In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper frames Christian Nationalism as a deep story founded on an apocalyptic narrative that fuses Christian and American identities, rooted in historical and theological interpretations of the book of Revelation and Puritan founding myths. Drawing on sociological frameworks, it explains how these stories shape ontology, mythology, and epistemology for adherents, forging strong group cohesion by framing their experience as a divinely mandated cosmic struggle. This apocalyptic framework promotes a perception of persecution and a sense of divine purpose that inspires political engagement, supports exclusionary practices, and forms the basis for movements such as Dominionism and the New Apostolic Reformation. The Christian Nationalism narrative interprets perceived challenges to a divinely established national identity as grounds for efforts aimed at restoring and sustaining Christian prominence in society.

The study of affect has been historically attributed to Western philosophical traditions, beginning with Kant, Spinoza, Husserl, Freud, and Heidegger. In contemporary times, the politics of academic publications on affect invariably involve their ethnographic accounts from the ‘Orient’ but do not engage with these accounts as theories or epistemes in themselves. As a form of the decolonial methodology of undoing the Eurocentrism inherent within the academic study of affect and looking at its pluriversal conceptions, in this paper, I will discuss the Vedic concept of ‘Rasa’ that was first systematically defined by Bharata in the 2nd century BCE, its expansion by later Sanskrit scholars and its relevance in contemporary India.

This paper explores moral disorientation as an affective experience of temporal rupture. Interweaving short audio clips, images, and analytic commentary, I read everyday pastoral disclosures through phenomenologies of dis/orientation, vertigo, and hesitation developed by Sara Ahmed, Ami Harbin, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Alia Al-Saji. I argue that moral disorientation disorderly reorients bodies in and out of time with God and the world, generating ambivalent intervals of indetermination where moral and temporal orientations can either be unsettled or renewed. The presentation contrasts pastoral strategies that resynchronize congregants into linear futures guided by divine providence with homiletic practices that sustain affective and temporal wobble as an opening toward queer/just futures. 

Growing interest in contemplative sciences and their related well-being interventions has underscored the limitations of approaches rooted in individualistic, Western-centric frameworks and highlighted the need for models grounded in relational, nature-based perspectives. Indigenous contemplative sciences are knowledge systems that offer a rich repertoire of spiritual exercises and contemplative practices centered on kin relations, ecological belonging, place-based interconnectedness, reverence for the natural world, and planetary flourishing—principles that align with contemporary movements toward sustainable and inclusive well-being (Celidwen & Keltner, 2023). Despite this relevance, Indigenous contemplative traditions remain underrepresented and mischaracterized in current well-being research, obscuring their transformative potential. The present work introduces the Ethics of Belonging Scale (EofB Scale), designed to assess collective belonging, personality, lifestyle patterns, and relational dispositions aligned with eight dimensions of planetary flourishing derived from Indigenous contemplative principles. The EofB scale serves as a tool to evaluate how practices informed by Indigenous values contribute to enhanced collective self-identity, strengthened communal bonds, and greater environmental concern, while also upholding cultural integrity, ethical disposition, and spiritual acumen.

Meditation research has entered a third wave focused on contemplative states, stages, and endpoints that arise with mastery, including across traditions, yet existing empirical research is grounded primarily in Buddhist-derived practices. This paper introduces devekut, or cleaving to the Divine in the Jewish mystical tradition, as a case study for developing and refining emerging trans-traditional scientific models in advanced meditation research. Drawing on Kabbalistic and Hasidic scholarship alongside neurophenomenological meditation research, we argue that devekut offers an opportunity to enrich current frameworks in advanced meditation research in three ways: its entry points, including prayer and wordless melody, are not classically contemplative; its pathway to advanced absorption states is relational rather than detachment-based; and devekut is sometimes understood as pervading ordinary life rather than being confined to formal practice. These challenges and our proposed solutions point toward a contemplative science that can address cultural, religious, and cosmological complexity without flattening it.

Miles Davis advised his musicians, “don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” Herbie Hancock said, “Jazz is about being in the moment.” Sonny Rollins said, “you can’t think and play at the same time.” That they sound like musicians and meditation teachers is typical. Jazz musicians frequently embrace the transformational capacity of music within a markedly contemplative approach to creativity. Engaging this in a scholarly capacity points toward research methods supportive of the academic impulse to understand and put into words these depths of experience. This paper explores how the intentional, inspired musical creativity of Jazz musicians also describes the transformational processes of contemplative scholarship, suggesting that understanding music as a contemplative practice deepens the processes by which we understand both while expanding our capacity to think critically about expressive culture and contemplative spirituality as points of personal and collective transformation, for musicians and scholars alike. 

A fundamental epistemological asymmetry shapes contemplative studies: Western academic frameworks treat the practitioner’s interior development as methodologically irrelevant, while Buddhist traditions treat it as the precondition of valid knowledge. This paper takes that asymmetry seriously as an invitation rather than a problem. Drawing on the Uttaratantra’s distinction between naturally abiding and transforming buddha nature, and on the lamrim tradition of Atiśa and Tsongkhapa, it argues that the lamrim functions as a rigorous developmental epistemology — one that shares structural features with Western developmental frameworks (Piaget, Erikson, Fowler) while asking a fundamentally different question: not how humans develop, but toward what highest possibility. The paper invites contemplative studies to engage this framework as a genuine epistemological resource, and suggests that doing so is essential if the field is to maintain its depth in a cultural moment that risks reducing contemplative practice to wellness commodity.

This paper examines how established historiography changes when new categories of sources are introduced. Our point of departure is Swedish historiography on the 1958 reform enabling women’s ordination in the Church of Sweden. Several competing historical narratives frame this reform either as a theological breakthrough, a political compromise, or an institutional crisis. These accounts rely almost exclusively on official documents, such as parliamentary and synod protocols, and on writings by prominent (male) theologians and church leaders.

By introducing a previously unused body of sources – the narratives of the first ordained women themselves – we show how the established historical narratives are complemented and complicated, revealing new insights into a crucial societal and ecclesiastical reform which not only calls for a revised understanding of the past but also reshapes how the future of the church can be imagined.

The medieval Latin hagiography The Life of Christian of Markyate: A Twelfth Century Recluse uses a range of literary devices and Latin wordplay in order to produce an effect known as controlled ambiguity. Medieval Christian literature utilized this in order to provoke its readers into complex theological dialogue, forcing them to navigate challenging and uncomfortable questions of doctrine and practice by refusing to provide straightforward clarity. As a result, ambiguity became a necessary aspect of theological literary production. However, this poses a problem for translation which traditionally prioritizes content accuracy over stylistics. This paper proposes new translations from The Life of Christina as examples of possible interventions in theological translation norms, refocusing on developing new parameters for ambiguity within the target text. By unsettling models for scholarly translation, it suggests new practical methodologies as well as new interpretive frameworks for future scholarship. 

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This paper retrieves the Platonic and Neoplatonic metaphysics of participation, as developed by Augustine and Aquinas, arguing that their accounts of the fulfilment of creatures in contemplative ascent offers a constructive alternative to impasses in contemporary models of eschatology. Augustine inteprets the creature’s longing for beatitude through a participatory ontology shaped by his Plotinian inheritance, in which all beings proceed from and return to a transcendent source. Aquinas extends this trajectory, integrating Dionysian elements within his account of creation to produce a metaphysics in which creaturely being remains ultimately ordered towards its source. Together these accounts offers a profoundly Platonic vision of participatory being which resists naturalistic eschatology or the collapse of the distinction of creatures from the Creator. Their synthesis illuminates the metaphysical depths and theological fecundity of creaturely dependence, ascent, and contemplation in ways that contemporary eschatologies–shorn of these resources–struggle to do.

This paper unveils a Neoplatonic grammar of “energy” (energeia) in Richard Hooker’s (1554–1600) account of humanity’s creative “participation” in God. His articulation of a “sacramental poetics” in his Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie has drawn attention from scholars aiming to re-enchant the post-Enlightenment world. They often read Hooker as supporting a participatory metaphysics grounded in Christian panentheism. This paper argues instead that Hooker retrieves from church fathers like Dionysius and Damascene a Neoplatonic tradition that connects the Aristotelian language of energeia with human acts of divine participation. I demonstrate this through his participative use of terms like “working” in Book One of the Lawes in relation to human acts of poesis, and then in Book Five in relation to Christ’s sacramental presence. I argue that “energy” operates as a mediating category in his thought, allowing Hooker to articulate a participatory ontology that avoids both panentheism and undue metaphysical complexity.

Plato’s Timaeus makes the cosmos intelligible by positing a world soul: a mediating intelligence that binds the visible world to intelligible order and renders it a living whole. This paper takes that account as a conceptual baseline and reads the Gospel of John in its light. This paper does not argue that John depends on Plato. This paper argues that John addresses a comparable problem—how cosmic order and knowability relate to divine agency—while refusing a key Platonic solution. In the Timaeus, intelligibility is secured by an immanent cosmic soul. In John, the work of mediation and disclosure is assigned to the Logos (and, secondarily, to the Spirit) within a doctrine of creation. The comparison clarifies what the world soul contributes in the Platonic tradition and what changes when mediation is relocated from the cosmos to the divine Word.

Henry More’s Spirit of Nature, or hylarchic principle, is well-known as one of the signature doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists by means of which they navigated between materialist atheism and hylozoic pantheism. Anne Conway’s Middle Nature occupies a similar position as it mediates between God and creatures, but it operates within a seemingly quite different, less dualist and more gradualist metaphysics. The relationship between the two, and to the deeply Plotinian panentheism of More’s early poetry, is a complex one. This paper will re-examine this relationship, arguing that Conway’s gradualist metaphysics, devised in part to overcome the difficulties of More’s dualism, approximates the metaphysics of his poetry, and there is evidence that More too, late in his career, inclined hestiantly back toward his earlier positions. Conway emerges not so much as departing from More as completing her teacher’s original system more thoroughly than he himself was able to achieve.