In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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. 

This paper draws on qualitative research exploring God-experiences among Protestant adults who were raised in Korean residential child care institutions. Participants’ childhoods were marked by abandonment, violence, and structural marginalization, situating them in what I term borderland spaces—lived realities close to death, on the periphery of society, and in positions of powerlessness. Yet their testimonies of survival and the ways in which God-experiences functioned within these conditions—both death-dealing and life-giving—reveal theological wisdom for sustaining the present and envisioning futures from within trauma. The analysis demonstrates that coerced religious experiences became life-giving when four conditions interacted: the exercise of agency, coming to be situated within a safe space, corrective embodied experience, and the naming of these experiences as God’s presence. By listening to their lived experiences, this project proposes a pastoral theology of Salim that recognizes children and young adults as theological agents, articulating grace as it emerges in borderland spaces.

“Young people are not the future of the church. We are the church now.” This proposal is based on the Young People and Christian Worship (YPCW) study, a mixed-methods, multisite, binational, and ecumenical research project that listens deeply to how teenagers and emerging adults (aged 13–29) experience public Christian worship (95 qualitative interviews, 25 focus groups representing approximately 215 participants, and participant observation at 45 worship services, alongside a 1,420-person national survey). Rejecting problematic deficit frameworks and instead engaging in collaborative constructive theology, we ask “What can we learn about worship from young people?” Our research addresses three distinct liturgical traditions—Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical Protestant. Initial findings highlight holistic formation: young people are shaped by and for specific traditions of worship in multiple ways—intellectually, emotionally, and actively. What we are learning about formation is significant for the future/s of the church, and the church today.

Digital culture is a major factor in contemporary children’s lives. It shapes all aspects of their days, from education and relationships to free time and physical health. This paper will explore several ways that digital culture and artificial intelligence influence spiritual well-being and faith formation. It will suggest that digital experiences provide opportunities for kids to expand their spiritual horizons, make connections with diverse others, experiment with authentic identity formation, and engage in creative religious activities. It will also discuss how uncritical exposure to AI, excessive engagement with social media, and other problematic elements of digital culture pose threats to spiritual health, especially for children already at risk because of cultural marginalization and discrimination. Along the way, the paper will explore how faith formation practices can incorporate digital opportunities while teaching children how to resist digital threats.

Children of missionaries (often called missionary kids or MKs) occupy an understudied place in practical theology, despite their outsized influence on the theological academy and the church. This paper examines storytelling practices among MKs at a Christian summer camp, asking how these practices help MKs make theological sense of their cross-cultural lives. Drawing on ethnographic research, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews, it argues that the camp's formal and informal storytelling practices facilitate identity construction by immersing participants in a community of others who share similar experiences of migration and cross-cultural living. More specifically, MKs learn to interpret their own experiences by listening to other MKs narrate theirs, "apprenticed" by older peers into shared practices of meaning-making. The paper concludes by asking what kind of theological future becomes possible when we not only listen to young people's stories, but help them tell those stories well.

This study rethinks Christian asceticism through the lens of hunger, drawing on Simone Weil’s work. For Weil, hunger is not something to be overcome but a concrete exposure of human vulnerability, where bodily need, spiritual truth, and ethical responsibility converge. The paper proceeds in three parts. The first section situates her view of renunciation—not as a pursuit of spiritual advantage but as relinquishing all that is not grace—within the history of ascetic mastery, emphasizing consent to human vulnerability. The second section examines Weil’s account of hunger on multiple interrelated levels: as a physical reality, as an expression of desire, and as a source of ethical awareness. The third section proposes a reimagined Christian asceticism that distinguishes genuine need from manufactured appetite, reorients practice from mastery toward consent, and extends personal discipline to an awareness of structural oppression and systemic injustice.

Peter Thiel states that death is a problem to be solved. He routinely frames his transhumanist ideas through theological language, highlighting resonances between his vision of immortality and the Christian eschatological body. But beyond an external motivator for innovation, there is little room in Thiel’s proposal for dying one’s own death; that is, our deaths do not seem to inform us about life, finitude, or even mortality itself. As such, this paper offers a pedagogical interpretation of death by way of the ascetical rule of John Climacus. Through a constructive reading of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, I demonstrate that death operates paradoxically for Climacus, by inverting expectations on spiritual maturity with the goal of constituting the ascetic’s relation to the world by reorienting them back to their finitude. 

This paper examines Emmanuiel Mounier’s account of personalist asceticism as a social practice. Mounier articulates the human as a relational being, irreducible to her social, historical conditioning and yet organically and constitutively embedded within living communities. Asceticism, in his view, becomes the practice by which the human becomes fully personal and creates healthy social bonds. In our precarious ecological and capitalist moment where human beings are too easily reduced to producers and consumers, I argue that Mounier offers a vision of ascetic practice that can synthesize the hopes for personal flourishing with social justice. This demands a reconceptualization of asceticism and refusal not as an acceptance of lack or as a necessary sacrifice but as the very path to personal flourishing and, thus, social wholeness.

This paper engages apocalypse not as genre, ideology, or eschatology, but as praxis. Drawing the three-fold way of perfection from the Christian spiritual tradition, it proposes an account of the apocalyptic as a renunciation of the world as it is, an imaginative vision of the world as it might be, and a practice of creaturely care in the meantime. In the practices of purgation (lament, renunciation, conversion), illumination (vision, imagination, thanksgiving), and unity (care, indifference, discernment, praise), apocalyptic praxis allows Christian to engage the endings of the world with hope. Under such a description, the apocalyptic is less a predictive tool and more a spiritual practice. And in this way, apocalyptic praxis becomes a guide and challenge for Christian spirituality as the world seems to be ending.