In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

In this case study, scholar practitioners will share experiences leading "Multiple Belonging Circles" as a part of the Belonging Colorado project, a statewide effort to help people connect, participate, and collaborate across differences. Following ten people from diverse religious, political, cultural, racial, and gender identities, presenters will share stories, videos, struggles, and insights from the project. Additionally, logistical details will be shared, including funding, collaboration, and participant support.

The United States is plagued by rising polarization, misinformation, and threats to democratic pluralism. The need for empowered leaders with the practical skills and ethical frameworks to translate deeply held values into effective public action is clear. To address this pressing need, our institute is launching the “Values and Public Voice Network.” The primary goal of the VPV Network is to provide a practical, graduate-level public curriculum that equips clergy, nonprofit professionals, organizers, educators, activists, and other leaders to translate their deeply held values into tangible, justice-oriented frameworks for public impact. We are discussing this program as a case study for the "Publicly Engaged Scholarship in the Study of Religion Seminar" to expand relationships, share wisdom, and receive valuable feedback from leaders in other institutions who are engaging in similar work. 

How can scholarship on interreligious relations move beyond the academy to shape the future of relationships between religious communities? This paper examines a developing symposium initiative designed to translate academic research on Hindu–Christian relations into publicly engaged collaboration among scholars, Hindu organizations, and Christian communities in the United States. Building on foundational works such as The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations and Francis X. Clooney’s The Future of Hindu-Christian Studies, the project seeks to bring scholarly insights into practical community engagement.

Using this initiative as a case study, the paper analyzes strategies for building relationships across multiple scales: individual trust between scholars and practitioners, community partnerships between Hindu and Christian organizations, and institutional collaborations that sustain engagement over time. Reflecting on my experiences working with academic institutions and religious organizations, the paper examines how publicly engaged scholarship navigates institutional power structures while cultivating relationships necessary for pluralistic coexistence.

More than four decades after the AIDS crisis began, the history of Quaker responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis remains largely untold within American religious historiography. Similarly, the history of the first Quaker ceremonies of commitment for same-sex couples and Quaker advocacy for marriage equality is underrepresented in academic work about 20th century Quakerism. This paper responds to this lacuna by sharing highlights from an extensive body of research conducted by two researchers who have examined how Quakers grappled with both AIDS and marriage equality, often simultaneously, showing how these were not parallel crises but deeply intertwined struggles within the same congregations and across the many branches of Quakerism in North America. Additionally, by centering local congregational discernment rather than denominational pronouncements, this paper emphasizes how ordinary people transformed inherited theology through lived experience.

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David Koresh’s visits to Israel were crucial in shaping his theological development, self-conception, and apocalyptic prophecy. With each journey, both Koresh’s sense of purpose and the trust his followers placed in him intensified. His increasingly cohesive apocalyptic vision intertwined spiritual salvation with a radical political agenda. 

Despite the significance of these events, the specifics of what transpired during each visit remain inadequately understood. My research addresses this by both synthesizing the dispersed primary evidence and incorporating previously unutilized sources, including Hebrew-language publications and interviews with individuals who met Koresh during his visits.

In this paper, I will present my preliminary findings to construct a coherent picture of how Koresh’s pilgrimages not only solidified his self-conception as the Messiah but also delineated a striking political dimension in his vision – one that cast the modern State of Israel and the United States as pivotal players in an unfolding cosmic drama.

This paper examines an understudied dimension of "zine" culture of the 1980s and 1990s, namely, the religious theorization going on between NRMs across America and England. While zines are often discussed for their do-it-yourself ethics, aesthetics, and ‘subterranean’ politics (often attached to a music “scene”), little room has been devoted to analysis of those deriving from the religious underground. My analysis is centered around an archive housed at the Denver Public Library, that of Tom Hallewell—zine author, music promoter, and figurehead of the American network of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Hallewell’s archive brings together numerous small-press publications from a range of NRMs such as Satanists, O.T.O. branches, Gnostics, and magickal organizations. Communication between zine creators, and the shared ideas spawned within the pages of their zines, is illustrative of a unique kind of religious theorization stemming from the margins of culture rather than from academic discourse. 

This paper brings new insight to academic understandings of the bricolage of ideas L. Ron Hubbard assembled in his development of Scientology as a syncretic religion. It demonstrates that, in addition to having been influenced by science fiction, popular psychology and Western esotericism, as has been explored in the existing literature (Melton 2000, Lewis 2009, Urban 2011, Frenchkowski 2016), Hubbard was also influenced by certain popular post-WWII ideas about science, technology and the universe. In particular, the research presented here demonstrates that Hubbard’s 1951 development and introduction of the foundational Scientology doctrine known as the Theta-MEST theory, which establishes the religion’s basic metaphysical propositions as well as its soteriological logic, relied on ideas connected with the then-new field of cybernetics and explicitly drew from the work of the mathematician and author credited with naming and popularizing the field, Norbert Wiener. 

Religious globalization is commonly interpreted through two paradigms: centralized missionary expansion or diaspora transmission tied to ethnic community reproduction. This paper argues that I-Kuan Tao represents a third configuration: polycentric globalization within a transnational religious field. Originating in China and consolidated in Taiwan, the movement now operates across Southeast Asia, North America, Europe, and beyond without a singular governing center. Decentralized regional associations maintain ritual continuity and shared cosmological narrative while exercising contextual autonomy. Authority circulates through relational networks rather than hierarchical command. Drawing on scholarship on transnational religion, mobility, and networked governance, the study analyzes how ritual standardization, multidirectional flows, and negotiated coherence enable expansion beyond diaspora while preserving institutional stability. The case challenges assumptions that globalization necessitates either centralization or fragmentation and proposes polycentric governance as a distinct mode of contemporary religious expansion.

This presentation argues that the 1987 Harmonic Convergence—the first globally synchronized meditation event—played a pivotal but under‑recognized role in creating the conditions that enabled the rise of the “spiritual, but not religious” (SBNR) identity. Through an analysis of media saturation across newspapers, syndicated comics, and late‑night television, I show how ambivalent coverage—mixing fascination, irony, and critique—performed essential work of discursive normalization. Drawing on Foucault’s “field of the sayable”, I demonstrate how ubiquity generated familiarity, which generated intelligibility, and ultimately allowed SBNR to emerge as a socially intelligible identity. Constant coverage, in other words, ensured that the ideas and practices embodied in the Convergence—and later, SBNR identity—would become part what Stalnaker refers to as “the common ground”.  By tracing how public talk circulated across media, this paper reframes the Convergence not as a failed New Age prophecy, but as an essential inflection point in understanding the exponential rise in SBNR identities.  

This paper argues, following Bataille, that there is a deep relationship between sacrifice and the constitution of the domain of the sacred. This logic, we argue, derives from the structure of the cosmos itself, which produces a sense of the sacred through continual sacrifice and destruction via a general economy of entropy. We contrast this way of producing the sacred with a different impersonal political form of sacrifice that grounds what Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben call biopolitics, a logic of restricted economy that manifests through both the state and the economy. We argue that whereas the sacred in Bataille works through a direct relational encounter with death, intimacy, and the immanence of general economy, biopolitics works by displacing the death and intimacy inherent to sacrifice to the domain of the profane, generating a boundary between the human and the non-human that is built upon the sacrifice of ecological life and the racialized body. This biopolitical sacrifice props up Man as a restricted (rather than general) economy of the sacred.

“A paschal banquet in which Christ is consumed.” This description of the Mass, drawn from the Vatican II constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, holds in tension the ideas of feast and sacrifice that are central to Catholic Eucharistic theology. In the postconciliar Church, particularly in elite Catholic culture, this tension has fissured into competing “horizontal” and “vertical" theological perspectives, each carrying divergent ecclesiological and political commitments. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, this paper examines how the routine celebration of the Eucharist in the contemporary United States generates an excess that overflows, but also reinforces, the restricted economies through which it is interpreted. Bataille’s framework of general economy, I argue, illuminates what theological discourse struggles to name: that both camps draw on the same sovereign expenditure, and that their conflict depends on that shared foundation remaining unacknowledged.

The Pacific Northwest “potlatch” cultures were found by Boas, Mauss, and Bataille to engage in profligate “waste” and “destruction” of wealth, from the viewpoint of our capitalist addiction to production and accumulation. The sacrificial, feasting, and shamanistic cultures of Bronze Age China shared this ethos of excessive ritual expenditures. These acts of celebratory consumption and destruction of wealth are now greatly diminished in the age of modern capitalist self-discipline and utilitarian harnessing of labor for endless production, utility, and efficiency. In contemporary China, despite the state developmentalism and capitalism, surprisingly, one finds that the spirit of wasteful consumption and sacrifice to the gods is still alive. The sun, noted Bataille in The History of Religion, showers all life on Earth with its inexhaustible energy. In the Age of the Anthropocene, can we tap into this abundant solar energy and sparks of archaic effervescence, for a flourishing and renewable planetary life? 

Poststructuralist ethnology in Lowland South America can be said, without exaggeration, to be founded on the twin rejections of “sacrifice” and “gift exchange.” These concepts are not merely considered empirically absent; they are taken to express logics of hierarchy that are actively refused. By contrast, anthropologists of Mesoamerica see in sacrifice the foundation for the unification of political and cosmic authority. In this presentation, I take up Amerindian sacrifice alternately as a political remainder and as a political concept. Beginning with Pierre Clastres' argument that Amerindian political hierarchy historically emerges from religion, I then compare the religious and political dimensions of captive-taking in South America and Mesoamerica. Beneath superficial similarities in the killing of war captives lie different political functions and religious leadership, such that sacrifice operates as a plastic political technology for organizing the relation between cosmology, violence, and sovereignty, working with and against state formations.

This paper asks how the inauguration of the Khalsa, a sacred military-spiritual order in the Sikh tradition, can be understood from the standpoint of human sacrifice. Conventional approaches construe this order from the standpoint of identity, as if the purpose of its institution were to create a distinct sense of self. However, a concern with identity violates other commitments to ego-loss that are replete in the tradition. This paper instead argues that a logic of sacrifice better voices a key aspect of this military-spiritual order — a psycho-social transformation of self. In doing so, this paper turns to the sacrality of sacrifice for a more ethically rich engagement with Sikh thought, tradition, and religion.

This paper argues, following Bataille, that there is a deep relationship between sacrifice and the constitution of the domain of the sacred. This logic, we argue, derives from the structure of the cosmos itself, which produces a sense of the sacred through continual sacrifice and destruction via a general economy of entropy. We contrast this way of producing the sacred with a different impersonal political form of sacrifice that grounds what Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben call biopolitics, a logic of restricted economy that manifests through both the state and the economy. We argue that whereas the sacred in Bataille works through a direct relational encounter with death, intimacy, and the immanence of general economy, biopolitics works by displacing the death and intimacy inherent to sacrifice to the domain of the profane, generating a boundary between the human and the non-human that is built upon the sacrifice of ecological life and the racialized body. This biopolitical sacrifice props up Man as a restricted (rather than general) economy of the sacred.

“A paschal banquet in which Christ is consumed.” This description of the Mass, drawn from the Vatican II constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, holds in tension the ideas of feast and sacrifice that are central to Catholic Eucharistic theology. In the postconciliar Church, particularly in elite Catholic culture, this tension has fissured into competing “horizontal” and “vertical" theological perspectives, each carrying divergent ecclesiological and political commitments. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, this paper examines how the routine celebration of the Eucharist in the contemporary United States generates an excess that overflows, but also reinforces, the restricted economies through which it is interpreted. Bataille’s framework of general economy, I argue, illuminates what theological discourse struggles to name: that both camps draw on the same sovereign expenditure, and that their conflict depends on that shared foundation remaining unacknowledged.

The Pacific Northwest “potlatch” cultures were found by Boas, Mauss, and Bataille to engage in profligate “waste” and “destruction” of wealth, from the viewpoint of our capitalist addiction to production and accumulation. The sacrificial, feasting, and shamanistic cultures of Bronze Age China shared this ethos of excessive ritual expenditures. These acts of celebratory consumption and destruction of wealth are now greatly diminished in the age of modern capitalist self-discipline and utilitarian harnessing of labor for endless production, utility, and efficiency. In contemporary China, despite the state developmentalism and capitalism, surprisingly, one finds that the spirit of wasteful consumption and sacrifice to the gods is still alive. The sun, noted Bataille in The History of Religion, showers all life on Earth with its inexhaustible energy. In the Age of the Anthropocene, can we tap into this abundant solar energy and sparks of archaic effervescence, for a flourishing and renewable planetary life? 

Poststructuralist ethnology in Lowland South America can be said, without exaggeration, to be founded on the twin rejections of “sacrifice” and “gift exchange.” These concepts are not merely considered empirically absent; they are taken to express logics of hierarchy that are actively refused. By contrast, anthropologists of Mesoamerica see in sacrifice the foundation for the unification of political and cosmic authority. In this presentation, I take up Amerindian sacrifice alternately as a political remainder and as a political concept. Beginning with Pierre Clastres' argument that Amerindian political hierarchy historically emerges from religion, I then compare the religious and political dimensions of captive-taking in South America and Mesoamerica. Beneath superficial similarities in the killing of war captives lie different political functions and religious leadership, such that sacrifice operates as a plastic political technology for organizing the relation between cosmology, violence, and sovereignty, working with and against state formations.

This paper asks how the inauguration of the Khalsa, a sacred military-spiritual order in the Sikh tradition, can be understood from the standpoint of human sacrifice. Conventional approaches construe this order from the standpoint of identity, as if the purpose of its institution were to create a distinct sense of self. However, a concern with identity violates other commitments to ego-loss that are replete in the tradition. This paper instead argues that a logic of sacrifice better voices a key aspect of this military-spiritual order — a psycho-social transformation of self. In doing so, this paper turns to the sacrality of sacrifice for a more ethically rich engagement with Sikh thought, tradition, and religion.

When we ask “what is meant by childhood?” and “who gets protected,” there is a sub-question of to what extent we consider children human, and further, what interlocking identities might make some children considered subhuman in relation to others? It is my suggestion that the current dialogue around childhood and child protection falls into the trap of paternalism because the normative gaze has deemed only white male children as fully human. To this narrative, I suggest introducing an expanded womanist framework that draws on both Alice Walker’s Four-part definition, with specific attention to the first and second sections, and the tenets of Dr. Stacey Floyd-Thomas’s womanist framework: Radical Subjectivity and Traditional Communalism. In this cross-section, this paper illuminates how Womanism allows us to redefine who gets to be a child, our concept of innocence, and how we read the humanity of children, thereby determining whether they are (un)protectable.

This paper examines the role of Mark 9, particularly when reception becomes routine. In such contexts, interpretive escalation—characterised by increased prayer and fasting—is often perceived as an expression of faithfulness, even when it results in physical consequences for minors. Through comparative analysis of examples from the UK, Nigeria, and Kenya, I identify recurring pathways of harm, including claims of authority that exceed accountability, consent asymmetries that are spiritualized as obedience, and cycles of escalation where distress is interpreted as a sign that further intensification is required. I contend that the phrase “prayer-and-fasting” from Mark 9:29 functions as a travelling gloss with significant safeguarding implications, while the shorter version (“by prayer”) can serve as a limiting resource in practices involving children. Finally, I propose theological “red lines” for individuals under 18 and advocate for care pathways—encompassing pediatric, psychological, and safeguarding measures—as progressive alternatives to paternalistic protection models.

Many religious communities have adopted formal child protection policies in recent decades, often in response to legal and insurance pressures rather than sustained ethical reflection.  Despite the proliferation of such policies, communities frequently struggle to respond well when harm occurs. Drawing on over a decade of experience as both a scholar of sexual violence in religious contexts and a practitioner advocating for survivors and consulting with faith communities, this paper examines the gap between policy adoption and meaningful safeguarding practice. It argues that dominant frameworks often position competent adults as protectors of incompetent children, allowing communities to imagine harm as external to their own moral life and implicitly setting up children's voices to be dismissed. This orientation encourages defensive responses and obscures systemic inequalities that shape harm. The paper proposes an alternative vision of safeguarding grounded in communal ethical formation, in which children are recognized as full members whose wellbeing is integral to the health and accountability of the entire community.

The contemporary debate over birthright citizenship—centered on the January 2025 executive order, the anticipated legal challenge, and the posture of religiously affiliated amici—recasts older questions about who belongs and who is protected by the state. Yet the legal and moral logic of such debates has historical antecedents. Sacramento Orphanage & Children’s Home v. Chambers stands as an early and instructive example of a court grappling with whether parental status may be used to differentiate access to public benefits for native-born children. This paper reads that decision alongside the modern dispute to illuminate how courts have, over more than a century, defended or disputed the principle that citizenship carries obligations—ones that should not be erased by parental immigration status. The paper argues for a more nuanced understanding of “birthright” that foregrounds equal protection, the public role in child welfare, and the moral claims of vulnerable children within the citizenship framework.