In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper articulates an Augustinian account of hopeful expectation or future thinking that acknowledges its limits and is shaped by exemplarity to imagine and hope otherwise. 

First, I argue that since our imaginations of the future are conditioned by and indexed to our memory, Augustine’s use of consuetudo (i.e., "custom"/"habit") provides resources for thinking through the historical contingencies and burdened pasts that shape our present and future expectations. Then, I note how our hopeful expectations of the future are inextricably perspectival and limited given the distorting effects of temporality. I argue that this means we need resources and perspectives other than just our own to coherently imagine hopeful futures, particularly in pluralistic democracies. Finally, I suggest how Augustine’s sermons on the martyrs provides resources for reflection on how exemplarity cultivates imaginative excellences towards expecting and hoping for a liberatory future that exceeds what we alone remember and think possible.

MarthaNussbaum describes emotions as arising from our “neediness and lack of self-sufficiency.” They are eudaimonistic, occurring only in imperfect individuals pursuing the perfective good. Nussbaum observes this same understanding in Augustine’s account of affectivity.  In City of God, Augustine speaks of emotions – especially negative ones like grief and fear – as those which “belong to this life, not to the life we hope for in the future,” while simultaneously defending their moral significance, for responding rightly to good and evil. In this paper, I affirm Nussbaum’s understanding of Augustine’s treatment of earthly emotions, labeling them restless affectivity; then, I inquire about the possibility of emotion in the eschaton. Repeatedly, Augustine refers to love and joy as constitutive of eternal felicity. In contrast to the restless affectivity emerging from postlapsarian incompleteness, then, I propose another category of affectivity in Augustine’s account, that of restive affectivity, proceeding from fullness and completeness in grace. 

In this paper I argue that progressivist and realist Augustinians mischaracterize Augustine’s theology of hope in ways that diminish its significance for contemporary Christian ethics and politics. Progressivist Augustinians attribute Christian hope’s realization to God’s empowerment of creation’s historical advance, compromising its credibility when environmental and technological developments provoke profound pessimism. Realist Augustinians avoid this vulnerability by ascribing Christian hope’s realization to God’s supra-historical consummation of creation, yet they construe this hope primarily as consolation for inevitable moral failure and so strip the Christian life of its teleology. By contrast, I contend that Augustine presents hope as structured by two anticipations: God’s unilateral consummation of creation and humanity’s participation in that consummation. Moreover, since such participation is constituted by love, this second anticipation orders hope to love. Augustine’s account therefore sustains hope amid historical pessimism with the realists while summoning people to do what good they can with the progressivists.

This paper offers a case study in the history of Jewish assimilation through the lens of female Jewish experience. The apparent “success” of Jewish women’s conversions to Christianity in the nineteenth century obscures a more complex picture of Jewish women’s self-expression and religiosity. I argue that while a potent combination of antisemitism and misogyny led to increased conversions, Jewish women's participation in Christian spaces was a meaningful form of religious activity. 

Focusing on the writings of Rahel Varnhagen, the paper situates female conversion within broader debates about gender and Jewish assimilation. In the early nineteenth century, conversion was often considered more socially acceptable for Jewish women than for men. I argue that Varnhagen’s correspondences and eventual baptism engage Christian symbolic frameworks while remaining connected to Jewish identity, revealing conversion as a layered, dynamic process rather than a singular act of assimilation.

This paper examines Jain responses to Christian missionary critiques in late nineteenth-century India through the writings of the Jain monk Vijayānanda Sūri. Focusing on his Hindi text Īsāīmata Samīkṣā, written as a defence of Jainism against the Gujarati missionary tract Jainamatanī Parīkṣā, I explore how theological debate became a space for negotiating questions of religious identity, authority, and colonial power. In particular, the paper analyses Ātmārāmajī’s critiques of Christian theology, especially his engagement with the problem of evil and the attributes of the Christian God. I argue that these arguments, beyond defending doctrine, helped articulate a new Jain self-understanding within an emerging pan-Indian intellectual and political context. By situating Vijayānanda Sūri’s critiques of the problem of evil in the Christian context, the paper shows how theological criticism of Christianity became intertwined with broader anti-colonial concerns and contributed to the formation of a more self-conscious Jain identity in colonial India.

On 28 June 1825, in the Prussian town of Heiligenstadt, a young law student – a Jew – opened his mouth and took an oath. He recited the relevant creed, was brought to some water, and was pronounced baptised. Harry became Heinrich – Heinrich Heine. Little has been made of the legal dimensions of Heine’s conversion.  To acquire this, through a ritual Heine would create a new self, one which exited Jewish law and entered into German Recht ("Right" or "Law"). In this paper, I contend that what brought Heine into this act of conversion was his way of thinking about law: specifically, its liturgical and philosophical dimensions. I wish to propose that Heine saw the Bürgerrecht (bourgeois-Right or "law") that he gained access to in converting as comprised of both a spiritual Recht and a literary Recht.

Recent U.S. political and advocacy discourse, including statements by Donald Trump, has labeled violence in Nigeria a “Christian genocide.” This paper argues that the genocide frame does more than misdescribe events. It reorganizes them. Drawing on eight months of research in Southwestern Nigeria, I show how residents interpret killings and kidnappings through overlapping logics of banditry, land disputes, electoral rivalry, and state neglect rather than sectarian extermination. Violence is lived as chronic insecurity, not religious annihilation. Yet transnational advocacy networks and international media compress this complexity into a single story of persecution, hardening Christian Muslim boundaries that are often fluid in practice and redirecting moral claims and resources. The analysis combines Nigerian media analysis, discourse analysis of U.S. reports and advocacy materials, and event level conflict data from ACLED, and treats naming as a social process with measurable effects, challenging genocide narratives as analytic defaults in the sociology of religion.

In Latin America, growing religious diversity has prompted calls to reform secular governance and rethink the status of minorities. Yet narratives celebrating pluralism rarely interrogate the category of “religion” itself. In Mexico, a predominantly Catholic country, this produces a paradox: while evangelical Christians are framed as vulnerable minorities, other non-Christian groups remain invisible, especially those outside the world religions framework. This paper examines how religious discrimination as a discursive regime is operationalized in Mexico’s 2022 National Survey on Discrimination (ENADIS). Drawing on a recoding of the survey’s religious identity variable and a multidimensional measure of discrimination, we compare patterns of exclusion across religious and non-religious groups. Contrary to prevailing diagnoses, Evangelical-Protestants don’t show higher discrimination than the national average, while secular individuals and subaltern spiritualities report significantly higher levels. These findings challenge prevailing understandings of religious diversity and call for renewed scrutiny of how religion is manufactured, measured, and governed.

How do organizational actors evaluate different types of clergy misconduct? The way organizational leadership misconduct is perceived has consequences for how that misconduct will be addressed, tolerated, or in extreme cases, even perpetuated. Through a preregistered survey experiment with a nationally representative sample (n=1,124), I compare how religious and non-religious individuals evaluate different forms of clergy malfeasance. While non-religious respondents view clergy sexual misconduct as categorically more serious than clergy embezzlement, religious respondents show no significant difference in their evaluations of these violations' severity. Further, religiously active people display greater confidence in their congregation's ability to "do the right thing" following misconduct. Simultaneously, religiously active people are less likely to recommend that people cease donating to or attending the congregation even when allegations of their clergy's misconduct are confirmed. 

The dramatic decline of Catholic affiliation in Latin America has often been interpreted as evidence of secularization. Drawing on the 2026 Pew Research Center report, this paper challenges that conclusion by arguing that the region is not becoming less religious but more religiously plural. While Catholic identification has fallen sharply across six major countries, belief in God, prayer, and supernatural worldviews remain remarkably robust—even among the religiously unaffiliated. 

Rather than signaling disenchantment, these patterns suggest the collapse of Catholic monopoly and the rise of post-institutional spiritual repertoires. Integrating secularization theory, religious economy models, and lived religion frameworks, the paper contends that Latin America exemplifies a distinct form of religious modernity characterized by institutional disaffection and spiritual diversification. By reframing Catholic decline as pluralization, the study positions Latin America as a critical site for rethinking global theories of religion and modernity.

The paper analyzes the role of the Catholic Church as an intermediator between popular discontent and state power in Cuba from two perspectives. First, it analyzes how Catholic institutions in Cuba have exercised resistance to punitive state power directed at the people. Second, the paper examines the role of Catholic charities in the humanitarian crises that have unfolded in Cuba and discusses religiously motivated charity as an extended form of outreach into civil society by the Catholic Church. Overall, the paper argues that Catholic institutions have increasingly acquired moral authority and occupied a distinct role of intermediation between the people, their discontent, and punitive, authoritarian state power. They have done so by employing various forms of strategic engagement, highlighting the polyvocality and hybridity of Catholic socio-ethical presence under diverse political and social conditions. 

What does it mean to heal in exile? This paper examines ritual healing among displaced Cuban communities in Miami, where Santería and Catholicism coexist not as competing doctrines but as interwoven threads of a single moral ecology. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and Latine theological ethics, I argue that ritual healing is not merely therapeutic or sacramental; it is a liberative process through which the traumatized reclaim agency over body, memory, and future. Situating the paper at the intersection of liberation theology, Afro-Cuban religious studies, and trauma theory, I draw on Gutiérrez, Isasi-Díaz, and De La Torre alongside Beliso-De Jesús’s treatment of ritual as epistemology and Lederach’s moral imagination to trace four ways Santería ritual enacts healing for the displaced: relational restoration, the holding of paradox, divine encounter, and the breaking of intergenerational trauma. Among displaced Cubans, the future is not an abstract horizon; it is ritually practiced in the present.

During Operation Metro Surge (December 2025–February 2026), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions targeting and terrorizing Latinx and Somali immigrants and refugees produced widespread fear, anxiety, and instability across Minnesota. Reports of racial profiling, surveillance, aggressive tactics, and economic hardship created an environment where many residents felt unsafe participating in daily public life.

In this context, Minnesota’s long-standing interfaith relationships—built through years of dialogue, trust-building, and shared civic engagement—served as vital social infrastructure. Faith leaders from diverse traditions mobilized to provide pastoral care, public witness, and coordinated moral leadership, helping communities facing fear and uncertainty respond collectively rather than in isolation.

This proposal examines how interfaith networks function as civic infrastructure during crises, focusing on the Minnesota Multifaith Network and collaborating organizations during Operation Metro Surge. It argues sustained interfaith relationships strengthen resilience, support leadership, and transform strain into solidarity.

Instances of religious discrimination are not always clear, ranging from overt acts to subtle microaggressions. While research distinguishes these types, we know little about how the physical context shapes these experiences. Drawing on 44 in-depth interviews with victims of religious discrimination, drawn from a national U.S. survey sample, we examine how narratives of religious discrimination vary across regulated spaces (with formal rules and boundaries, such as workplaces/airports) and unregulated spaces (such as parks and sidewalks). We find that victims felt more uncertain about whether an incident constituted discrimination in regulated spaces. Conversely, they expressed greater certainty and fear regarding incidents in unregulated spaces. These findings shift the focus from the individual to the context of discrimination, highlighting the power of place in shaping how discriminatory interactions are experienced. This expands the field beyond workplace studies on discrimination, comparing how the nature of the physical place itself shapes the victim’s experience.

Interreligious and interfaith studies have emerged over the past several decades as a dynamic multidisciplinary field responding to changing global religious realities. Increasing religious pluralism, the growth of religious nones, intensifying political polarization, and the destabilizing rise of social media and AI have created new challenges for religious communities and scholars who seek to understand and cultivate constructive engagement across difference. Within this context, the future of interreligious and interfaith studies will depend not only on theoretical reflection but also on careful attention to local practices in which religious communities learn to live together amid diversity. This paper argues that local interfaith initiatives can serve as laboratories for the future of applied interreligious studies. Drawing on qualitative research with members of the Alachua County Faith Leaders Alliance (ACFLA) in Florida, this study explores how interreligious collaboration contributes to grassroots peacebuilding and offers emerging models for the field.

This paper presents a case study showing an emerging trajectory for the future of interreligious encounter: an Interfaithless Beach Party (IBP) held regularly between 2014 and 2022, which was a striking example of the growing number of initiatives in the United States in which exes from different high-demand religious groups navigate the difficult process of religious exit together. Using data from surveys and interviews conducted with IBP attendees, I argue that associating so-called interfaithlessness with interfaith becomes legible by thinking of interfaithlessness not as peripheral to but rather as a transposition of interfaith. Through this lens, the IBP allowed for interfaith encounter at its best, fostering not just proximity between exes from different religions, but meaningful interreligious exchange that complicates assumptions about America’s growing nonreligious population. The analysis suggests that the current age of religious exit may bring about not less but more opportunity for meaningful connection across (ex)religious difference.