In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Tlacatecolotl is defined as: owl-person, sorcerer, witch, devil, demon, and many more of the like. Tlacatecolotl is a Nahuatl word that is found in the 16th Century Florentine Codex, that was created by Friar Bernardino de Sahagún and Nahua scribes. The word is found is depicted through textual translation and through images, yet there is no one concise definition. In this presentation, I will go through a thorough textual and image analysis in order to discern what Tlacatecolotl actually means. 

I offer an analysis of altarcitos devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe as an act of futuring rooted in the material religious practices of Mexican American women. I argue that this altar tradition centers the epistemological authority of Mexican American women and their orientation toward justice through the veneration of Guadalupe. Moreover, Guadalupan altars offer a future shaped around the altarista’s theological understandings, lived experiences, and commitment to maintaining life. 

Max Weber’s “disenchantment” thesis casts science as a carrier of secularization, dissolving mystery and ultimacy. Yet theorists such as Hans Joas and Charles Taylor suggest modernity reconfigures transcendence rather than simply erasing it, generating “cross-pressures” and longings for “fullness” within the immanent frame. This paper draws on 104 interviews with physicists and biologists in the US, UK, Italy, and India to examine how scientific practice elicits experiences of wonder, mystery, and “otherness”--and how these experiences can function as pathways into spiritual yearning, especially among nonreligious scientists. We conceptualize enchantment as a relational mode of engagement marked by (1) encounter with alterity, (2) orientation toward the world as a meaningful cosmos, and (3) affective engagement. Comparing religious and nonreligious narratives, we show how immanent and liminal forms of enchantment enable yearnings for connection and higher meaning without stable doctrinal commitment, reframing science as a consequential site of contemporary spirituality.

The U.S. is becoming more religious diverse while trust in religious institutions and leaders is declining.  And more Americans are growing reticent to connect across religious divides. These trends raise critical questions about the benefits of religious diversity and the role of religious leaders in civil society. Drawing on interviews and focus groups (N=81) with a diverse group of religious leaders in Houston, Texas, we examine their attitudes towards religious diversity. We found that nearly all see religious diversity as a benefit to the city. They argue that religious diversity provides an opportunity to appreciate religious difference, for reflexivity in one’s religious beliefs, for everyone to find a religious home, and it serves as a crucible for developing democratic capacities. Challenges include intolerance, polarization, and logistical challenges of connecting in a large city. Our findings illuminate how religious leaders appraise religious diversity and the implications for inter-religious collaboration, pluralism, and civil society.

This study examines Taegyo, a traditional Korean prenatal practice, as a form of prenatal religion among Korean immigrants in the U.S. Taegyo emphasizes ethical conduct and spiritual cultivation during pregnancy and reflects Korea’s historically hybrid religious traditions, including Confucianism, Buddhist ethical teachings, Daoism, Shamanistic spirituality, and contemporary Christian devotional practices. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews with Korean immigrants in the U.S. who have experienced pregnancy and childbirth (target N = 30), this study analyzes how participants interpret pregnancy as a spiritually meaningful period during which religious values and moral environments may influence fetal development. Many participants describe Taegyo as a spiritual practice while also reporting social isolation during pregnancy due to the absence of extended family support networks. The paper argues that Taegyo functions as both prenatal religion and part of broader processes of reproductive religion through which immigrants reproduce cultural traditions, religious meanings, and intergenerational care practices in diaspora contexts.

This paper interrogates the rise of AI-mediated relationality in Black communities asking how such technological interventions may reshape relationships across the lifespan and how digital religion offers expanded discourse for exploring these new connections. Using autoethnography, qualitative data from both social media and digital religion participants, and sociological research on artificial intelligence and religion, this paper examines how AI engagement reconfigures embodiment, desire, and expectations of intimacy. The paper ends by critically situating AI intimacy within longer histories of racialized embodiment, moral regulation, and technological mediation ultimately offering insight on emergent technologies and Black religion.

This paper examines a paradox at the intersection of technology, religion, and political imagination: Eastern Orthodox influencers in the United States who utilize digital media infrastructures to propagate an explicitly anti-modern vision of Christian civilization. Drawing on science and technology studies, political theology, and media theory, we analyze how these influencers synthesize patristic sources, conspiracy epistemologies, and geopolitical commentary to articulate a vision of the future that is imbued with “trad” aesthetics and anti-capitalist economic formations while also being eschatologically charged. Their use of technology is neither incidental nor contradictory in their own framing—rather, digital media becomes a weapon seized from the enemy, a temporary instrument for building the conditions under which technology's dominion might be refuted. We argue that trad futurism represents a form of religiously-motivated technological ambivalence, complicating simple Luddite or anti-modern categorizations by embedding technological critique within a constructive, if deeply illiberal, vision of future human flourishing.

This paper analyzes radical renunciation of science and technology through the lens of Philip Sherrard (1922-1995). Sherrard, a poet, theologian, and translator, was a convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and is most known in Greece for his introduction of modern Greek literature to the west. In the 1970s, increasingly concerned about the environmental crisis, he abandoned modernity and built a primitive haven on the Greek island of Evia—a home without electricity, phones, heating, air conditioning. However, beyond Orthodoxy, much of Sherrard’s thinking was influenced by the shadowy world of the Traditionalist School. But where many Traditionalists tend towards right-wing extremism in response to environmental destruction and technological dehumanization, Sherrard charted an alternate path through pacifism and a unique brand of theologically-motivated technological asceticism. While his response to climate change is not sustainable, it raises serious questions about the intersection of ecological despair, anti-modernism, and right-wing extremism.

Since the 2022 release of ChatGPT, writers have been among the most vocal sources of resistance to AI. Some have been drawn into a broader and deeper form of tech-resistance. This paper poses a critical question: can anti-tech resistance guard, or protect, the process and practice of writing? The paper examines the work of British writer, “recovering” environmentalist, and recent convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, Paul Kingsnorth who offers a scathing critique of the modern dream of progress. Progress has become, for him, a form of totalizing technological capture that he names the Machine. The paper argues that primitivist critiques like Kingsnorth’s suffer from a genealogical amnesia that leads them to misunderstand their own resistance and takes for granted the technologies (like writing) that support it. In conversation with Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, the paper argues that writing should instead be guarded as a form of technological inheritance.

The Japanese occupation of Burma (1942-1945) is often invoked in Burmese as “khit-pyet,” an “era of disorder.” Histories of this period are primarily shaped by nationalist narratives put forth in the memoirs of Myanmar’s male political elite. Biographical writing by Buddhist female renunciants (thilashin), however, offer new perspectives on this era. This paper takes up narratives of khit-pyet voiced by women like Daw Malayi, whose nunnery was commandeered by the Kempetai, the military police of the Japanese army, and Daw Nyanacari, who welcomed refugees from the fall of Rangoon to her Myanaung nunnery while continuing to train her thilashin students preparing for their monastic exams. I bring these and other biographical accounts together to investigate how thilashin relied on practices of institutional maintenance and mental cultivation to deal with the violence, confusion, and deprivations of the occupation, and how the disorder of “khit-pyet” has shaped representations of Buddhist institutional history.

Myanmar’s conservative monastic bodies and associated government regulators have consistently argued that the bhikkhunī (higher ordained nun) lineage died out and therefore, according to the scriptures, it cannot be reinstated. And in fact, Myanmar’s nuns are not bhikkhunīs but a form of female renunciate called a thilashin. Yet in the early 1900s a thilashin named Daw Konmayi and the  famous monk, the Maha Gandhayon Sayadaw of Sagaing, knew that in the absence of the Bhikkhunī Vinaya there needed to be rules to protect the thilashin, thereby creating a monastic code of conduct. In 1994, the State Saṅgha Mahā Nāyaka Committee, completed a revised version of these rules. This paper compares the two works and similar to Martin Seeger (2018), makes the case for looking at how these nuns have made a space for themselves in which scholars miss when focusing on the bhikkhunī debate.

This paper demonstrates how the historical paintings in the Capitol Rotunda contributed to the formation of an American national identity by constructing memories of a heroic past, animated by a religious imagination. It considers these paintings in light of Anthony D. Smith’s work on nationalism and reads them alongside primary source materials relating to their production and reception. Despite the sometimes differing, even competing, political and theological visions of these paintings, they cohere in the (re)production of a national creation myth in order to make visible an imagined providential destiny for the American project. This usable past continues to fund nationalist futures that understand domination as America’s divine mission and sacralize regenerative violence, which prompts the question of whether other futures are possible. And if not, what forms of forgetting must be cultivated for the sake of a livable future?

This paper explores how Korean immigrant leaders in the United States from the 1930s to 1940s reformulated the story of their country’s past toward advancing a vision of a future sovereign Korea. Drawing on petitions and letters written by Korean immigrant organizations to American government agencies as well as news articles, it situates these efforts within a moment when Korean immigrant leaders began to see the growing possibilities of forming kinship with the United States in opposition to the Japanese empire. By doing so, this paper argues that Korean immigrant leaders glorified their country’s history to highlight their racial superiority—or their racial “fit”—and thus position Korea less as a colonized country than as an equal player among other national powers on the global stage. 

Since Jan Gross called attention to Poles’ complicity in the murder of Jews during the Second World War with the publication of Neighbors in 2000, a populist “backlash” (Forecki 2018) to critical historiography on the Holocaust in Poland has emerged among Polish ethnonationalists seeking to defend the “good name” of Poland. In this paper, I critically analyze one salient locus of this ethnonationalist backlash: The Chapel of Remembrance (Kaplica Pamięci) in Toruń, which commemorates Poles murdered for helping Jews during the Holocaust. Building on recent sociological engagements with the Chapel of Remembrance, I offer a theological analysis and critique of the chapel’s portrayal of the “dead rescuers” (Łysak 2023) it commemorates as martyrs. Ultimately, I argue that the Chapel of Remembrance deploys the symbolic grammar of martyrdom for nationalist ends and, in doing so, sacralizes the Polish nation in a manner fundamentally at odds with a Christian theology of martyrdom.