In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

The invention of new mass media visual technologies – including photography, video, and social media – has raised significant questions regarding the ethics of “viewing the dead.” Should we watch the videos of the death of George Floyd or protesters shot by ICE in Minneapolis? Should photographs of children killed in school shootings appear in newspapers? In this paper I address these urgent questions by turning to the way photography has been used to depict a narrative of Jewish death as tragic and violent. These images of death contrast with Judaism’s general reluctance to visually engage with corpses, whether in the traditions of Jewish art or in death care rituals. By developing a more positive aesthetic of Jewish death – one that depicts care, solidarity, and community - we can begin to imagine a visual culture of death as caring in the face of violence, as creating solidarity in response to oppression.

This paper theorizes hospicing Zionism as an ethical, political, and memorial practice for a Jewish futurity in the face of planetary collapse. Rather than treating Zionism as the inevitable future of Jewish life, it reads Zionism as a dying structure that continues to reproduce violence through dominant regimes of memory. The paper argues that counter-memory is the central practice through which Zionism can be hospiced, since haunting names the ethical demand issued by histories that cannot be successfully buried. These histories include Palestinian death and dispossession as well as the suppressed inheritances of non-Ashkenazi, non-Zionist, diasporic, queer, disabled, and racialized Jewish communities. Integrating historical and theological analysis, ritual interventions by diasporist Jewish communities, and personal narrative, the paper imagines Jewish futurity beyond sovereignty, exceptionalism, and trauma, toward accountability, relationality, and repair.

Popular cultural narratives such as film and television programs serve as a terrain where competing meanings are assembled and contested, symbolically resolving tensions that may not be fully articulated elsewhere. Utilizing critical/cultural studies approaches to religious studies and popular cultural texts, in this paper we consider the ways that contemporary tensions around life/death and the human/machine interface are represented in the film Mickey 17 and in several television episodes of Black Mirror, Upload, and Severance, each of which depicts characters who leverage technologies as a means of overriding, denying, or deferring death. Building on the work of Donna Haraway and Achille Mbembe, we introduce the concept of Anthropocene lament to capture the emotional sense of mourning these narratives evoke as they speak to the tensions that emerge in a technoscientific system that allows colonizers to leverage technology to deny or defer the natural processes of death. 

This paper examines communal forms of AI griefbots. While most scholarship treats AI griefbots as private technologies of mourning, it focuses on cases in which reconstructed voices address gathered audiences in public, institutional, or ritualized settings. Comparing these practices with ancient pseudepigraphal writings, the paper argues that both involve communities generating meaningful postmortem speech from traces left behind and receiving that speech as significant after death. Nineteenth-century Spiritualism provides a more recent analogue, making visible the social expectations and interpretive habits that surround communal postmortem voice. Read together, these cases illuminate a recurring religious logic in which communities authorize speech for the dead as guidance, consolation, witness, or public address. By situating communal AI grief practices within this longer history, the paper expands current discussion beyond private bereavement and opens the way for more careful evaluation of the promises and dangers of emerging digital afterlives.

The British colonisers and their European counterparts invented the discipline of Sikh Studies to study “Sikhism,” a colonial imaginary for the religion of the Sikhs. The advent of Sikh Studies reduced Sikhī to a subject and located it in a discursive domain constituted in English: an alien language that belonged to the British colonisers. Since then, Sikh Studies has been fluctuating between blatant theoretical imperialism to somewhat liberating theoretical constraints. The future of Sikh Studies depends upon whether the indigenous sources begin to intervene as an agency. In this paper, I'll explore the questions, such as: What is the potential of the literary as an agency, and to what extent did it subvert the hegemony of the discursive processes in the Sikh context? How are the literary and the idea of lived experience connected to religion and dharam, or Christianity and Sikhī, to be more precise?

This paper interrogates how religious authority can be preserved when generative AI optimises for fluency, virality and visual impact rather than provenance. Taking recent Sikh controversies as a focal lens I argue that the most consequential harms are not only factual but form‑level including depiction violations, lineage invisibility, and blended or hallucinated lines presented as canonical. Bridging digital religion and media studies. I trace how these form‑level harms arise from platform logics that reward speed and spectacle, and I outline a lineage‑first design vocabulary, drawn from Sikh custodianship, that treats provenance as a visible, verifiable precondition for interpretation.

The Bahá’í religion, emerging from the Bábí movement, was widely perceived as having broken with Islamic law on the question of hijab. In 1848, the Bábí heroine Tahirih appeared unveiled before a gathering of Bábí men; she was the first woman in modern Iranian history to publicly discard the veil. Yet it was not until the 1930s that many Iranian Bahá’í women, perhaps even the majority, removed the veil. It therefore seems paradoxical that despite Tahirih’s powerful legacy, the Bahá’í community did not actively promote unveiling. ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá in fact instructed Bahá’ís in Iran and other Muslim-majority societies to conform to prevailing public norms regarding hijab, a stance that contrasts sharply with his strong encouragement of the community playing a leading role in advancing girls’ education. This paper investigates the underlying considerations that shaped the Bahá’í community’s cautious approach to hijab.

This paper examines how narratives of women martyrs are remembered and transmitted within contemporary Bahá’í community life through an ethnographic study of the global campaign Our Story Is One. The campaign commemorates the execution of ten Bahá’í women in Shiraz, Iran, in 1983, whose refusal to renounce their faith has become a powerful narrative of steadfastness within Bahá’í history. Drawing on ethnographic observation of the exhibitions organized by the Bahá’í community in Ireland, together with analysis of the campaign’s global digital materials, the paper explores how the story of the Shiraz martyrs circulates across transnational Bahá’í networks and is interpreted in local community contexts. By situating the Shiraz women within the longer tradition of female martyrdom in the Bahá’í Faith, including the nineteenth-century figure Táhirih, the study demonstrates how contemporary commemorative practices reproduce and reinterpret historical narratives that continue to shape Bahá’í collective memory and community identity.

Obligatory prayer (ṣalát) occupies a central place in the devotional life prescribed by Bahá’u’lláh in his central work, the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. Yet the historical development of this law has received almost no scholarly attention. This paper reconstructs the evolution of the Bahá’í obligatory prayer from its earliest formulation to its final canonical form. Drawing on textual evidence from the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and Bahá’u’lláh’s correspondence, it demonstrates that the law passed through three successive stages: an original nine-rakʿah prayer prescribed in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas but later lost, a second prayer composed but never disseminated, and finally the current set of three alternative obligatory prayers. The paper explores the historical circumstances that shaped these developments, including the precarious social context of Bahá’ís in Ottoman Syria and Persia and Bahá’u’lláh’s gradualist approach to religious legislation. By situating the Bahá’í law of obligatory prayer within the broader history of ritual prayer in Abrahamic traditions, the study highlights how Bahá’u’lláh reshaped inherited patterns of devotional practice while emphasizing flexibility, individual devotion, and progressive revelation.

This paper examines how the Bahá’í community of Iran has pursued social change despite systematic persecution since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Challenging the common assumption that the Bahá’í principle of non-involvement in partisan politics leads to social passivity, it argues that the community has developed a distinctive model of principled engagement rooted in constructive resilience. Drawing on historical analysis, Bahá’í texts and institutional documents, and relevant social theory, the paper explores how this approach integrates individual transformation, community building, social action, and participation in public discourse. It highlights initiatives such as grassroots educational efforts and the Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education (BIHE) as examples of non-adversarial responses to exclusion. The paper argues that the experience of the Iranian Bahá’ís offers an alternative framework for understanding religion and social transformation—one grounded in non-violence, ethical coherence between means and ends, and the gradual cultivation of more just social relations.

Disability scholarship has long grappled with the instability of the future. Feminist disability scholar Alison Kafer describes dominant cultural narratives of disability as structured by a temporal imaginary in which disability forecloses the possibility of flourishing unless medical intervention restores normative function. When cure is unavailable or ineffective, disabled futures are suspended within what Kafer calls “curative time,” a framework that renders the present merely a waiting period for medical resolution.

This paper engages disability studies, particularly the concept of “crip time,” alongside eschatology to challenge these impoverished temporal imaginaries. Crip time foregrounds unpredictability, contingency, and alternative rhythms of life. This paper argues that crip time offers theology crucial resources for inhabiting uncertain futurity. Read alongside apocalyptic theology, crip time interrupts assumptions of linear progress and invites forms of hope grounded not in control of the future but in presence, solidarity, and collective action.

Christian tradition has long wrestled with understanding the relation of time and eternity and its entanglement with questions of evil and suffering today. But where earlier spiritual thinkers such as Augustine and Boethius related questions of time and divine being to more logical conundrums of epistemology, it is with the late medieval anchoress, Julian of Norwich, where time, eternity, and evil are worked out in what this paper will argue is a comprehensive and realistic treatment of these enduring questions. It is in Julian’s differentiation between the “Now” of the divine perspective and the “now and not-yet” of human experience where questions of moral responsibility in both endurance of and resistance to evil can be helpfully engaged.

This paper rethinks the Christian virtue of hope in conversation with trauma studies, queer theory, and critical geography. In the first part of the paper, I argue that hope is a vexed subject for trauma studies and queer theory, because thinkers within these disciplines tend to conceptualize hope in terms of temporality and affectivity. But what if hope is neither an affective nor a temporal relation? What if it is, say, a practical and spatial one? To put the question in terms of Christian theology: What if the basic difference between the world as we know it and the eschaton is a spatial rather than a temporal difference? In the second half of this paper, I experiment constructively with this possibility, close-reading Romans 8:18-26 and Kathryn Tanner’s eschatology in *Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity* in conversation with critical geography’s conception of hope as a place-making activity. 

This paper examines a strength training and functional fitness gym located in Hillcrest, the LGBTQ+ district of San Diego, as an urban space of healing and communal flourishing. Drawing on practical and pastoral theology and informed by participant-observation, it argues that community-based gyms within marginalized neighborhoods can function as sites of embodied ritual that cultivate belonging, activism, and mutual care. As Nancy Ammerman suggests, spirituality often emerges through embodied practices enacted in everyday life. This paper explores how the gym became a site of collective healing following one member’s traumatic brain injury after a car accident. Through group chats, weightlifting, and coordinated activism, members formed bonds of trust and solidarity, using physical training to metabolize trauma and sustain fundraising efforts. Engaging the work of  Sally R. Munt and Nancy Ammerman, this paper positions the gym as a space of spiritual formation and urban religious life beyond traditional sacred institutions.

What do an Eastern Orthodox, a Javanese mystic, and a Balinese Hindu have in common? They believe that water is more than just H₂O. This paper argues that Indonesia's water crisis is not only political or economic but also theological: a neglect of "cosmological integration" between the sacred and the profane. While consecrated water in ritual is protected, natural water flowing through rivers and canals is treated as disposable. This is not merely a secular vs. religious problem: both utilitarian and urban/metropolitan religious approaches reduce water as a neutral resource, confining its moral protection to only within temples, mosques, or churches. Through comparative religion and philosophical theology, I propose an eco-theology of water rooted in Javanese and Balinese traditions, highlighting three dimensions—ontological, covenantal, and liturgical—that restore spiritual and moral significance to water and offer tools for creation care beyond doctrinal boundaries.

Roadside shrines of healing saints in Indian cities, though often appearing random and barely noticeable, are sustained through the constant attention and care of devotees. At one such shrine in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, the space is widely trusted as a healing center, particularly by mothers who bring toddlers for routine check-ups when they suspect their child may be affected by nazar, or the evil eye. This paper examines informal shrines as sites of maternal care grounded in healing and everyday protection. Drawing on feminist literature, I argue that mothering here operates not simply as a biological role but as a collective healing practice shared among mothers, priests, and the saint invoked for protection. Rituals to remove nazar, which include burning chilies, spreading salt, applying kohl, and tying protective bands, also reflect maternal vigilance over children’s vulnerability. The anonymity and diversity of urban landscape do not guarantee safety, and that is where these modest, homely shrines become alternative spaces of healing and protection. In this paper, I aim to intervene in feminist literature to study informal healing sites as gendered infrastructures of care.