In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper asks: Do queer Zimbabwean Exists? as an extension of Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s book title - Do Zimbabweans Exist? - in which he deploys postcolonial nationalism through frames such as ethnicity and violence in Zimbabwe. This study uses sexuality to deconstruct the official nationalism undergirded and articulated through alliances between state power, religious conservatism, and heteronormative constructions of citizenship. As such, I examine instantiations where queer persons and movements destabilise political and religious symbols deployed in the making of the postcolonial nation in Zimbabwe. 

How do religious communities teach people to understand sexuality, and what kinds of futures do those teachings imagine? Within conservative American evangelicalism, sexual knowledge has often been framed through purity culture, complementarian theology, and instruction on marriage and gender roles. These teachings do more than regulate behavior. They provide an interpretive matrix through which believers learn to understand desire and self-sovereignty. This paper examines evangelical sexual literacy through memoirs by former evangelicals (exvangelicals), including Jamie Lee Finch, Glennon Doyle, Matthias Roberts, and Linda Kay Klein. Reading these narratives together, I explore how sexual teachings were internalized and later reenvisioned through deconversion. Methodologically, I treat memoir as a site of religious reflection in which former evangelicals wrestle with earlier instruction and emerge with new meaning-making. These narratives not only reveal how evangelical sexual literacy is formed, but how it is contested and reworked in a post-evangelical future.

This paper argues that kink, understood not as sexual transgression but as an embodied practice of negotiating power, vulnerability, and pleasure, offers a critical site for theorizing "demonic possibilities": the capacity of liminal peoples to create joy, relationality, and livable worlds within and against systems designed to render them invisible. Drawing on Black studies, Indigenous thought, and queer theory, I propose that kink enacts a demonic ethics born from outside the dominant order, seeping through its fissures. The paper grounds this argument theologically, revealing how Christian moral frameworks imposed normative sexuality as a colonial project, and refuses to theorize kink as universally liberatory, instead attending to how race, gender, and coloniality shape access to erotic world-making. I offer demonic kink ethics as a framework that refuses the reproductive, marital, and national logics through which religious traditions have organized sexual meaning.

This paper proposes a 4E cognitive framework to analyze gender transition as a fundamental reconfiguration of the agent-environment interface. Moving beyond discursive models of performativity, I argue that gender is a primary mechanism of enactive sense-making and a key depth dimension of existential flourishing. Drawing on Tillich and Merleau-Ponty, I frame gender transition as a state of functional ease where the physical body and social position align.

Then, utilizing a Haslangerian lens, I position the body as an active participant in cognition rather than a passive substrate. Transitioning is thus an enactive resolution to existential dislocation, utilizing medical and social re-tooling to create necessary affordances for action. Finally, I characterize transgender communities as essential affective scaffolding and frame anti-trans legislation as environmental enclosure—a systematic attempt to render the world un-grippable, obstructing both the material and cognitive foundations of integrated wholeness.

This paper engages the intersection of affective neuroscience and medieval philosophical theology by comparing Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion, specifically the role of interoception, with Thomas Aquinas's account of phantasms in shaping human affect. Barrett argues that emotions are constructed concepts emerging from interoceptive bodily signals, while Aquinas argues that phantasms are sensory representations generated by the sense appetite and stored in the intellect, which enable human passions. Despite radically different metaphysical frameworks, both recognize that emotion depends on a structured interplay between body and cognition. I argue that interoception and phantasms function in both frameworks as analogous mediators in the formation of human affect, highlighting an unexpected convergence between contemporary cognitive science and Thomistic theological anthropology. This comparison underscores that insights from medieval theology can still illuminate contemporary discussions about embodiment, affect, and the nature of human emotion. 

This paper analyzes CSR theories of agency attribution to supernatural agents (SAs), specifically the extent to which specific properties (psychological vs physiological) result in human-like versus nonhuman-like understandings. To test the relationship between properties and agential understanding, we analyze 40 native Tagalog (Filipino) speakers who currently reside in the Philippines. Tagalog is distinct in that it linguistically differentiates between human and nonhuman agents through case markers and determiners. It is therefore offers a productive opportunity to explore the extent to which these speakers label a given supernatural agent as human-like or not based on specific properties. In addition to using a non-WEIRD dataset and a linguistic analysis rare in the field, this study builds on recent work both analyzing Tagalog in the context of CSR and investigating the properties generally assigned to God and other SAs.

The standard model of the cognitive science of religion “puts all its eggs in the basket” of supernatural agents. This has resulted in the neglect or denial of nonpersonal and nonagentive powers and meanings with respect to magic, for both magical thinking and practice, for hunter-gatherer, ancient, and contemporary manifestations of magic. Embodied cognition offers a corrective to the standard model’s assumptions about magic. It recognizes the very obvious bodily involvement in rituals involving magic. It recognizes that not all patterns in the natural world involve conscious intention by agents and that all societies acknowledge the reality of some of those patterns. The paper analyzes imitative/sympathetic, contagious, divination, apotropaic—warding off evil, healing, transformation of status, and some Christian sacramental rituals. It evidences the highly significant role that magic rituals enlisting nonpersonal and nonagentive processes have played in religions through the ages.

This paper examines two kinds of transformations of shame (zanki) in late Heian Pure Land discourse through the contrasting ideas of emotion and affect. First, subjective remorse was formalized into standardized rites of repentance (sange). This formalization generated a strong emphasis on ritual expression of shame, as opposed to the internal emotion itself. It effectively converted invisible individual feelings into an intersubjective affective field accessible to other individuals. Second, the perceived lack of shame was paradoxically redefined as a performative gateway to spiritual success. By self-portraying as shameless, practitioners strategically aligned themselves with a particular category of people expounded in Pure Land teachings as an object of salvation, thereby ensuring their position within the soteriological system. This paper argues that the emotion of shame functioned not merely as a psychological state but as a conceptual matrix for ritual embodiment and performative self-definition.

This paper examines the emotion of rage as expressed by Tokugawa protest martyrs (gimin) and complex affective landscapes their rage engenders. Although individual circumstances differ, stories of early modern protest martyrs largely hinge upon the sacrificial deaths of virtuous peasants who engage in “illegal” protests against corrupt feudal lords. The prototypical example of this narrative pattern is Sakura Sōgorō, a seventeenth-century peasant executed by the Sakura domain for the crime of making a direct appeal to the Shogun. Moments before his death, Sōgorō expresses his rage at the corrupt domain lord and makes a vow of vengeance, no matter how many lifetimes it may take. Sōgorō thus articulates his rage in trans-corporeal and trans-temporal terms, assuming that his rage will live on even after his body perishes. This paper argues that it was the trans-corporeal, trans-temporal conception of Sōgorō’s rage that informed his postmortem apotheosis as a kami.

This paper analyzes emotion, religious cultivation, and pacifism in Konkōkyō war commemoration rituals. Drawing on textual testimonies and fieldwork, I examine how adherents of Konkōkyō—a Sect Shinto new religious movement (NRM) that was both oppressed and privileged in the 1930s and 1940s—create, share, and transform war emotions through memorial rituals. I focus on two rituals: spirit pacification (ireisai) in Konkōkyō peace conferences, and war remains repatriation (ikotsu shūshū) in Okinawa. Konkōkyō participants recall a range of emotions and experiences evoked by the ritual; negative feelings of guilt and suffering are interpreted as opportunities to cultivate gratitude and pacifism. I show how adherents of a marginalized religion grapple with loss, suffering, and responsibility through communal rituals that mobilize war experiences toward goals of self-cultivation and pacifism. My paper theorizes these rituals as pulling participants back in time as a way to cultivate new emotional capacities in the present.

Anne Allison introduced “sensing precarity” in her influential 2013 book, Precarious Japan which argued for precarity as an emotional status, one characterized by an insecurity and desociality that pervades contemporary Japanese society. Sensing precarity, then, can be interpreted as an inability to move within social worlds, what Gilles Deleuze (1978) defined as sadness. Yet Allison did not consider the role religion plays in sensing precarity through practices that enable movement, what Deleuze saw as joy. In this presentation, I draw on Buddhist women’s experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic to revisit Allison’s sensing precarity in light of Deleuze’s concepts of joy and sadness to understand the ways that women negotiated their extreme senses of sadness through their active Buddhist practices of joy. These women turned to Buddhist teachings and practices to craft a quasi-communal life of joy that helped them battle the precarious emotional tides that threatened to overcome them.

A burgeoning body of evidence documents how Black women in higher education are disproportionately impacted by adverse outcomes pertaining to their physical, mental, and social wellbeing as compared to their white counterparts in academe. While some research has examined why Black women exit the academy, far less attention has been paid to why Black women remain in institutions that are increasingly marked by epistemic violence, gendered racism, and unequal access to promotion. Bridging womanist thought with the Public Health Critical Race (PHCR) praxis of critical storytelling, this study draws on survey data and semi-structured interviews with womanist scholars at various stages of their careers (i.e., students, junior scholars, and senior scholars) to demonstrate how a sense of calling in the lives of Black women may function as a mechanism of self-sacrifice even as it is reconfigured as a weaponized tool of anti-Black violence in academe. 

This paper argues that carcerality is a more adequate and generative theological metaphor than crucifixion for naming Black women's survival in America. Ignacio Ellacuría's "crucified people" and James Cone's theology of the cross are event-based, male-coded, and easily spiritualized into redemptive suffering. Drawing on Sarah Jobe's carceral hermeneutics, Hortense Spillers' analysis of the captive body, Kelly Brown Douglas's account of criminalized Black womanhood, and Sylvia Wynter's decolonial critique of the genre of the human, this paper contends that carcerality names what crucifixion cannot: a system of ongoing bodily confinement, intimate and gendered violence, and colonial construction that extends from the Middle Passage to the present. Working constructively within womanist theology, and grounded in Delores Williams's survival ethics and Katie Cannon's moral wisdom, the paper proposes a womanist carceral theology adequate to the task of dismantling, not merely enduring, the structures that confine.

This paper develops a womanist pastoral-theological framework for understanding Black women’s depression as a relational, embodied, and justice-related reality rather than an individual deficit. Based on my qualitative study of seven Black Christian women with persistent depression, it treats their narratives as theological texts and sources of wisdom. Combining trauma theory and ecosocial approaches with self-psychology and womanist theology, the paper interprets depression as a bodily response to multilevel trauma—historical, structural, communal, and personal. It critically examines controlling images such as the Strong Black Woman, Platonic body–spirit dualisms, and sacrificial atonement theologies that over-spiritualize mental health and sanctify Black women’s suffering. In dialogue with Alice Walker’s womanism and influential womanist theologians, it offers embodied reinterpretations of incarnation, the cross, and salvation that affirm Black women’s depressed bodies as sacred and deserving of care. Finally, it provides trauma-informed, practical recommendations for Black churches aiming to foster more just and liberating ministries.

My paper examines the elements of René Girard’s mimetic theory that Peter Thiel uses to question the prioritization of environmental politics in parts of the contemporary Western discourse. Recalling the main patterns of Thiel’s long-standing engagement with Girard’s thought, my talk aims at demonstrating that Thiel interprets climate politics not merely as a dispute over environmental facts, but as a structural reorientation of political desire toward managed scarcity.

According to a Girardian framework, periods of stagnation or decline intensify mimetic rivalry as social actors compete for increasingly limited goods. Thiel’s critique, as reconstructed in my talk, suggests that political programs willing to accept economic contraction in the name of climate goals risk amplifying precisely these dynamics of envy, resentment, and rivalry. In such conditions, social cohesion becomes fragile, and political conflict is increasingly organized around moralized blame rather than productive cooperation.

In conversation with Friedrich Nietzsche and René Girard, this paper develops an account of Kierkegaard’s the stages on life’s way and applies them to a reading of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and especially to the relationship between Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov.