This session honors the extraordinary contributions of Carrie Doehring, a leading scholar in the psychology of religion, pastoral psychology, pastoral theology, and chaplaincy; a licensed psychologist; a theological educator; and a Presbyterian minister. Doehring’s work has profoundly shaped the field through her commitment to teaching and researching interreligious, socially just, and research-informed spiritual care. Her scholarship has been especially influential in advancing trauma-informed spiritual care, addressing moral injury and moral stress, and exploring spiritual struggle, all while integrating clinical practice with theological reflection. This session celebrates her enduring impact by engaging her intellectual legacy and exploring how her contributions continue to inform contemporary approaches to spiritual care, pastoral theology, and the psychology of religion. In this session, Doehring will present a paper on lamentation and spiritual reflexivity, followed by responses from a panel of scholars who will engage both the paper and her broader contributions to the field.
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.
20 years ago, the literary world lost a giant. Octavia E. Butler was known as the first African American Woman to gain notoriety as a Science Fiction writer. Known for her acute cultural depiction in her dystopian novels, Butler's worldbuilding brought together politics, religion, and the harsh realities of the complicated decisions we make for our own survival. This panel brings together leading scholars of African American religions and speculative fiction to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Octavia Butler's Patternmaster, her first published novel. Themes discussed include the ethical implications of biological engineering, what it means to be human, ethical and unethical uses of power, and community building.
This panel’s papers approach conversion in the politically fraught nineteenth century as a complex and uneasy transition, during which converts sought to define religious change on their own terms, or, in the case of would-be converts, to reject the offer altogether and arrive at a surer sense of their own religious identity. The first paper uses the writings of Rahel Varnhagen as a case study for considering Jewish women’s conversions as a form of religious activity in itself. The second argues Heinrich Heine’s conversion was a choice to leave Jewish law and enter into German law (understood as both spiritual and literary) to become a new self. The third paper examines the writings of the Jain monk Vijayānanda Sūri, also known as Ātmārāmajī. It argues that one of his tracts both defended Jain doctrine against missionary critique and articulated a vision of Jain identity that combined theology and anti-colonial critique.
Papers
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.
Respondent
This session facilitates critical reflection on the future of Vatican II Studies at a moment when six decades of scholarship and the passing of the 60th jubilee raises the question of whether the field stands at an endpoint, a continuation, or the threshold of a new era of Vatican II research. Recent major initiatives provide a valuable lens through which to evaluate current trajectories and imagine possible pathways forward. Discussing the Vatican II: Event and Mandate (Herder/Peeters); The Legacy and Limits of Vatican II in an Age of Crisis (Liturgical Press); Vatican II After Sixty Years (Brepols) projects will allow us to assess how new scholarship advances intercultural and intertextual histories and commentaries and new methodological and hermeneutical directions. By placing these initiatives in dialogue, the session explores who will shape the field’s future, how it can serve both acaeudemy and society, and which dominant narratives require revisiting or renewal.
The four papers on this panel addresses various forms of religious discrimination, misconduct, and violence in the global context. “Everyday Insecurity, Religious Life, and Global Narratives” examines the label of “Christian genocide” in Nigeria challenges genocide narratives as analytic defaults in the sociology of religion. “Religious Discrimination as Martyrdom and Erasure” examines how religious discrimination as a discursive regime is operationalized in Mexico’s 2022 National Survey on Discrimination (ENADIS). “Reactions to Clergy Financial and Sexual Misconduct” asks the question of how organizational actors evaluate different types of clergy misconduct, and suggests that the way organizational leadership misconduct is perceived has consequences for how that misconduct will be addressed, tolerated, or in extreme cases, even perpetuated. “Global Religious Restriction and Human Flourishing” explores the question of how government and social restrictions on religion impact human flourishing around the globe, focusing on predictors of flourishing under different levels of religious restriction.
Papers
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.
This panel explores shifts in Latin American church-state relations through analyses of Cuban religious experience across the island and its diaspora. The panel begins by reframing the decline of Catholic affiliation in Latin America as a move toward spiritual pluralization rather than secularization, while the subsequent papers delve into the socio-political and therapeutic roles of faith in the Cuban context. Analyzing the Catholic Church’s emergence as a moral intermediary between popular discontent and authoritarian state power in Cuba from 2021 to 2026, one case highlights the Church's strategic role in humanitarian aid and resistance. Complementing this, the panel concludes with an exploration of how the Cuban diaspora in Miami utilizes the "moral ecology" of Santería and Catholicism for ritual healing and liberation from displacement-related trauma. Together, these papers illustrate how Cuban religious practices function as vital sites of agency, resistance, and healing amidst systemic crisis and migration.
Papers
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.
Where does interreligious encounter happen, and who participates? This session examines sites of encounter that challenge inherited assumptions about dialogue, belonging, and resilience, asking what conditions enable or constrain connection across religious difference.
Papers
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.
Respondent
This panel brings together three different papers which explore the relationship between the histories and configuration of labor activism and specific communities. In conversation with the audience, Wedgle looks at how Jewish children’s stories dampened if not erased Jewish women’s activism in the labor movement. Next, Wijoyo interrogates the changing narratives of cooperatives as some succumb to contemporary managerial practices, highlighting the political struggle of worker oriented democracy on a smaller scale. In the third paper, Martinez traces two conflicting narratives of labor in El Salvador, naming competing visions of transcendent utopianism and utopia-in-place. Together, these papers demonstrate how work organizing is a central site of contestation of social power and of the construction of potential alternative social orders.
Papers
This paper examines children’s literature about Jewish women in the labor movement in order to analyze what story about the Jewish past this particular body of work tells, and what kind of Jewish future it wishes to shape. I argue that this children’s literature overwhelmingly erases the politics of the Jewish labor movement, particularly ignoring socialism, communism, and often even unionization, while amplifying the graphic violence of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The resulting stories become moral tales of doing the right thing in line with capitalist American values, rather than ones of Jewish left radicalism which has the potential to inform a future of principled labor activism and working-class solidarity. Ultimately, this paper questions what happens to the past, the present, and the future of American Judaism and of the American labor movement when the radicalism is erased but the violence remains.
This paper examines what might be described as the slow cancellation of the cooperative movement’s promised future. Drawing on examples from multiple contexts, cooperative institutions increasingly diverge from the emancipatory visions that once animated cooperative thought. In Indonesia, the cooperative model championed by Mohammad Hatta has gradually been absorbed into state apparatuses serving neoliberal development agendas. In Europe, some co-ops survive but adopt managerial practices that dilute their role as schools of democracy. Even thriving co-ops face persistent internal conflicts, splintered visions, and member dissatisfaction. Rather than treating these developments as failures of an inherently harmonious cooperative ideal, this paper reinterprets them through Foucault alongside the post-Marxist framework of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. It argues for radical negativity as a working ontology, viewing adversarial conflicts within and with the state as constitutive of democratic economic institutions. Using an agonistic model of politics, the paper reconceives cooperative economies as sites of ongoing political struggle and resubjectification.
The renovation of San Salvador’s Historic Downtown (Centro Histórico) is a central collective dream of postwar Salvadoran society. At its heart is the hyper-modern National Library (BINAES), functioning as a secular cathedral for President Nayib Bukele’s future-oriented, religious-infused politics. Drawing on Laurence Davis, I analyze this urban spectacle as “transcendent utopianism,” a top-down vision demanding an ideological faith in capitalist progress that ultimately drives speculative dispossession. In contrast, I examine an alternative renovation process led by the Salvadoran Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperativism (FECOSVAM). Rooted in the labor movement, these cooperatives provide dignified housing to working-class families formerly in precarious tenements (mesones). Following David Bell, I conceptualize FECOSVAM’s cooperative labor as “utopia-as-place”: an immanent space continuously reproduced through shared governance, solidarity, and convivencia. Theorizing this praxis as utopianism renders visible a contesting horizon of social dreaming, challenging the state’s elite, linear model of development.
The growth of white Christian nationalism and its allegiances to the Trump administration in the United States are well documented. This panel offers insight into these phenomena through analyzing the White House's relationship with MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) and the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship). With focuses on violence, embodiment, and hyper masculinity, these papers demonstrate the vital role sport plays in political, social, and religious developments.
Papers
On July 3rd, 2025, Donald Trump announced that a UFC Event would be held on the South Lawn of the White House as part of celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the USA. The announcement came after multiple key appearances of Donald Trump at UFC Events and the inclusion of key UFC personnel in major Republican moments, such as Dana White’s appearance and speaking on election night 2024. Using current research into the enactment of ritualized violence within sport from within religion and sport studies, this paper will explore the UFC as a site of sportswashing. However, by focusing on the growing participation of women in sport categorised ‘violent’, and specifically women UFC fighters, it will show how women fighters use evangelical-nationalistic sportswashing to buffer against the ongoing project or normalising gender and sexuality that places their identity under threat at the hands of both the state.
Donald Trump and his administration are intimately tied to the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA), with the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) “Freedom 250” event on the White House Lawn being the most obvious illustration. With Trump’s presence in the sport, his Christian nationalist supporters have sought to capitalize on this relationship and integrate MMA into their larger socio-religious projects. While previous scholarship has noted how Muscular Christianity appears within MMA, this paper explicitly argues that MMA has become a vital part of the larger Christian nationalist project’s masculine domination, populist rhetoric, and violence. To understand this dynamic, this paper makes the case for seeing the Christian nationalist embrace of MMA within an adaptive methodology on both the national and local levels. To conclude, this paper highlights how MMA requires greater attention thanks to its place within the larger extremist ecosystem.
Scholars of white Christian nationalism most frequently train their analytical lens on elections, voter blocs, culture war stances, and the words and actions of famous conservative religious leaders. Yet in doing so they miss how the values, aesthetics, and practices of white Christian nationalism become embodied. As a corrective, we draw on our fieldwork in CrossFit and with combatives (i.e. Mixed Martial Arts fighters) as a way to bring bodies back into conversations about processes of political formation. Beyond commonplace theoretical metaphors of a “body politic,” our analysis more aptly addresses what we call a “political physiology” of the body and the role that fitness and physical cultural practices play in forging right wing political identities and imaginaries. We argue that beyond the pews and pulpits, white Christian nationalism is formed and circulated through seemingly mundane spaces like the gym.
Respondent
This panel examines how mobility—whether through exile, scholarly travel, or diaspora life—shapes the production and contestation of ecclesial authority in Middle Eastern Christian traditions. Spanning late antique, medieval, and contemporary contexts, the papers argue that displacement is not merely a backdrop to religious life but a generative force that reconfigures theological imagination, institutional legitimacy, and communal belonging. The first paper shows how exiled clerics in Egyptian non-Chalcedonian Christianity transformed displacement into a credential of authenticity, enabling the expansion of orthodoxy through hagiography and epistolary networks. The second analyzes the mobility of the Armenian theologian Mkhitar Gosh, demonstrating how movement between Gandzak and Cilicia fostered theological synthesis while sustaining tensions between homeland and diaspora. The final paper examines the Coptic Synaxarium in the United States, where youth reinterpret hagiography in digital and pedagogical settings. Together, the panel highlights authority as continually reconstituted through movement and reinterpretation.
Papers
The leitmotif of the exiled legitimate cleric was more than rhetoric in the Egyptian non-Chalcedonian polemics of the fifth-through-eighth centuries. This paper analyzes exile and expulsion of non-Chalcedonian leaders as a trope in hagiographies, as well as a galvanizing factor in connecting various Egyptian localities through epistolary correspondence with non-Chalcedonian leaders in exile. The analysis accounts for expulsions appearing in Christian non-Chalcedonian hagiographical texts (such as Makarius of Tkow, Daniel of Scetis, and Samuel of Kalamoun); and in the letters of Pope Timothy II Aelurus (d.477), written in exile to the faithful in Egypt. The paper discusses the ironies of exilic displacement, showing how: 1) it was subverted, transformed into a credential of authentic authority, and 2) it served to make non-Chalcedonian orthodoxy unexpectedly mobile. This paper draws significantly on the unpublished files of David W. Johnson, S.J. (†2011), who serves posthumously as a co-author.
In American Coptic Orthodox parishes, the Synaxarium is often treated as inherited devotional reading, yet it is increasingly becoming a frontline site where the church’s future is negotiated with younger generations. This paper argues that the Synaxarium functions as a technology of ecclesial formation: it scripts models of holiness, suffering, gender, vocation, and communal belonging, and thereby shapes how youth imagine what “Coptic” Christianity can be in the United States. I examine how second- and third-generation Copts receive, contest, or re-narrate Synaxarium figures amid American moral sensibilities, digital media habits, and inter-Christian proximity. Particular attention is given to pedagogical settings (Sunday school, youth meetings, retreats, and online clips) where hagiography is condensed, moralized, or contextualized. I show how these interpretive moves implicitly revise ecclesiology—redefining authority, identity, and continuity—by determining which saints remain credible, and why.
Mkhitar Gosh, one of the most influential figures in the history of the Armenian Church, was born around 1140 in the city of Gandzak (present-day Ganja in Azerbaijan) and was educated at some of the most prominent monasteries in the northern region, eventually attaining the rank of vardapet (given to scholar monks, roughly equivalent to an archimandrite). After receiving this rank, which designated him as scholar and gave him the right to teach, he traveled to the Cilicia region. At the time, the two regions were starkly divided intellectually, theologically, and culturally. This paper argues that this very literal mobility and Gosh’s monastic trajectory influences the characteristics of Gosh’s intellectual and theological approach. It suggests that Gosh’s mobile trajectory between these two regions can serve as an example for a recurring theme and problem in the Armenian experience: the disjoint between Armenian life in the traditional homeland and in diaspora.