In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

A Jain anti-animal sacrifice activist stumbling over an overgrown ancient sacred site and kick- starting a whole new genre of travel writing. A remote hilltop rock temple dedicated to Āṭinātar-Ṛṣabha turning into the central pilgrimage site for the Jains of the Tamil-speaking region. An anti-mining protest event sparking the creation of ecologically inspired walks across the Jain landscape of the hills surrounding Madurai. This talk will take these three moments in the history of the Jain community of the Tamil-speaking region to reflect on visions for the reclaiming of spaces that help re-create a Jain landscape out of a scenario of marginalisation, destruction, and endangerment. The remembered, imagined, and projected voyage up the mountain will confront both larger historical practices of Jain pilgrimage and concrete cases of reconfiguration in a period crucial for the transformation of the diverse communities practising Jainism in contemporary Tamil Nadu.

Contemporary Jain laymen take great pride in their organisation of pilgrimages. To plan a pilgrimage is to partake in the actions associated with the great saṅghpatis of old, whose lavish and extraordinary pilgrimage arrangements are the stuff of legend. But even for lower-middle and middle-class Jain laymen, saṅghpati narratives create a template of Jain masculinity from which Jain laymen draw inspiration for their choice of Jain participation. Contemporary laymen used this term in the abstract to describe men who led pilgrimages and made arrangements for Jain processions. The saṅghpati illuminates the merchant skills of diplomacy, management and organisation, knowledge of resources, maintaining a network of connections, and strategic planning. But these skills matter not just for garnering the coveted status as a saṅghpati but also as a mark of masculine leadership and management skills. Thus, Jain pilgrimage provides a site for the creation of a new form of saṅghpati.

This paper examines the emergence of Bhomiyā Jī Mahārāja, the guardian deity at the foothill of Śikharajī (Pārasnātha Hill), and situates his worship within longer histories of landholding, protection, and mediated access to the mountain. While Śikharajī is the most revered Jain tīrtha, sanctified by the liberation of twenty tīrthaṅkaras, ascent has historically required negotiation with territorial authorities. Drawing on colonial revenue records, court cases, Jain tīrthamālā literature, and vernacular pamphlets, the paper traces how guardianship shifted from the Bhuiyan Raja of Palganj under the ghatwālī tenure system to institutional Jain trusts in the colonial and postcolonial periods. I argue that Bhomiyā Jī does not replace earlier intermediaries but condenses their functions into a divine form. His shrine materialises structural continuities in authority even as legal regimes transformed property, sovereignty, and recognition, foregrounding questions of Adivasi dispossession and sacred access.

The paper examines how, for Śvetāmbara Mūrtipūjaka Jains, a tīrthayātrā (pilgrimage) can be performed through bhāva ('cultivated action-disposition') without visiting a physical tīrthakṣetra—a practice called bhāvayātrā. This is often undertaken using a tīrtha paṭa, an abstract cartographic map of pilgrimage places. The paper explores the semantic and phenomenological dimensions of bhāva. It particularly examines how bhāva operates as an enabler of learning, cultivation, and dispositional transformation in practice and how it constitutes actions. It also examines how tīrtha paṭa allows realisation of place without physical presence. Analysing the Caityavandana Sūtras, contemporary Gujarati Jain texts, and practitioners’ oral histories to frame bhāvayātrā, the paper challenges reductive translations of bhāva as ‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’ and reconstrues it as ‘cultivated action-disposition’. It argues that bhāvayātrā enables pilgrims to reconfigure their dispositions towards the qualities of tīrthaṅkaras, foregrounding bhāva as a generative category for understanding tīrthayātrā in the Śvetāmbara Mūrtipūjaka Jain tradition.

This panel engages Jonathan Anderson’s forthcoming book, The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025), a major contribution to contemporary debates at the intersection of art history, religious studies, and theology. Anderson argues that religion—particularly theology—has been rendered functionally invisible within dominant narratives of modern and contemporary art. Through historiographical analysis and close readings, he proposes new methodological approaches for interpreting contemporary art in more rigorous dialogue with theology. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines, this roundtable examines the book’s central claims, its implications for art-historical method, and the broader question of whether “contemporary art and religion” can be understood as a coherent field. Panelists will address key tensions concerning theology, criticism, judgment, and disciplinary boundaries. The discussion concludes with Anderson’s response, opening a broader conversation about the future of art history and religion.

This paper responds to The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025), affirming its landmark demonstration that religion remains present in contemporary art despite its marginalization within academic interpretation. While endorsing the book’s historiographical rigor and methodological clarity, the paper raises two broader questions: How much authority do academic interpretations of contemporary art retain in the algorithm-driven attention economy? And is the category of “religion” sufficient to address the deeper aesthetic and metaphysical assumptions shaping contemporary art institutions? Focusing on the book’s analysis of Kris Martin’s Altar, the paper argues that institutional validation often favors reductive and disenchanted forms of religious art while marginalizing works grounded in beauty and metaphysical richness. It asks whether making religion visible in interpretation is enough—or whether contemporary art must also confront its underlying commitments to disenchantment.

This paper responds to The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025), a landmark study that diagnoses religion’s marginalization in modern art history and proposes theology as an interpretive discourse for art criticism. While affirming the book’s monumental historiographical and methodological achievements, the response argues that certain forms of theology remain “invisible” within its framework—particularly poetic, political, and experimental theologies shaped by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin. It questions whether theology should function solely as a disciplined interpretive method or also as a creative, constitutive discourse akin to art criticism itself. By examining Benjamin’s images of theology and his relationship to Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the paper suggests alternative models of theological engagement with art that move beyond close reading toward companionate and generative encounters. The aim is not to critique but to extend the field the book so compellingly maps.

This presentation responds to Jonathan A. Anderson’s The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025), a landmark study that reframes contemporary art’s engagement with religion and theology. While Anderson argues that theology has been rendered hermeneutically invisible within dominant art-historical narratives, this response explores the political stakes of that claim. If contemporary art history prioritizes power, ideology, and critique, might political and liberation theologies provide a more direct point of contact than Anderson’s broader theological horizon? Focusing on Anderson’s analysis of Kris Martin’s Altar, the presentation asks whether theological interpretation can persuade secular art historians or whether it risks speaking primarily to theology itself. By pressing the question of whether the theological horizon is already a political horizon, this session extends Anderson’s field-defining intervention and probes the future of contemporary art and religion as an interdisciplinary domain.

This paper responds to four critical reviews of The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025). Addressing questions about interpretive communities, the political and theological horizons, the status of theology as discourse, and the risk of totalization, it clarifies the book’s central claims and corrects several misunderstandings. The theological horizon is presented not as a disciplinary enclosure or ontotheological system, but as a hermeneutical field of questioning open wherever the question of God remains live. The response defends the dialogical, nontotalizing aims of the project and reiterates that its purpose is to expand contemporary art history’s interpretive resources rather than to supplant them. Ultimately, the paper argues that the book’s value lies in its capacity to provoke further inquiry, sustaining rigorous dialogue about religion’s visibility and intelligibility within contemporary art discourse.

The Catholic Church, since Vatican II, has sought to rediscover its identity in its relationships with other religions. Indeed, Vatican II dedicated an entire document to this matter and urged its members to dialogue with believers of other religions. This dialogue is more crucial to the church in Asia, where Christians are the minority among believers of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, etc. In Vietnam, the Catholics comprise a small number of the population, while the majority are Buddhists. No matter how crucial Buddhist-Catholic dialogue is for the existence of the Church, the Catholic Church in Vietnam remains static. This paper examines the gap between the teachings and practice of the Vietnamese Catholic Church in Buddhist-Christian dialogue and explores how dialogue could be a new way of being church in Vietnam. I approach this by illustrating the reasons for Buddhist-Christian dialogue, proposing some methods of dialogue as suggested by magisterial teaching, and concluding with a prediction of its fruits and limits, along with suggestions for ways forward. 

What happens when a tradition that understands itself as continuous across two millennia becomes a diaspora tradition by necessity? I argue that American Coptic Orthodoxy functions as a decontextualized ancient Christianity that must renegotiate identity, authority, and transmission as it is re-embedded in U.S. religious, cultural, and institutional environments. Treating the diaspora parish as a primary laboratory rather than a secondary extension of “Egyptian” Christianity, I examine how tradition is tested and rearticulated through language choice (Coptic/Arabic/English), liturgical pedagogy, communal memory, and pastoral strategies for a multilingual, multi-generational community. Focusing on temporality, I show how appeals to antiquity (saints, martyrdom, monastic ideals) authorize continuity while selective adaptation (catechesis, parish organization, English worship) enables an imaginable intelligible future.

Technological advances have reshaped relationships, identity, and religious life, challenging Orthodox parishes to reclaim the irreplaceable value of embodied communion in an algorithm-driven culture. Digital “hyper-personalization” traps individuals in ideological echo chambers; online American Orthodoxy has as supposed aura of toxic masculinity that attracts some young male converts. Online influencers and content creators form para-ecclesial authorities, competing with parish clergy in defining Orthodox identity.

Yet many converts first drawn in by online personalities eventually distance themselves from them as they become rooted in real parish life. Immersion in a living community reduces reliance on virtual religious spaces and softens ideological rigidity. Some arrive expecting an anti-liberal or anti-Western refuge, especially regarding gender and authority, but parish reality often reveals authentic communion instead, being embraced as persons and not reduced to demographic categories (male, conservative). Unlike the virtual space, the parish is an embodied, merciful, and reconciled community. 

Recent research in Finland suggests a growing interest in Christianity among some groups of young men, challenging assumptions about linear religious decline and the marginal relevance of the church for younger generations. This paper examines the factors that attract young men to Christianity and explores what these attractions reveal about implicit ecclesiologies and emerging visions of the church’s future. The analysis draws on in-depth interviews with 30 young Christian men conducted in 2024–2025 and employs template analysis to identify recurring themes in how participants narrate meaning, community, tradition, and institutional credibility. The findings suggest that young men approach Christianity not primarily as a fixed authority, but as a moral, relational, and symbolic space whose legitimacy depends on authenticity, fairness, and continuity. The paper argues that young men’s selective engagements with Christianity illuminate changing expectations of ecclesial belonging and authority, offering important insights for ecclesiological reflection on generational change and the future of the church.

Religious identity has long been shown to shape political attitudes in the United States, with Evangelical or Born-Again Christians often treated as a single political category. Yet emerging evidence suggests that charismatic and Pentecostal beliefs increasingly characterize the future demographic profile of American evangelicalism. Drawing on original survey research conducted in cooperation with the Public Religion Research Institute, this paper parses charismatic identity from broader evangelical affiliation by measuring charismatic practices such as prophecy, divine healing, and speaking in tongues. Using insights from Social Identity Theory (SIT) and Self-Categorization Theory (SCT), the study analyzes how charismatic practices contribute to the development of group consciousness and political attitudes. Across three national surveys conducted in 2023 and 2024, charismatic respondents emerge as younger and more racially diverse than non-charismatic evangelicals while also exhibiting distinctive perceptions of cultural threat and democratic authority—patterns that are critical for understanding the political future of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity.

This paper explores the relationship between the discipline of American history and the study of Pentecostalism, particularly as it relates to the literature on the rise of the Religious Right and conservative evangelical Christianity. Since the 1990s, but accelerating since the presidency of George W. Bush, historians have turned their attention to the emergence of the Religious Right and the politicization of evangelical Christianity across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet, Pentecostals and charismatics, with a few notable exceptions, have remained marginal figures within this broader historiographical turn. It examines this absence with particular attention to the writing and development of two fields: how the study of the Religious Right took place within the American historical profession and how American Pentecostal historiography emerged with a distinct reluctance to engage in political questions. 

This paper argues for describing the Pentecostal doctrine of divine healing as inherently utopian. Beginning with the historical account of Zion City, a failed Pentecostal utopia, this paper traces an aesthetic representation of healing that sought racial equality and yet was vulnerable to white supremacy. This vulnerability culminated in the fatal exorcism of Letitia Greenhaulgh, a resident suffering from paralysis. An application of Fredric Jameson’s theory of utopia reveals Zion’s ambiguous relationship to race as ideological. After examining prominent anti-utopian political theory of the 20th century, the paper demonstrates the impossibility of completely affirming or negating Pentecostalism’s Utopianism. The conclusion urges future representations of Pentecostalism to recognize the presence of healing ideology in the movement to best account for its past and future relationship to democracy.

This paper uses Occupy Candler— the occupation of Candler School of Theology from April 25-28, 2024 as part of the nationwide movement for divestment from the Israeli regime on college campuses—as a case study to examine how various conceptualizations of time are experienced by, and help orient, collectives as they imagine and fight for alternative futures. Written by a co-organizer and spokesperson for Occupy Candler, this paper engages personal narrative and media transcripts alongside various conceptualizations of time in order to examine the ways time moves differently during moments of intense disruption as part of struggles for liberation. 

This essay argues that contemporary AI society should be understood not simply as a new phase of automation, but as the generalization of a financialized regime of futurity. Reading Maia’s (2022) Trading Futures alongside Benjamin Bratton’s account of planetary computation (2015), I develop the concept of algorithmic eschatology. Maia shows how financialized capitalism captures the future by commodifying uncertainty and monopolizing the means of prediction. Bratton identifies the infrastructural conditions under which predictive operations become socially ambient rather than sectorally financial. Taken together, they illuminate a regime in which socially consequential futures are rendered as prediction problems, operationalized in allocative institutions, and recursively fed back into present conduct. The result is a differential distribution of futurity: some actors hedge and monetize uncertainty, while others encounter the future through scores, ratings, and preemptive constraints. AI society, I argue, colonizes financialized futurity into algorithmic infrastructure. 

We live today amidst a crisis of eschatology. That is to say, we lack the capacity to speak of, envision, and thus call into being, a novel future that breaks with our present conditions. How we conceive of the trajectory of history and the end of time in both theological scholarship and our social imaginary more broadly, is co-constitutive with the colonial project and its afterlife: the endless march of capitalist extraction, transforming life into commodity for profit. This paper posits that Christian eschatological discourse is entangled with the structures of capitalist and neoliberal politics. In order to address this crisis, theological scholarship must break with the dominant frames of eschatology, specifically atemporal, individual and realized eschatology logics. In response this paper offers an alternative conception of time and history through examining the unrealized promise of the apocalyptic, anti-capitalist eschatology of Ignacio Ellacuría. 

Do the theological roots of liberation psychology matter? Psychological literature that draws on Ignacio Martín-Baró’s contributions often gives vague or perfunctory treatment to his theological commitments, or even dismisses them outright. This paper aims to illuminate the significance of Martín-Baró’s theology by considering his innovative psychological work in the context of the thought and praxis of his community: the UCA Jesuits, including philosopher-theologian Ignacio Ellacuría. This interdisciplinary paper analyzes Martín-Baró’s interventions in light of Ellacuría's theology. I argue that liberative work in psychology today will benefit from attention to the theological foundations of Martín-Baró’s work, particularly his understanding of historical reality as transcendent, that is, open, dynamic, and disclosive of God’s presence. Recognizing this foundation of Martín-Baró’s psychology can help us to imagine and to open further spaces of dialogue between psychology and theology toward a shared goal of human liberation.