In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Whether denounced or defended, Genesis still sparks interminable debate in Christian discourses of religion and ecology: Is imago dei anthropocentric? Yet when unearthing the notorious “curse of Ham” text (Gen. 9:24-27), the reception histories tend to focus—for good reason—not on the text’s environmental dimensions, but its fraught role in the origins of racialized slavery. In this paper, I contend that this separation of environmental frameworks from critical race studies, of soil questions from slavery questions, winds up impoverishing both. I explore what fresh lines of inquiry might open for the religion and ecology conversation if we read Noah’s enslaving curse as vividly disclosing the perennial human tendency toward political ecology: that is, toward the use of power, domination, and difference in distributing ecological harms and benefits.

Ecological crises increasingly displace communities into host societies that frequently conceptualize them as threats to social stability. This paper examines how host societies recast displaced populations as dangerous outsiders and justify exclusion through borders and social fragmentation. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s concept of dirt as "matter out of place," I show how dominant narratives code displaced people as intrusions within imagined national or cultural orders, rendering their suffering morally illegible. I analyze mutual aid food-sharing initiatives as counter-rituals that confront fear and indifference through radical hospitality. These meals identify fear, exclusion, and indifference as the real social toxins and use shared food to dissolve the boundaries that sustain them. By feeding people in public spaces, these gatherings meet immediate needs and model resilient, non-state forms of collective life that embody a compassionate ecological future in the present.

Vehicle-dwelling nomads on western public lands offer a case study of ecological belonging without settlement. In contrast to ecological futures grounded in permanence, property, or linear progress, nomadic life is structured around mobility, impermanence, nonlinearity, and the constraints of state territorialization. This paper draws on participatory ethnography—including oral history interviews and my own experience living nomadically since 2022—alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology and scholarship in religion and ecology. It follows dispersed campers who cultivate temporary forms of dwelling as campsites appear and disappear and community gathers and disperses. Rather than diminishing dwelling, nomadic life intensifies ecological attunement as the quotidian becomes oriented around weather, terrain, water, wildlife, and seasonal movement across the landscapes of the western cordillera.

Industrial pollution, global-warming-intensified natural disasters, and ineffective governmental policy have converged to produce enduring environmental injustices in Buenos Aires’ Matanza-Riachuelo River Basin, presenting both ethical and political. Drawing on scientific, economic, ethnographic, and journalistic sources, as well as political analyses, I argue that ongoing attempts to meaningfully improve the lives of marginalized residents have been ineffective because they fail to sufficiently (re-)imagine and innovate both in activist strategies and in policy proposals. Religion(s) can serve as (a) resource(s) for guiding responses and policymaking in the Matanza-Riachuelo, reflecting their potential to support environmental justice movements more generally. Rather than abandoning existing efforts in the Matanza-Riachuelo, this paper suggests that a strategy that both builds on their successes and drawing on religions’ cosmological creativity could best support the imagination and implementation of new political, social, environmental and economic responses. 

This paper examines an unlikely alliance between a Pentecostal megachurch and an ecofeminist movement within a 2025 environmental conflict in El Salvador. Salvadoran sociologist Rafael Cartagena’s concept of socio-ambientalismo, defined as the convergence of distributive and ecological critiques, is expanded to incorporate the agency of the land in fostering this solidarity. Utilizing Actor-Network Theory, the study challenges the understanding of the social as a purely human domain by positioning more-than-human entities as actants rather than passive backdrops.

In this framework, material elements also shape the relations, mobilizations, and alliances that define the conflict. Such unlikely alliances reimagine the conceptual scope of the ecological community and planetary consciousness proposed by ecofeminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether. Rather than relying on a shared progressive ideology, this paper demonstrates that within this instance of environmental resistance, ideologically distant groups can participate in productive solidarity through the agency of the land.

This presentation takes a new materialist approach to exploring the particularities of matter that entwine around the task of online theological education across regional contexts. Crucially, it appropriates Tara Page's new materialist pedagogy of placemaking for digitally networked theological education–in dialogue with writings on theological formation by Charles Foster, Willie James Jennings, and Katherine Turpin, Etienne Wenger's social theory of learning in practice, and indigenous insights on Land-based pedagogy from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robin Wall Kimmerer. It argues for the construction of curriculum with the differential practical mattering of learners in the online environment as its starting place, inviting students to pay increasing attention to their peculiarities of place and practices of placemaking.

This paper makes two main interventions. First, I will elaborate a new method for theological reflection rooted in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Marxist geography: what I am calling queer abolition geography. Second, to demonstrate the affordances of this geographical method of theological reflection, I will present a case study from my work as a spiritual care provider at a community hospital in San Francisco: hospital chaplaincy as queer abolition geography. 

This query begins with Vine Deloria Jr.’s text, For This Land, delineating an indigenous sense of “belonging-to-the-land” quite different from colonial approaches presuming ownership and mere aesthetic appreciation.  This difference involves not only generations of reflection provoked by a given topography of dwelling, carried forward in myth and ritual, but also sudden moments of “revelation” when a piece of the land by means of uncanny dread, communicates itself off-limits to humans, reserved-to-itself.  Tracing such an earth-respecting “haunting” of landscape in relation to various cultures’ notions of “hungry ghosts” of community members untimely dispatched, re-visiting the living with disruption, Zimbabwean understanding of even clear-cut trees as capable of such ghosting, we will focus on Irish experiences of “hungry grass” arising from the 19th century Potato Famine and Oweynagat Cave’s 4,000-year-old Samhain tradition of ghostly “Halloween” appearances, alongside consideration of Jesus’ Mt. Hermon (verboten) encounter with haunting ancestry (Mark 9).

In the early 2000s, a number of Christian women participated in the tradition of Christian life writing through a newly accessible technology. Christian women bloggers, like Glennon Doyle, Ann Voskamp, Jackie Hill Perry, and Melanie Shankle have been insufficiently considered by scholars and their own communities as Christian thought leaders. Drawn from my dissertation project examining twenty-first century women bloggers-turned-authors as theorists of the self, this paper interrogates these women’s shared investment in the craft of writing. Together, they imagine writing not as a practice of formation but as a practice of attention. They understand writing to be a technology of the self, but given their belief in a true, unchanging self, writing can only reveal, not transform. Drawing from other theorists of writing and my memoirists own reflection, I argue that writing is transformative and formative. Nevertheless, to acknowledge this would require my memoirists to accept a dynamic self.

Spiritual harm and “church hurt” are widely invoked in survivor communities and pastoral conversations, yet it remains undertheorized within religious studies. What distinguishes spiritual harm from ordinary religious conflict, and when does theological formation become injury? Drawing on scholars such as Katie Gaddini and Beth Allison Barr, this paper argues that contemporary women’s deconversion narratives offer critical resources for clarifying the concept. Focusing on memoirs by women formed within white American evangelicalism, including Tia Levings, Shannon Harris, Glennon Doyle, and Cait West, I examine how gendered regimes of authority and sexuality structure experiences of harm. I propose that spiritual harm is operationalized through a matrix of theological, epistemic, and relational dimensions that delegitimize women’s knowledge and constrain their moral agency. Within these accounts, deconversion emerges as epistemic resistance. These narratives also model reparative futures, offering resources for reimagining accountability and healing in and beyond evangelical frameworks.
 

Conceptually robust and practically grounded, the proposed framework comes from both scholarly research and direct advocacy with survivors. It is designed to be intersectional, anti-carceral, contextually flexible, and feminist. It takes survivors’ voices as authoritative without presuming any individual survivor is all-knowing or infallible. It treats spiritual harm as an individual experience that is also always systemic. It recognizes that while maintaining ethical standards is paramount for communities, we need a flexible set of tools for response—there is no one-size-fits-all solution to specific instances of spiritual harm. This framework takes seriously that spiritual harm is pervasively entrenched in western modernity and also envisions societies free of it. It holds the maintenance of human dignity together with the urgency of social accountability. The goal is to address spiritual harm in a manner that, itself, models the spiritual and ethical integrity that was called for, abandoned, and degraded in that instance. 

This paper argues that theories of spiritual harm and repair in religious studies would greatly benefit from Gloria Anzaldúa’s body of work on spirituality, psyche, and writing practices. A critic of the category of "religion" because of its enmeshment in colonial, patriarchal violence, Anzaldúa also unpacked how colonial epistemic violence is spiritual harm. She held these theories alongside writing practices that were reparative, indeed forms of "spiritual activism," that contested the epistemic and material violence of patriarchy and colonialism. While known in religious studies for her woman-of-color theory of "borderlands," what remains under-theorized from her three decades of writing is Anzaldúa's feminist insistence that repair of spiritual harm is formative to her theories and her expansive genre-bending writing that labored beyond academic conventions. This paper bridges Anzaldúan theory with religious studies and feminist writing pedagogies, offering transformative methods for teaching and learning that support marginalized voices and center survivors’ agency.

Recently, Catholic popes have begun a controversial practice of publicly apologizing for specific spiritual harms done by the Church. In this paper, I argue that these public apologies can be fruitful, but only if popes proceed with a robustly Christian and survivor-centered model of repentance, placing the needs of others over concern for reputation.

I argue that public apology does have a place in Catholic repentance, even apology on behalf of the whole Church, but that it must be done on the terms of the survivors and with their (self-determined) interests at heart. I suggest that the Church use its own magisterial formula for the sacrament of reconciliation as a starting script for public repentance. This should include an examination of conscience, a full confession, and an act of penance. Each of these aspects should de-center concern for self and center, instead, the voices of survivors.

Spiritual abuse has emerged as a critical term within recent Muslim discourse, yet it is most often framed as an ethical wrong. While such framing foregrounds survivor experience, it also individualizes abuse and sidesteps Islamic law—an authoritative discursive tradition through which many Muslim communities conceptualize harm. In minority contexts, appeals to institutional accountability remain necessary but insufficient: mechanisms of accountability cannot meaningfully confront practices activists deem abusive if some of those practices are simultaneously justified within prevailing legal interpretations. Avoiding Islamic law leaves this normative architecture intact. This paper argues that struggles over Islamic law are ultimately struggles over the futures of accountability. Drawing on classical legal theory, I propose conceptualizing spiritual abuse as a fiduciary breach of communally delegated religious authority. Reframing spiritual harm juridically relocates accountability within the tradition itself, demonstrating that the question of care is inseparable from how the law imagines its own future.

Spiritual harm is widely invoked in religious studies and social science literature but rarely theorized with precision adequate to clergy sexual abuse of adults. This paper introduces Sacred Relational Archetypes (SRAs) — the constellation of symbolic roles and relational expectations structuring the clergy-congregant relationship in Christian denominational contexts — as a framework for that theorization, drawing on qualitative dissertation research analyzed through the Sexual Grooming Model.

My central argument is that clergy sexual abuse does not merely occur within sacred relational structures but systematically weaponizes them. Perpetrators invert the archetype - the shepherd becomes the wolf, the confessor the interrogator of shame - producing harm that is simultaneously relational, psychological, and theological. I term this process archetypal betrayal. The paper defines spiritual harm specific to clergy abuse, examines its gendered dimensions within patriarchal religious institutions, and draws implications for repair through archetypal restoration.

This paper examines parallels between early American critiques of the printing press with contemporary critiques and problems with particular uses of AI. By the eighteenth-century, members of Native American communities, the Jewish diaspora, and German migrant groups were becoming wary of the ways the Anglo-American Protestants treated the technology and its productions as producing speech that would be treated as timeless, permanent, and having universal scope. At the heart of their concerns, however, was the way the technology was promoted by booksellers, printers, missionaries, etc... to do exactly that, but in a manner that only really benefitted Anglo-American Protestants. This paper compares these critiques to some AI use-cases in contemporary discourse, and the ways that eighteenth-century critiques of print technology very much parallel our own concerns about the rampant marketing of the technology and the goals of those most invested in its proliferation across all parts of society.

Internet-based communication technologies are changing the role of religious and scientific discourse in the world today. Scholars have noted that a “post truth” environment is insufficient to explain how the internet is leading to the rise of awaking movements like QAnon and other form of conspirituality that, though scientifically falsifiable, can sustain their systems of meaning against valid critique because of communication on the internet. The “New Clarity” has been proposed as an alternative conceptual schema for describing how the internet allows for the forming of communities online that explain away criticisms in a real-time, cybernetic feedback loop of crowdsourced identity formation in epistemic silos. Using systems theory to inform a philosophy of science and religion, this paper will show how both science and religion develop in relation to communication complexity to resolve forms of uncertainty in physical, social, and virtual environments according to different modes of explanation. 

This paper discusses the role of religious narratives and metaphors in structuring debates at the intersection of technology and ecology by relating opposed positions on artificial intelligence’s role in the climate crisis to contrasting frames of technical mastery of the world within the nascent environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the works of the architect and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, Jr, and the historian Lynn White, Jr, the paper draws attention to a structural parallels between contemporary and historical imaginaries of the techno-ecological future. On the one hand, utopian narratives provide comprehensive environmental solutions by constructing a transcendent technological “god’s-eye” view that allows for global ecological interventions. On the other hand, critical narratives situate human agency within abstract ideal frameworks and underscore the necessity of profound epistemic and ethical shifts to avoid ecological and social catastrophe.

When scholars of religion ask how the science/religion dynamic changes as technology changes, they typically look toward AI, virtual reality, and the metaverse. This paper argues that the future they are trying to theorize is not coming but has already arrived, and it arrived first in Black digital religious communities. Drawing on original qualitative research on two online Black faith communities, this paper proposes two new categories—the Digital Hybrid Black Church (DHBC) and the Virtual Networked Black Church (VNBC)—as emergent religious space formations that challenge longstanding assumptions about what constitutes a liberating religious community, a sacred healing space, and the institutional church. Together, these concepts reframe the science/religion question not as a question about what technology will do to religion in the future, but as a question about how Black communities operating at the margins of both religious and technological power are already doing with technology now.

Biological reproduction is central to white evangelical futurity. This paper analyzes the enfleshed labor of childbirth as core to the ends of the evangelical far-right, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. I argue that the birthing body functions as the site that upholds white evangelical visions of salvation in a way that frames the act of childbearing as a form of redemptive suffering toward the end of furthering Christian theopolitical power. I contend that this soteriology of reproduction is furthered by the figure of the child being constructed as the subject that ultimately enacts redemption by securing the future of white evangelicalism. I conclude by turning toward an abortive ethic as a potential resource for disrupting the interlocking of reproductive labor with the expansion of Christian hegemony. 

Debates about the future of the family often focus on whether the traditional biological family should be defended, reformed, or abolished. Yet the vital role of “chosen family” in queer communities suggests that a more pressing question is how intergenerational relationships are sustained without biological kinship at all. This paper revisits the virtue of filial piety as a framework for addressing that question. Drawing on Confucian virtue ethics, queer studies, and Christian reflection on adoption, I argue that filial piety can be configured as an ethical orientation toward predecessors and elders within communities of shared life. On this account, filial piety names not obedience to biological parents but a cluster of dispositions: gratitude for formative care, fidelity to communities of survival, attention to communal memory, and responsibility for elders. Read in this way, queer kinship practices illuminate how filial piety might guide new forms of family beyond biological descent.

The purity movement, a phenomenon of the late twentieth century which heightened Christian norms restricting most forms of sexual desire, has influenced family structures within and beyond the Evangelical culture from which it sprang. Narrative accounts from people raised in the purity movement have publicly critiqued its claims, pointing to negative psychological, social, and biological health outcomes. These accounts make the case against purity on utilitarian grounds; separation of unwed mothers from their children, unsatisfactory sexual relationships within marriage, and physical pain are evidence against the validity of the purity framework. While these impacts are important and worthy of moral consideration, this paper argues that a utilitarian approach is insufficient to counter a theo-ethical framework that prioritizes conformity with God’s design over this-worldly flourishing. Persuasive critique of the purity movement will need to employ theological language, such as idolatry.