This bilingual (English/Spanish) roundtable brings together scholars of religion to critically examine the category of “costumbre” as it is used in historical and contemporary context across Mesoamerica. Rooted in Spanish legal traditions, the term “costumbre” (lit. “custom”) has come to refer to the customary ritual practices, modes of social organization, and belief systems of Indigenous communities across the continent. Like other terms that are used in parallel with “religion” and its cognates, costumbre is a contested term that denotes something that is religion-like without explicitly being classed as “religious.” This critical investigation of how “costumbre” has variously been discursively framed and deployed over the last 500 years aims to prompt scholars to rethink the question of how “religion” and “religions” are configured from the vantage point of Indigenous Americans’ efforts to resist and reconfigure the imposition of those categories from the colonial period through the present.
In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book
The 2026 November Annual Meeting in Denver, CO: Friday, November 20 - Tuesday, November 24. All times are listed in Mountain Time Zone. For more information about the November Annual Meeting, co-hosted with the Society of Biblical Literature, click here.
Please note that this is the preliminary schedule and is subject to change. We anticipate a mostly final schedule in mid-August. If you have any questions, please contact annualmeeting@aarweb.org. For Other Events, your event is not confirmed until you received notification from AAR staff.
This bilingual (English/Spanish) roundtable brings together scholars of religion to critically examine the category of “costumbre” as it is used in historical and contemporary context across Mesoamerica. Rooted in Spanish legal traditions, the term “costumbre” (lit. “custom”) has come to refer to the customary ritual practices, modes of social organization, and belief systems of Indigenous communities across the continent. Like other terms that are used in parallel with “religion” and its cognates, costumbre is a contested term that denotes something that is religion-like without explicitly being classed as “religious.” This critical investigation of how “costumbre” has variously been discursively framed and deployed over the last 500 years aims to prompt scholars to rethink the question of how “religion” and “religions” are configured from the vantage point of Indigenous Americans’ efforts to resist and reconfigure the imposition of those categories from the colonial period through the present.
Although casual observers often dismiss Asian American religious communities as inward-looking and conservative, the reality is that Asian American religious communities across the country are drawing on their faith to mobilize creative responses to a wide array of pressing social, political, and economic challenges. In doing so, they are often rooting their efforts in values of solidarity and diversity, intentionally pursuing their work in collaboration with people who are different from themselves. What does this type of coalitional justice work look like in practice? And what are the possibilities and perils of trying to work across boundaries of social difference in order to transform our world? This roundtable discussion offers a critical examination of six examples of contemporary faith-based justice work conducted by Asian American religious communities committed to bridging differences and working in coalition amid polarized and politically fraught times.s
Evangelicals have long been active agents in cultural production through art, media, and technology. This session examines the relationship between cultural production, visions of the future, and evangelical spirituality and theology. The papers engage a diverse range of topics—including the body, artificial intelligence, and eschatological imaginaries of heaven and hell—to analyze how competing visions of the future shape evangelical thought and practice in the present.
Papers
In the 1970s, faculty in the Art Department at Wheaton College (IL) engaged in a decade-long debate over the appropriateness of displaying artwork that featured the nude body in public campus exhibitions. Two studio art professors, Alva Steffler and Miriam Hunter, drove the discussion. Steffler felt Christians should embrace Biblical eroticism and explored this theme through his own abstract sculptures. Hunter, morally conservative and fearful of secularism’s threats to Christendom’s future, “literalized” artworks with nudity by denying multi-valent meaning and insisting on purely anatomical interpretations. I argue that this debate, which extended beyond the art department and engaged the broader campus community, reveals a fundamental tension between the nature of American evangelicalism and the visual arts: evangelicals crave certainty, but visual art inherently resists definitive meaning.
This work of this paper is to examine how Evangelical media visualizes the landscape of heaven and what these depictions reveal about theological and cultural aspirations. In doing so, it argues that Evangelical depictions of the heavenly topographies consistently present deeply anthropocentric theologies in which heavenly land remains ordered under human-oriented dominion. The paper turns to three primary examples, a Trinity Broadcast Network “Praise the Lord!” soundstage, the film Heaven Is for Real, and the film The Shack. The study analyzes how lawns, parks, and wilderness are imagined in each of these digital "heavenscapes." These landscapes encode distinct ideals: prosperity and privatized wealth, child-centered safety and family values, and controlled pastoral freedom. Together, they reveal an anthropocentric Evangelical dominionist theology, one which impacts more than the beyond, but touches the here, now, and immediate future.
The evangelistic drama Heaven’s Gates & Hell’s Flames (HGHF) promises audiences a glimpse of “what happens one second after you take your last breath.” I argue that HGHF capitalizes on audiences’ simultaneous fears and hopes for their afterlife future by cultivating affective experiences to instill a distinct soteriological message and teach appropriate moral behavior. Originating as a camp ministry in the late 1970s and now performed globally through Reality Outreach Ministries, HGHF dramatizes scenes of sudden death and final judgment in which characters are welcomed into heaven or dragged into hell. By rapidly switching between the two extreme affective registers of hope and fear, HGHF allows audiences to vicariously experience both their anticipation and anxiety for the afterlife. Drawing on my ethnographic research at rehearsals, prayer meetings, and performances, I show how these imagined futures are embodied and repeatedly reenacted, shaping evangelical understandings of salvation, morality, and behavior in everyday life.
A reading of biblical passages like Rev 7:9-17 as a checklist of what must happen to bring about the apocalypse is an ethical hermeneutic that some scholars call consequentialism—the ends justify the means, in this case, the means of using AI to reach "the nations." AI alignment with human good is systemically, developmentally, and theoretically problematic and yet AI proves incredibly influential in an age in which information flow is power. There is no good news of Christian witness when our ethic is simply to reach as many people as possible with information despite the harm of our methods. Such consequentialism aligns evangelical Christians with a culture of power and the politics of Babylon. Creative imaginings of better alignment for evangelical readers may by sustained by post-conservative theological interpretations of apocalyptic scripture.
This co-sponsored, interactive panel explores how disabled experience shapes methodology and lived participation in qualitative research processes related to religion and theology. Panelists will offer reflections on the intersections of their disability experience with: a) their roles as researchers (and/or research subjects), b) approaches to methodological choices, and c) research outcomes.
Ethical reflection is often concerned with responsible action—identifying problems, imagining alternatives, and promoting steps to achieve a brighter future. But we are in a moment that is characterized by unpredictability, a bombardment of moral demands, and pervasive harms. Trauma and crisis fatigue make it difficult for many people to imagine anything beyond survival. These papers explore how the field of religious ethics helps us understand and respond to this felt lack of agency. Do the experiences of the traumatized, demoralized, and compassion-fatigued complicate existing moral paradigms? What does responsibility look like when one’s capacity to respond has been overwhelmed? Do we need to be able to envision a better world to withstand the crises around us?
Papers
This paper interrogates the moral meanings of enduring historical crises for agents caught in their wake. It begins with Christina Sharpe’s insight that the evil of chattel slavery adheres recalcitrantly to contemporary agents; it continues to affect us and risks depleting our moral capacities. I consider three alternative conceptions of this affective grip of purportedly irreparable evils (Bordieuan habitus, Deleuzian affect, and neo-phenomenological atmospheres) before outlining a constructive account of atmospheric adhesion. This reveals the paradoxical predicament of creatures seized by an infinite demand to repair evils that exceed our capacities to respond adequately. But it also indicates the more primordial, pathic dimension to agency that Bernhard Waldenfels’s “responsive ethics” attempts to articulate. I argue that recent theological formulations of this lived-bodily pathos present a picture of moral agency that remains intact with even a clear-eyed view of the gratuitous threats of agential depletion posed by irreparable evils.
This paper will explore the concept of “good boundaries,” particularly as they relate to ethical responses to the ongoing homelessness crisis in the United States. This paper will consider how blanket understandings of good boundaries as virtuous can shape interactions between housed and unhoused people in unhelpful ways that ignore the complexity of people’s circumstances and further perpetuate economic segregation. Drawing from sources in Christian ethics as well as ongoing ethnographic research in a Christian church that prioritizes fostering community inclusive of its unhoused neighbors, this paper will explore how relationships across class differences nurture our ability to imagine more mutually beneficial ways of living well together. This paper will consider the limits and possibilities in a particular community’s practices of relationally discerned and ever-evolving boundaries, offering insight with broader implications for how ethical discernment within communities can help us to envision our collective well-being in the face of crises.
This paper turns to Thomas Aquinas’s moral anthropology and theory of emotion to explore the felt lack of agency associated with feelings of despair. I argue that a distinction between a felt lack of moral agency and a diminished agency to put one’s moral values into action enables us to consider how quotidian activities, such as reading or watching news media, might cause two different yet related forms of moral injury. I begin by developing a working definition of moral injury with reference Joseph Wiinikka-Lyndon’s (2021) Murdochian account. I then use the ethical theory of Thomas Aquinas to offer a distinction between moral feeling and moral agency. I contend that this distinction aligns with forms of moral injury which I refer to as “moral injury-as-feeling” and “moral injury-as-diminished agency.” This distinction draws attention to the importance of daily practices to prevent feelings of despair from developing into habits of despair.
Ecological crises now displace growing numbers of individuals and communities. Many seek refuge in societies that greet them with ambivalence or hostility. Public discourse frequently minimizes their suffering. This paper examines how constant crisis overwhelms individual and institutional moral capacity, producing a widespread sense of diminished agency among both displaced populations and those who encounter them. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s concept of “matter out of place,” I show how dominant narratives render displaced suffering morally illegible, deepening the trauma of exclusion. I analyze mutual aid food-sharing initiatives as counter-rituals that respond to exhaustion by creating spaces for collective action. These gatherings reject bureaucratic state aid and cultivate a horizontal ethos of kinship. By transforming public spaces into temporary commons, shared meals restore the capacity to respond through tangible forms of solidarity in the present.
This panel will explore the significance of Simon Conway Morris’s work for the field of science and religion. A particular focus will be the bearing of his ground-breaking work on evolutionary convergence for how we understand such questions as the directionality or purposefulness of evolution, human uniqueness, and whether divine providence is compatible with the naturalistic and putatively ‘blind’ mechanisms of evolutionary change. Simon Conway Morris will provide a response.
Respondent
This session explores the struggles with imagining the futures of humans and more-than-human animals amid rising fascism, genocide, and ecological disaster. The first paper examines moments in biblical interpretation where readers thought with ravens, given these birds' frequent presence in depictions of famine, flood, and the destruction of civilizations. The second paper proposes a non-anthropocentric Jewish ecotheology by viewing sacrifice as an interspecies transformation that can foster an imagination reworking human-animal relations to rethink the concept of perfection. The third paper investigates dehumanization and animalization through social psychological research, which shows strong links between perceived human-animal divisions and dehumanizing beliefs toward out-groups. The fourth paper engages post-humanist thought to argue that unearthing and burying 'unhuman” others (both racialized and speciated) is essential to envisioning a posthuman path towards flourishing.
Papers
In the Hebrew Bible, depictions of famine, flood, and the destruction of civilizations are haunted by the presence of ravens. As Jewish and Christian interpreters read these texts, they found the birds who showed up at these sites of death “good to think with.” They considered ravens as they contemplated the pressures of food scarcity in the story of Elijah or the deaths that follow rising waters in the story of Noah. These ravens were neither simple victims nor passive witnesses to these catastrophic events; instead, like the human characters in these stories, they often played active roles in the devastation. This paper examines places in the history of biblical interpretation in which readers thought with ravens as they read these scenes of ecological destruction or precarity, sometimes seeing ravens as a threat to their own survival and other times as a mirror to the devastating impacts of their own hungers and predations.
Are the sources of modern Jewish thought capable of theorizing a planetary politics? This paper suggests a non-anthropocentric Jewish ecotheology by conceptualizing sacrifice as interspecies transformation. An interpretive tradition developed by medieval and modern Jewish thinkers understands biblical sacrifice as a sacrament symbolizing apotheosis. Unexpectedly, human union with the Divine opens up interspecies possibility. Thinking beyond the human becomes possible because apotheosis is contingent upon the human offerant’s identification with the sacrificial animal. What is the nature of this “identification”? In what ways are human and more-than-human life bound together by their shared materiality? And what is the fate of this materiality? This paper populates an interspecies sacrificial imagination that reworks human-critter relations to reimagine the nature of perfection.
Behind every horror of genocide, war, or other similar acts of shocking violence are the mental and social frameworks that justify such actions. Among the most potent of these justifications is the language and logic of dehumanization. This paper incorporates social psychological research over the last decade which has demonstrated strong links between perceived Human-Animal division and dehumanizing beliefs towards human out-groups. Critically, this research finds that education about animal-human similarities reduces belief in a strong Human-Animal divide, while also providing the knock-on effect of reducing out-group dehumanization. These insights introduce a key litmus test for theologians: to what degree does the theology under question reinforce rigid (and hierarchical) categorizations between human and animal? This paper concludes by applying this test to common interpretations of the imago Dei, suggesting that even well-intentioned anthropocentric definitions may mistakenly cause harm to all animals, including Homo sapiens.
The politics of our moment lurch toward future(s) of climate disruption, mass extinction, global warfare, and social collapse with louder and louder denunciations, proclamations, and aggrandizements—nihilistic forms of nostalgia. If we recognize, building on Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, that the apocalyptic roar of “anthropos” rushing headlong toward collapse has long been a voice that relies on un-earthing and burying of “unhuman” others (in both a racialized and speciated sense), perhaps the time has come to imagine a posthuman offramp that places trust in meaningful silences.
Respondent
This panel explores how religious symbols, rituals, and stories influence and challenge visions of the future across different contexts and traditions. Using case studies from modern Southeast Asia, Japanese literature, and Hindu Purāṇas, the papers examine how religious language and imagery shape futures. The first paper investigates floral labor in Bangkok, where Buddhist devotional garlands reflect on class insecurity and new connections between humans and flowers. The second paper discusses Hikaru Okuizumi’s The Night to Kill a Snake (1992), suggesting that its use of religious snake imagery—from Shinto myth to Genesis—disrupts narrative flow and highlights the fragility of religious futures. The third paper examines Vaiṣṇava Purāṇic cosmology, connecting cyclical time and avatāras to contemporary Hindu discussions of climate change and apocalyptic visions. Overall, the papers present how flowers, serpents, and avatars of sci-fi novels imagine religious futures.
Papers
In contemporary Bangkok, flowers are instrumental to religious life. Buddhists daily offer fresh garlands to temples to accrue merit and to ask deities for blessings. But over the past fifty years, the craftspeople who make these garlands have been forcibly removed from the city, deemed an aesthetic “blight” to the modern landscape. What is the future of these workers in a city that at once needs them and discards them? I answer this question by analyzing an eight-tiered fresh flower chandelier created by my interlocutor, a queer flower artist, which premiered at Singapore’s international art fair in 2025. Lowering the chandelier to the ground, the garlands on the bottom broke to provide a soft bed for more expensive garlands; lower-class workers are breaking under the weight of class inequality. The future is not hopeless. Through developing expansive and intimate relationships with flowers, Bangkokians can cultivate stronger floral and human solidarities.
This paper examines how Hikaru Okuizumi’s novella The Night to Kill a Snake (1992) destabilizes religiously mediated futures—often sustained by cohesive narrative structures—by proliferating religious imagery to the point where narrativity itself collapses. Through free association, the text disperses snake metaphors drawn from Shinto myth, Genesis, Greek legend, and Japanese imperial symbolism without allowing them to converge into symbolic resolution. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s account of modern literature as repetitive language without securing memory, this paper argues that the novella’s proliferating religious imagery exposes the fragility underlying both religious futurity and interpretive desire. As images multiply, the protagonist’s imagined future unravels, and the reader’s interpretive expectations are similarly frustrated. Literary art here neither redeems nor resolves; instead, it reveals futurity as radically open, suspended within the unsettling repetition of religious language itself.
This paper studies visions of the future, apocalyptic imagination and discourses on climate change in Hindu theistic traditions as revealed in the Vaishnava Puranas (4-18 c.CE). Hindu imagination sees time as cyclic, and not linear, and understands the cyclic creation and dissolution of the universe as a repetitive and normal process that is good, desired and necessary. In the Vaishnava tradition, Vishnu and his avataras, or bodily descents, in which he incarnates in various anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic forms, comes down to earth in order to save humankind from natural calamities and disasters, such as floods, draughts, etc. Similarly, the proliferation of contemporary discourses on the future, climate change, are often immersed in Hindu mythology and religious culture, and cannot be ignored when discussing the issues of apocalyptic imagination and climate change in Hindu traditions. Thus, my talk seeks to explore the complex links between visions of the future, apocalyptic imagination, the mythologizing of the divine, and the mythologizing of contemporary cultural and religious discourses on climate change.
Respondent
Engaging the AAR theme of futures, this panel examines how religious traditions construct, regulate, and reimagine bodies across contexts shaped by gender, age, ecology, and power. The papers move from Islamic legal and devotional discourses on aging female bodies, to Indigenous feminist engagements with Choctaw ceremonial life and ecological kinship, to Vietnamese Catholic women negotiating layered patriarchies, and to a theological critique of fatphobia as a form of structural sin within Christian history. Across these papers, the body emerges as a site where norms are enforced but also contested and transformed. Each paper identifies resources within tradition—legal, ritual, communal, and theological—that enable alternative futures grounded in dignity, relationality, and justice. By foregrounding embodied experience and structural critique, the panel advances a vision of religious futures attentive to repair, survivance, and institutional accountability.
Papers
Scholarship on religion and the body has examined sexuality, purity, and bodily discipline but rarely considers how aging transforms the moral classification of bodies. This paper argues that Islamic traditions regulated female embodiment across the life course by distinguishing between the sexually disruptive body of the young woman and the desexualized body of the elderly woman. Drawing on Islamic legal discourse, waqf endowments, and Sufi hagiography, it shows how aging reconfigured norms governing women’s visibility, mobility, and bodily interaction. Once no longer associated with fitna, elderly women could appear in courts, establish endowments, and participate in devotional life, revealing how regimes of purity and bodily discipline shifted across the life course.
As we collectively imagine future/s, insights from the Choctaw Green Corn Ceremony inspire reconnection with Mother Earth, invigorate rematriation (Maracle 1988), attend to the wisdom of our ancestors, and encourage harmonious relationships. From an Indigenous feminist perspective, hopeful future/s require practices of culture-keeping such as storytelling, which demand the active presence of the community. Prior to removal from the sacred homeland of the Choctaws, the Green Corn Ceremony was the epicenter of social and spiritual celebrations (Pesantubbee 2005). This paper will explore the key elements of this tradition that relate to kinship with Mother Earth and Father Sky, gratitude for harvest, renewal of the sun, reminder of death, ecological importance of corn, and matrilineal leadership. Choctaw wisdom from this tragically lost ceremony offers fruitful possibilities to shape survivance for our world and its creatures, including the human ones.
Vietnamese Catholicism is culturally influenced by a double layer of patriarchy: Confucianism and traditional interpretations of Catholicism. Confucian teachings, introduced through a thousand years of rule by the Chinese Han Dynasty, subordinate women in most aspects of life and have become the norm for Vietnamese social relationships and order. Likewise, the patriarchal mindset of the Catholic tradition and biblical passages that subordinate women not only reinforce but divinize Confucian thought and practices in Vietnam. Within this context, Vietnamese Catholic women struggle for equality to find their place in the Church. In this paper, I examine the gaps in gender equality and the context for women in the Vietnamese Church to recommend ways for the Vietnamese Church to improve gender equality, which I call ‘A Future in Negotiation.’ This analysis seeks to empower Vietnamese Catholic women to challenge patriarchal structures and establish a point for dialogue with male Church leaders.
Engaging with Sabrina Strings’ genealogical account of fatphobia’s Protestant origins, Michelle Lelwica’s analysis of diet culture as secularized soteriology, and clinical literature documenting weight stigma as a source of measurable trauma this paper argues that the chronic psychological harm fat people carry is not incidental to Christian theological history—it is, in significant part, its product. Applying this framework of social sin to establish the tradition’s structural complicity in the production of this harm, the paper further demonstrates that Christian communities function as sites of theological amplification, intensifying secular fat stigma through the doctrinal encoding of somatic hierarchy as moral and spiritual failure. The paper then turns constructively to retrieve tradition’s own resources as grounds for a reparative theological anthropology, refusing to condition human dignity on somatic conformity, concluding with an account of what institutional repentance requires. This is justice for fat people—liberation from oppressive systems rooted in religion.