrifice better voices a key aspect of this military-spiritual order — a psycho-social transformation of self. In doing so, this paper turns to the sacrality of sacrifice for a more ethically rich engagement with Sikh thought, tradition, and religion.

This presentation examines local and national contexts of an attempted bombing in a diverse town in western Kansas just before the 2016 presidential election. The would-be bombers, calling themselves “the Crusaders,” targeted Somali refugees who worked in Garden City’s meatpacking plants in a plan modeled after the Oklahoma City bombing. Arguing that their efforts were response to candidate Donald Trump’s call for patriots to defend their homeland, they attempted to appeal to jurors’ sense that everyday people should be applauded—or at least forgiven—for caring about the threat at Muslim immigrants played to national security. This presentation examines the larger context of their planned attack, including Garden City’s history as a place that both welcomes and exploits refugees from US foreign wars, from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror, and larger anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies, rhetoric, and religious teachings circulating in western Kansas and other rural areas.  

This paper argues, following Bataille, that there is a deep relationship between sacrifice and the constitution of the domain of the sacred. This logic, we argue, derives from the structure of the cosmos itself, which produces a sense of the sacred through continual sacrifice and destruction via a general economy of entropy. We contrast this way of producing the sacred with a different impersonal political form of sacrifice that grounds what Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben call biopolitics, a logic of restricted economy that manifests through both the state and the economy. We argue that whereas the sacred in Bataille works through a direct relational encounter with death, intimacy, and the immanence of general economy, biopolitics works by displacing the death and intimacy inherent to sacrifice to the domain of the profane, generating a boundary between the human and the non-human that is built upon the sacrifice of ecological life and the racialized body. This biopolitical sacrifice props up Man as a restricted (rather than general) economy of the sacred.

“A paschal banquet in which Christ is consumed.” This description of the Mass, drawn from the Vatican II constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, holds in tension the ideas of feast and sacrifice that are central to Catholic Eucharistic theology. In the postconciliar Church, particularly in elite Catholic culture, this tension has fissured into competing “horizontal” and “vertical" theological perspectives, each carrying divergent ecclesiological and political commitments. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, this paper examines how the routine celebration of the Eucharist in the contemporary United States generates an excess that overflows, but also reinforces, the restricted economies through which it is interpreted. Bataille’s framework of general economy, I argue, illuminates what theological discourse struggles to name: that both camps draw on the same sovereign expenditure, and that their conflict depends on that shared foundation remaining unacknowledged.

The Pacific Northwest “potlatch” cultures were found by Boas, Mauss, and Bataille to engage in profligate “waste” and “destruction” of wealth, from the viewpoint of our capitalist addiction to production and accumulation. The sacrificial, feasting, and shamanistic cultures of Bronze Age China shared this ethos of excessive ritual expenditures. These acts of celebratory consumption and destruction of wealth are now greatly diminished in the age of modern capitalist self-discipline and utilitarian harnessing of labor for endless production, utility, and efficiency. In contemporary China, despite the state developmentalism and capitalism, surprisingly, one finds that the spirit of wasteful consumption and sacrifice to the gods is still alive. The sun, noted Bataille in The History of Religion, showers all life on Earth with its inexhaustible energy. In the Age of the Anthropocene, can we tap into this abundant solar energy and sparks of archaic effervescence, for a flourishing and renewable planetary life? 

Poststructuralist ethnology in Lowland South America can be said, without exaggeration, to be founded on the twin rejections of “sacrifice” and “gift exchange.” These concepts are not merely considered empirically absent; they are taken to express logics of hierarchy that are actively refused. By contrast, anthropologists of Mesoamerica see in sacrifice the foundation for the unification of political and cosmic authority. In this presentation, I take up Amerindian sacrifice alternately as a political remainder and as a political concept. Beginning with Pierre Clastres' argument that Amerindian political hierarchy historically emerges from religion, I then compare the religious and political dimensions of captive-taking in South America and Mesoamerica. Beneath superficial similarities in the killing of war captives lie different political functions and religious leadership, such that sacrifice operates as a plastic political technology for organizing the relation between cosmology, violence, and sovereignty, working with and against state formations.

This paper asks how the inauguration of the Khalsa, a sacred military-spiritual order in the Sikh tradition, can be understood from the standpoint of human sacrifice. Conventional approaches construe this order from the standpoint of identity, as if the purpose of its institution were to create a distinct sense of self. However, a concern with identity violates other commitments to ego-loss that are replete in the tradition. This paper instead argues that a logic of sacrifice better voices a key aspect of this military-spiritual order — a psycho-social transformation of self. In doing so, this paper turns to the sacrality of sacrifice for a more ethically rich engagement with Sikh thought, tradition, and religion.

This presentation examines local and national contexts of an attempted bombing in a diverse town in western Kansas just before the 2016 presidential election. The would-be bombers, calling themselves “the Crusaders,” targeted Somali refugees who worked in Garden City’s meatpacking plants in a plan modeled after the Oklahoma City bombing. Arguing that their efforts were response to candidate Donald Trump’s call for patriots to defend their homeland, they attempted to appeal to jurors’ sense that everyday people should be applauded—or at least forgiven—for caring about the threat at Muslim immigrants played to national security. This presentation examines the larger context of their planned attack, including Garden City’s history as a place that both welcomes and exploits refugees from US foreign wars, from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror, and larger anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies, rhetoric, and religious teachings circulating in western Kansas and other rural areas.  

When we ask “what is meant by childhood?” and “who gets protected,” there is a sub-question of to what extent we consider children human, and further, what interlocking identities might make some children considered subhuman in relation to others? It is my suggestion that the current dialogue around childhood and child protection falls into the trap of paternalism because the normative gaze has deemed only white male children as fully human. To this narrative, I suggest introducing an expanded womanist framework that draws on both Alice Walker’s Four-part definition, with specific attention to the first and second sections, and the tenets of Dr. Stacey Floyd-Thomas’s womanist framework: Radical Subjectivity and Traditional Communalism. In this cross-section, this paper illuminates how Womanism allows us to redefine who gets to be a child, our concept of innocence, and how we read the humanity of children, thereby determining whether they are (un)protectable.

This paper examines the role of Mark 9, particularly when reception becomes routine. In such contexts, interpretive escalation—characterised by increased prayer and fasting—is often perceived as an expression of faithfulness, even when it results in physical consequences for minors. Through comparative analysis of examples from the UK, Nigeria, and Kenya, I identify recurring pathways of harm, including claims of authority that exceed accountability, consent asymmetries that are spiritualized as obedience, and cycles of escalation where distress is interpreted as a sign that further intensification is required. I contend that the phrase “prayer-and-fasting” from Mark 9:29 functions as a travelling gloss with significant safeguarding implications, while the shorter version (“by prayer”) can serve as a limiting resource in practices involving children. Finally, I propose theological “red lines” for individuals under 18 and advocate for care pathways—encompassing pediatric, psychological, and safeguarding measures—as progressive alternatives to paternalistic protection models.

Many religious communities have adopted formal child protection policies in recent decades, often in response to legal and insurance pressures rather than sustained ethical reflection.  Despite the proliferation of such policies, communities frequently struggle to respond well when harm occurs. Drawing on over a decade of experience as both a scholar of sexual violence in religious contexts and a practitioner advocating for survivors and consulting with faith communities, this paper examines the gap between policy adoption and meaningful safeguarding practice. It argues that dominant frameworks often position competent adults as protectors of incompetent children, allowing communities to imagine harm as external to their own moral life and implicitly setting up children's voices to be dismissed. This orientation encourages defensive responses and obscures systemic inequalities that shape harm. The paper proposes an alternative vision of safeguarding grounded in communal ethical formation, in which children are recognized as full members whose wellbeing is integral to the health and accountability of the entire community.

The contemporary debate over birthright citizenship—centered on the January 2025 executive order, the anticipated legal challenge, and the posture of religiously affiliated amici—recasts older questions about who belongs and who is protected by the state. Yet the legal and moral logic of such debates has historical antecedents. Sacramento Orphanage & Children’s Home v. Chambers stands as an early and instructive example of a court grappling with whether parental status may be used to differentiate access to public benefits for native-born children. This paper reads that decision alongside the modern dispute to illuminate how courts have, over more than a century, defended or disputed the principle that citizenship carries obligations—ones that should not be erased by parental immigration status. The paper argues for a more nuanced understanding of “birthright” that foregrounds equal protection, the public role in child welfare, and the moral claims of vulnerable children within the citizenship framework.

The invention of new mass media visual technologies – including photography, video, and social media – has raised significant questions regarding the ethics of “viewing the dead.” Should we watch the videos of the death of George Floyd or protesters shot by ICE in Minneapolis? Should photographs of children killed in school shootings appear in newspapers? In this paper I address these urgent questions by turning to the way photography has been used to depict a narrative of Jewish death as tragic and violent. These images of death contrast with Judaism’s general reluctance to visually engage with corpses, whether in the traditions of Jewish art or in death care rituals. By developing a more positive aesthetic of Jewish death – one that depicts care, solidarity, and community - we can begin to imagine a visual culture of death as caring in the face of violence, as creating solidarity in response to oppression.

This paper theorizes hospicing Zionism as an ethical, political, and memorial practice for a Jewish futurity in the face of planetary collapse. Rather than treating Zionism as the inevitable future of Jewish life, it reads Zionism as a dying structure that continues to reproduce violence through dominant regimes of memory. The paper argues that counter-memory is the central practice through which Zionism can be hospiced, since haunting names the ethical demand issued by histories that cannot be successfully buried. These histories include Palestinian death and dispossession as well as the suppressed inheritances of non-Ashkenazi, non-Zionist, diasporic, queer, disabled, and racialized Jewish communities. Integrating historical and theological analysis, ritual interventions by diasporist Jewish communities, and personal narrative, the paper imagines Jewish futurity beyond sovereignty, exceptionalism, and trauma, toward accountability, relationality, and repair.

Popular cultural narratives such as film and television programs serve as a terrain where competing meanings are assembled and contested, symbolically resolving tensions that may not be fully articulated elsewhere. Utilizing critical/cultural studies approaches to religious studies and popular cultural texts, in this paper we consider the ways that contemporary tensions around life/death and the human/machine interface are represented in the film Mickey 17 and in several television episodes of Black Mirror, Upload, and Severance, each of which depicts characters who leverage technologies as a means of overriding, denying, or deferring death. Building on the work of Donna Haraway and Achille Mbembe, we introduce the concept of Anthropocene lament to capture the emotional sense of mourning these narratives evoke as they speak to the tensions that emerge in a technoscientific system that allows colonizers to leverage technology to deny or defer the natural processes of death. 

This paper examines communal forms of AI griefbots. While most scholarship treats AI griefbots as private technologies of mourning, it focuses on cases in which reconstructed voices address gathered audiences in public, institutional, or ritualized settings. Comparing these practices with ancient pseudepigraphal writings, the paper argues that both involve communities generating meaningful postmortem speech from traces left behind and receiving that speech as significant after death. Nineteenth-century Spiritualism provides a more recent analogue, making visible the social expectations and interpretive habits that surround communal postmortem voice. Read together, these cases illuminate a recurring religious logic in which communities authorize speech for the dead as guidance, consolation, witness, or public address. By situating communal AI grief practices within this longer history, the paper expands current discussion beyond private bereavement and opens the way for more careful evaluation of the promises and dangers of emerging digital afterlives.

The British colonisers and their European counterparts invented the discipline of Sikh Studies to study “Sikhism,” a colonial imaginary for the religion of the Sikhs. The advent of Sikh Studies reduced Sikhī to a subject and located it in a discursive domain constituted in English: an alien language that belonged to the British colonisers. Since then, Sikh Studies has been fluctuating between blatant theoretical imperialism to somewhat liberating theoretical constraints. The future of Sikh Studies depends upon whether the indigenous sources begin to intervene as an agency. In this paper, I'll explore the questions, such as: What is the potential of the literary as an agency, and to what extent did it subvert the hegemony of the discursive processes in the Sikh context? How are the literary and the idea of lived experience connected to religion and dharam, or Christianity and Sikhī, to be more precise?

This paper interrogates how religious authority can be preserved when generative AI optimises for fluency, virality and visual impact rather than provenance. Taking recent Sikh controversies as a focal lens I argue that the most consequential harms are not only factual but form‑level including depiction violations, lineage invisibility, and blended or hallucinated lines presented as canonical. Bridging digital religion and media studies. I trace how these form‑level harms arise from platform logics that reward speed and spectacle, and I outline a lineage‑first design vocabulary, drawn from Sikh custodianship, that treats provenance as a visible, verifiable precondition for interpretation.

The Bahá’í religion, emerging from the Bábí movement, was widely perceived as having broken with Islamic law on the question of hijab. In 1848, the Bábí heroine Tahirih appeared unveiled before a gathering of Bábí men; she was the first woman in modern Iranian history to publicly discard the veil. Yet it was not until the 1930s that many Iranian Bahá’í women, perhaps even the majority, removed the veil. It therefore seems paradoxical that despite Tahirih’s powerful legacy, the Bahá’í community did not actively promote unveiling. ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá in fact instructed Bahá’ís in Iran and other Muslim-majority societies to conform to prevailing public norms regarding hijab, a stance that contrasts sharply with his strong encouragement of the community playing a leading role in advancing girls’ education. This paper investigates the underlying considerations that shaped the Bahá’í community’s cautious approach to hijab.

This paper examines how narratives of women martyrs are remembered and transmitted within contemporary Bahá’í community life through an ethnographic study of the global campaign Our Story Is One. The campaign commemorates the execution of ten Bahá’í women in Shiraz, Iran, in 1983, whose refusal to renounce their faith has become a powerful narrative of steadfastness within Bahá’í history. Drawing on ethnographic observation of the exhibitions organized by the Bahá’í community in Ireland, together with analysis of the campaign’s global digital materials, the paper explores how the story of the Shiraz martyrs circulates across transnational Bahá’í networks and is interpreted in local community contexts. By situating the Shiraz women within the longer tradition of female martyrdom in the Bahá’í Faith, including the nineteenth-century figure Táhirih, the study demonstrates how contemporary commemorative practices reproduce and reinterpret historical narratives that continue to shape Bahá’í collective memory and community identity.

Obligatory prayer (ṣalát) occupies a central place in the devotional life prescribed by Bahá’u’lláh in his central work, the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. Yet the historical development of this law has received almost no scholarly attention. This paper reconstructs the evolution of the Bahá’í obligatory prayer from its earliest formulation to its final canonical form. Drawing on textual evidence from the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and Bahá’u’lláh’s correspondence, it demonstrates that the law passed through three successive stages: an original nine-rakʿah prayer prescribed in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas but later lost, a second prayer composed but never disseminated, and finally the current set of three alternative obligatory prayers. The paper explores the historical circumstances that shaped these developments, including the precarious social context of Bahá’ís in Ottoman Syria and Persia and Bahá’u’lláh’s gradualist approach to religious legislation. By situating the Bahá’í law of obligatory prayer within the broader history of ritual prayer in Abrahamic traditions, the study highlights how Bahá’u’lláh reshaped inherited patterns of devotional practice while emphasizing flexibility, individual devotion, and progressive revelation.

This paper examines how the Bahá’í community of Iran has pursued social change despite systematic persecution since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Challenging the common assumption that the Bahá’í principle of non-involvement in partisan politics leads to social passivity, it argues that the community has developed a distinctive model of principled engagement rooted in constructive resilience. Drawing on historical analysis, Bahá’í texts and institutional documents, and relevant social theory, the paper explores how this approach integrates individual transformation, community building, social action, and participation in public discourse. It highlights initiatives such as grassroots educational efforts and the Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education (BIHE) as examples of non-adversarial responses to exclusion. The paper argues that the experience of the Iranian Bahá’ís offers an alternative framework for understanding religion and social transformation—one grounded in non-violence, ethical coherence between means and ends, and the gradual cultivation of more just social relations.

Disability scholarship has long grappled with the instability of the future. Feminist disability scholar Alison Kafer describes dominant cultural narratives of disability as structured by a temporal imaginary in which disability forecloses the possibility of flourishing unless medical intervention restores normative function. When cure is unavailable or ineffective, disabled futures are suspended within what Kafer calls “curative time,” a framework that renders the present merely a waiting period for medical resolution.

This paper engages disability studies, particularly the concept of “crip time,” alongside eschatology to challenge these impoverished temporal imaginaries. Crip time foregrounds unpredictability, contingency, and alternative rhythms of life. This paper argues that crip time offers theology crucial resources for inhabiting uncertain futurity. Read alongside apocalyptic theology, crip time interrupts assumptions of linear progress and invites forms of hope grounded not in control of the future but in presence, solidarity, and collective action.

Christian tradition has long wrestled with understanding the relation of time and eternity and its entanglement with questions of evil and suffering today. But where earlier spiritual thinkers such as Augustine and Boethius related questions of time and divine being to more logical conundrums of epistemology, it is with the late medieval anchoress, Julian of Norwich, where time, eternity, and evil are worked out in what this paper will argue is a comprehensive and realistic treatment of these enduring questions. It is in Julian’s differentiation between the “Now” of the divine perspective and the “now and not-yet” of human experience where questions of moral responsibility in both endurance of and resistance to evil can be helpfully engaged.

This paper rethinks the Christian virtue of hope in conversation with trauma studies, queer theory, and critical geography. In the first part of the paper, I argue that hope is a vexed subject for trauma studies and queer theory, because thinkers within these disciplines tend to conceptualize hope in terms of temporality and affectivity. But what if hope is neither an affective nor a temporal relation? What if it is, say, a practical and spatial one? To put the question in terms of Christian theology: What if the basic difference between the world as we know it and the eschaton is a spatial rather than a temporal difference? In the second half of this paper, I experiment constructively with this possibility, close-reading Romans 8:18-26 and Kathryn Tanner’s eschatology in *Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity* in conversation with critical geography’s conception of hope as a place-making activity.