In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This essay considers Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism (2020) as an autotheoretical performance of apophatic faith in a futurity beyond “the end of the World.” While Afropessimism is often implicitly or explicitly conflated with (Black) nihilism as a quietist form of resignation, I argue that its “refusal of prescription” should be read as an apophatic catalyst for tarrying with problems that do not have “solutions.” Echoing Frantz Fanon’s recitation of Aimé Césaire, Afropessimism rhetorically poses the question of where one should “begin” and responds with “the end of the World, of course.” Here, I argue that “beginning” and “ending” contract in(to) the messianic time of the Now, yielding an orientation to the afterlife of slavery and an accompanying eschatology—sans teleology—of interminable abolition. This abolitionist drive concerns not (simply) any given institution or apparatus within the World but rather the Black(est) desire for gratuitous freedom from the Human and the World as such.

This paper employs analytical lenses from theater studies to evaluate the activities of new religions that use ostensibly secular theatrical performance to convey religious messages about the path to a better future. I focus on two examples, one historical and the other current: Moral Re-Armament (MRA), and Shen Yun. Both groups have attempted to use theater as a religious ritual that inspires spiritual awakening among theater-goers, though the specifics of their intended outcomes differ. To explore the tension between what a religious group intends and what they might actually be able to achieve, I juxtapose theater studies scholarship about performance activism and theaters of social change that can be applied to these examples in productive ways.

In reimagining life-giving futures that are more expansive and inclusive of all peoples, Christian theology must be a part of the creative conversation given the ways that it has been co-opted by political powers to assert domination and control. As a result, Christian theology must intentionally re-center marginalized communities and re-imagine more life-giving and expansive futures through theopoetics. 

From tropes and stereotypes that originated during slavery, such as the mammy and jezebel, to policies and legislation that threaten our reproductive choices today, Black women have faced efforts to control their bodies and sexualities. Amid these efforts, dance becomes a sacred space of healing, freedom, and resistance for Black Christian women. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research and Black feminist and womanist scholarship to imagine Black Christian futures through dance that take us beyond the Black Church. I begin with liturgical dance as practiced in Black churches then move to pole dance as practiced at pole dance and fitness studios. In attending to generational differences in Black women who participate in liturgical dance and pole dance, I invite further reflection on how future generations can encounter the Spirit, find the divine within, and cultivate networks of care and support outside of traditional religious spaces and institutions.

Through a close reading of Garry Kilworth's sci-fi novel The Night of Kadar (1978) as a map key to the challenges that will attend any Islamofuturist project, I argue for a distinction between Islamicate science fiction (as a mere projection of Islam into the future) and Islamofuturism (the placing of Islam at the center of future possibility). Insofar as science fiction is a literature of change—one in which "the limit" is the main problematic—then the very possibility of Islamofuturism relies on the negotiation of Islam's historical and normative limits, on the one hand, and the imaginative limits of the orientalist and secularist conventions of sci-fi, on the other. 

I conclude that any viable Islamofuturism must confront four interrelated challenges: that of form, affect, technics, and home. In response, I propose four key concepts that might act as orienting coordinates for the aspiring Islamofuturist today: farq, adab, tafsir, and hijra. 

This paper is an intellectual history of the self-published journals of the avant-garde jazz musician and spiritual guru Alice Coltrane, also known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda. In these meditations, she received messages from realms beyond (turīya) and displayed them in sound and word. The journals also reveal an autodidact capable in Sanskrit and Hindi and an informed reader engaging with specific religious texts. In this talk, I am interested in Coltrane as Turiyasangitananda – that is, as a self-ordained monastic leader and an independent artist, thinking creatively at the nexus of metaphysical religion, modern Indian spirituality, and the Black radical tradition. Through a close reading of her book Divine Revelations (1995) and other ephemera from her Sai Anantam Ashram, I provide detail into the South Asian forms of knowledge that Turiyasangitananda molded into her “freedom dreams.”

As a South Asianist by training teaching in an African American & African Diaspora Studies Program, my daily task is to advance interdisciplinary conversations in Black Studies and South Asian Studies. I center my research methodologies on the African Diaspora in South Asia within the ideological frameworks animating the field of Black Studies. This presentation highlights the key questions, theoretical framework, methods, archives, and findings of ethnographic field research on the Sidi (African-Indian) Sufi devotional tradition, conducted in the state of Gujarat and the city of Mumbai in western India from 2017-2019. The presentation demonstrates the importance of multilinguistic, multi-sited, and collaborative, multidisciplinary research on the African Diaspora in South Asia (and in Indian Ocean worlds more broadly) to the tandem development of the fields of Black Studies and South Asian Studies.

The year 1838 signifies double histories in the Caribbean—the emancipation of enslaved Black workers and the arrival of the first group of South Asian indentured laborers. After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, South Asians were shipped to plantations across the Caribbean as indentured workers. They labored alongside emancipated Afro-Caribbean workers in segregated canefields. In this paper, I analyze the entangled histories of emancipation, indenture, and religion from the Caribbean plantation archives. First, I examine how the category “religion” was used to compare and categorize Black and South Asian workers. Then, I turn my attention to fugitives—workers who ran away from the plantations. Fugitive archives, I argue, persist as shadow records of the plantation. They forge errant routes, detours, and new directions for Black and South Asian Studies. Afro- and Indo-Caribbean religions underwent fugitive metamorphoses on the paths scribbled along the margins of the plantation archives.

By means of two case studies, Charles Bartholomew and Jovedah de Rajah, one from the Caribbean and one from the US, this paper will examine the ways in which peoples of African descent in the Americas have mobilized Hindu identifications and Hindu identified rituals, in these cases spiritism and hypnotism, to construct diaspora-like cultures or virtual diasporas, cultures sometimes practiced jointly with peoples of South Asian descent. Thinking beyond African American appropriations South Asian identities, these are examples of what I will call Hindu diasporicate cultures—which use constructions of others’ homelands to make a home in the here/now. Thinking with Tina Chen’s ideas on imposture and impersonation regarding Asian American negotiations of racial regimes in the Americas, I will argue that we eschew binaries of real/fake or authentic/inauthentic to understand the ways in which African Americans’ mobilizing of Hindu identifications engaged in a politics of the imposture of religion.

This paper proposes an interdisciplinary framework for understanding worldview formation at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy, and religion. Drawing on Iain McGilchrist’s (2009) account of hemispheric modes of attention, it argues that worldviews emerge from how people first encounter and make sense of reality as meaningful and ordered. Using Clément Vidal’s (2008) model of worldview components, the paper traces how basic understandings of reality, the nature of the world, and future direction shape values, everyday practices, and ways of knowing. Rather than explaining religion as a byproduct of brain activity, this framework treats neurological attention as providing a means whereby worldview formation and construction may be more effectively understood, compared, and discussed.  

Priests before the Divine Assembly: Zechariah 3 and Ancient Near Eastern Traditions

The vision of Joshua the high priest in Zechariah 3 presents a striking scene in which the priest stands before a heavenly assembly, accusations are raised, impurity is removed, and priestly authority is restored. While this passage is often interpreted primarily within the historical context of the postexilic restoration of the Jerusalem temple, its imagery also resonates with broader patterns found in Ancient Near Eastern religious literature. This paper examines how traditions of divine assembly deliberation, heavenly adjudication, and ritual purification help illuminate the symbolic setting of the vision. In this light, Zechariah 3 portrays the restoration of the Jerusalem high priesthood as an event affirmed in the divine realm, linking earthly priestly authority with heavenly authorization.

182 years after the founding of the Bahá’í Faith, Bahá’í communities in some countries are ceasing to be imperceptible minorities and becoming numerically significant segments of their populations. As they grow, practices of collective worship are changing, in part through the emergence of local houses of worship. This paper places the decisions Bahá’í communities are now making regarding collective worship in the context of scholarship on the transition from house meetings to a formal liturgy in second century Christianity and the formalization of collective prayer with the spread of Islam. 

This paper reads Wu Yaozong's 1943 theological work, No One Has Seen God (没有人看见过上帝), as a case study in the dangers of collapsing divine transcendence into historical immanence. Wu's two-dimensional ontology, indebted to a Spinozist philosophical imagination, ultimately dissolves the vertical reality of God into the horizontal movement of revolutionary history. The paper traces three interlocking developments: 1) the subordination of transcendence to material process, 2) the silencing of classical eschatological hopes such as resurrection and the return of Christ, and 3) the conferral of final, eschatological meaning upon revolutionary praxis. Wu's move is not Bultmann's existential reinterpretation but something more consequential; namely, the structural erasure of a God who can speak against history. The bitter irony is that when Mao's Cultural Revolution turned against Wu himself, his theology had already surrendered the only ground from which resistance, grief, and hope beyond history might have been spoken.

This paper argues that in the face of intersecting global crises—climate collapse, political instability, and societal uncertainty, Christian theology must not only relinquish hope in an omnipotent, interventionist God but more importantly surrender its traditional eschatological framework in order to avoid despair. While some theologians advocate abandoning hope in the omnipotence of God, this paper contends that the problem is not only hope in God’s omnipotence but one based in eschatological hope. Rather than give up hope entirely, this paper thus proposes a shift toward Indigenous relational and spatial understandings of Creator, as articulated by Vine Deloria Jr., George Tinker, and Randy Woodley. These frameworks prioritize place, relationality, and non‑anthropocentric creation over temporal promises. Relinquishing eschatological hope enables a theologically honest, palliative faith that accepts human finitude and finality without abandoning the reality or presence of Creator.

This paper explores the eschatological significance of Black identity by construing Blackness as fugitive performance. It aims to establish the Black body as a site and symbol of Christian hope without abstracting or distancing it from the experiences of subjection that shape its historical reality. Accordingly, it considers the ambivalence and multidimensionality of Blackness as a choreography of freedom within captivity, a lived performance in which the shape of Black life is seen to simultaneously reflect, resist, and transcend the constraints and definitions imposed upon it by antiblack violence. Through a theo-choreographic interpretation of Harriet Jacobs’ garret experience, it proposes that Black bodies are constituted in, as, and through fugitive performance and identifies this performance as the instantiation of Black hope. Such hope anticipates the redemption, transformation, and glorification of Blackness and gestures toward a notion of eschatological identity that suffuses and transcends the limitations of oppressed existence.

In this paper I argue that progressivist and realist Augustinians mischaracterize Augustine’s theology of hope in ways that diminish its significance for contemporary Christianity. Progressivist Augustinians attribute Christian hope’s realization to God’s empowerment of creation’s historical advance, compromising its credibility amidst profound environmental and technological pessimism. Realist Augustinians avoid this vulnerability by ascribing Christian hope’s realization to God’s supra-historical consummation of creation, yet they construe this hope primarily as consolation for inevitable moral failure and so strip the Christian life of its teleology. Augustine, however, presents hope as structured by two anticipations: God’s unilateral consummation of creation and humanity’s participation in that consummation. Moreover, since such participation is constituted by love, this second anticipation orders hope to love. Augustine’s account thereby restores a teleological relationship among the theological virtues that sustains hope amid historical pessimism with the realists while summoning people to do what good they can with the progressivists.

This paper argues that the fourfold investigation (catasraḥ paryeṣaṇāḥ) and the fourfold thorough knowledge of things as they are (catvāri yathābhūtaparijñānāni), as presented in the Tattvārthapaṭala of the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra, constitute a central contemplative methodology within the Yogācāra soteriological framework. Drawing on Sanskrit and Chinese sources through philological and hermeneutical approaches, the paper first identifies wisdom (prajñā) as the governing mental factor and establishes the fourfold investigation as a form of vipaśyanā, with the investigation of names as its foundation. It then analyzes the epistemic progression from investigation to thorough knowledge, showing that both things and the thing-only (vastumātra) are ineffable. Finally, the paper demonstrates that these methods correspond to the elimination of attachment of superimposition (samāropa) and diminution ( apavāda), providing the concrete contemplative mechanism for realizing the Yogācāra middle path between reification and nihilism.

This paper examines the debate over supportlessness (nirālambanatā) of cognition between Yogācāra and Kumārila. Yogācāra proposes this doctrine to express its distinctive theory of mind-only (cittamātra) from an epistemological perspective. It holds that no extramental objects exist for any states of cognition, which has aroused controversy since its transmission. One of the early opponents is Kumārila, a famous Mīmāṃsā philosopher, who provides extensive arguments against supportlessness in the Nirālambanavāda Chapter of his Ślokavārttika. As Taber (1994, 34) concludes, Kumārila primarily argues that the thesis of supportlessness undermines itself because its proof is either non-extramental, thus not objective, or extramental, thus contradicting its thesis. Through conceptual and textual analysis based on Yogācāra treatises, with particular focus on the soteriological perspective, this paper finds that Yogācāra’s thesis of supportlessness does not undermine itself, insofar as it is a pedagogical expression, and that it instrumentally serves to counter conceptualization through names. 

I present and discuss an argument to the conclusion that it is better to act wrongly and hold a right view than to hold a wrong view and act rightly. This counterintuitive conclusion derives from Āryadeva’s (ca. 3rd c. CE) Catuḥśataka and its Dasheng guang bailun shilun 大乘廣百論釋論 (T1571) commentary. After presenting the argument in its original context, I analyze it in the context of contemporary ethics of belief. I argue that the argument provides insight into the harm of purely mental action of believing or holding a view. This piece of insight is that if this action carries a risk of seriously bad consequences and damages people’s interests, then it is harmful, and this harm may outweigh the harm of acting wrongly.

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, debates about religion and national identity increasingly shape public discourse. This paper examines the pedagogical challenges and opportunities involved in teaching the history of early Christianity in contemporary American classrooms, particularly in culturally conservative contexts where students may arrive with strong assumptions about the unity and continuity of Christian tradition. By introducing students to the diversity of early Christian communities and the historical development of doctrine—such as debates surrounding the Council of Chalcedon (451)—courses on early Christianity can complicate confessional narratives while fostering critical historical analysis. The paper explores strategies for distinguishing historical inquiry from theological evaluation, encouraging constructive classroom dialogue, and helping students understand how Christian traditions have developed through ongoing processes of debate and interpretation. These pedagogical approaches highlight the continuing relevance of early Christian history for contemporary discussions about religion and public life.

As the United States prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Christian nationalists are promoting the myth that the founding fathers were predominately orthodox Christian men. I argue that recent efforts to sustain this myth by Christian nationalists like Doug Wilson center on a historical figure who was nowhere near the Pennsylvania State house in 1776: the Protestant reformer John Calvin. I demonstrate how Christian nationalists’ mobilization of Calvin rely on historical narratives advanced during the late nineteenth century by Dutch pastor and politician Abraham Kuyper. Throughout his writings, Kuyper valorized Calvinist rebels across time, from the sixteenth-century religious wars in France to the eighteenth-century American Revolution. Identifying Christian nationalists’ appropriation of Kuyper’s Calvinist genealogy helps us better to understand their efforts to dissociate the American Revolution from the Enlightenment and read founding documents like the Declaration of Independence in ways that promote Christian hegemony. 

In Ukraine, war did not simply reshape religious institutions—it generated a new model of military chaplaincy. While in most countries chaplaincy developed gradually within stable state structures, Ukraine followed a different trajectory: it emerged during an ongoing war and was initially driven by civil society rather than state policy. Drawing on original qualitative research, including a personal interview with Colonel Larysa Polianska, head of the Military Chaplaincy Service of Ukraine, this study examines how volunteer clergy, interfaith cooperation, and institutional improvisation shaped chaplaincy under wartime conditions. The Ukrainian case reveals a model of bottom-up institutionalization, in which grassroots religious initiatives preceded state recognition. It also shows how interfaith cooperation, gender transformation in leadership, and the legacy of Soviet secularism are reshaping the relationship between religion, civil society, and the military in contemporary Ukraine.

Anne Frank’s diary, from its original conception to its modern multifaceted existence as an object of Jewish memory and transmission, has long been a site of writing, harmonizing and interpreting, all with various objectives and by various editors (including herself). Philip Roth, too, has participated in the tradition of transmitting and reimagining Anne Frank in the “Femme Fatale” section of his 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer; Roth quotes Frank’s own words—as published in the 1952 English translation of her diary—rendering these words, unattributed, in italics. This paper explores the literary effects of this resurrection and the limits and implications of using Frank as a mechanism of exploring contemporary Jewish American life. Like reinventions that came before (and after) Roth’s, Frank, through constant borrowings, becomes a malleable symbol belonging to Jewish society and representative of the tragic Jewish past, the ever-slipping-away Jewish present, and the uncertainty of a Jewish future.

This paper analyses the efforts made by Jewish agencies, early scholars of antisemitism and State intelligence services to identify the author(s) behind the "Plot against the Church", first distributed at VaticanII, before becoming a long-standing bestseller for opponents to the aggiornamento on the Church teaching on the Jews. Archival findings outline an uncanny obsidional alliance between three groups, all embodying a specific form of antisemitism but with no prior contacts with the other two: Mexican antimodernist Catholics, Italian neofascists and Egyptian diplomacy.  

Building upon Stoler's "epistemic anxieties", the paper addresses not only the antisemitic networks behind The Plot, but also the representations of antisemitism conveyed in the hypotheses made by the investigators aiming to identify its authors. While The Plot was often seen as a derivation of the Protocols, we argue on the contrary that it embodies a complete shift of dynamics and power balance in transnational antisemitism after WWII.

What can we learn about the reproduction of fascism (and fascist desires) by re-staging the well-known antagonisms between the phenomenology and politics of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas? In this paper I read Levinas's "Heidegger, Gagarin and Us" — which chronicles the Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin's successful outer-space orbit in 1961 and takes the occasion to refute Heidegger's ontological attachment to "Place" — along with the latter essays of Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking" and "The Question Concerning Technology." Heidegger's essays have a provincialist, rooted, anti-technological and at times polytheistic ethos that Levinas expresses a strong aversion to. Levinas's aversion to "the Place" and human "rootedness" follows from his belief that Heidegger's attachment to place has fascist potentials. I ask however, if Levinas's thought fails to overcome what he most fears in his philosophical predecessor through his attachment to the idea of Jewish ethical exemplarity in the newly founded State of Israel?

This paper takes up the question of the doubling of the body of Jesus in Barabbas and Jesus in the Mark's gospel narrative, and situates this doubling in the context of the destruction of Jerusalem in the wake of which the text is written. It shows how the destruction of Jerusalem serves for the Flavians as the vindication of their rule and, for Mark, the vindication of Christainity. Reading this site with Barabbas' return in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, I suggest we might see this primal scene of supersession as necessarily predicated upon the staging of a civil war out of which a sovereign body emerges. Showing the way Schmitt reads these two sites, I suggest that ingredient to the production of "new-Schmittianisms" is the production of civil war superseded. 

Few stories in the Book of Genesis have generated as much theological and philosophical reflection on the human condition as the story of Eve. Interpretations of the narrative have traditionally emphasized disobedience and the theological problem of the Fall, while feminist scholarship has highlighted Eve’s association with knowledge and moral awareness. Less attention has been given to the way the narrative depicts the emergence of a future-oriented structure of human existence. Drawing on phenomenological accounts of temporality developed by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, this paper argues that Eve’s act marks the moment when human life becomes oriented toward possibilities that do not yet exist. By acting on an imagined future, Eve inaugurates a form of existence structured by projection, uncertainty, and responsibility for what has not yet occurred. Read in this way, the Genesis narrative reflects how human existence becomes historical and ethically responsible for the future.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in expanding political theology beyond its roots in the Christian tradition. This paper investigates two case studies from the Islamic tradition, corresponding to the two main strains of the field. On the side of politically-engaged theology, it focuses on Hamid Dabashi’s Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (Routledge, 2008), and on the side of genealogical inquiry into transformations of religion in a secular world, it takes up Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (Yale, 2025). Both explicitly engage with their Christian forebears—Gustavo Gutiérrez and Carl Schmitt, respectively—making them particularly fruitful interlocutors. Though they come from very different perspectives and take very different approaches, both ultimately show that the problems that Christianity has bequeathed to modernity remain problems for an Islamic political theology as well.

This paper rehabilitates a central problem for philosophy of revelation brought into relief by the responsibility for transmitting religious beliefs and practices to future generations. Transmission is a communicative endeavor essential to the task of religion. However, the concept of "revelation," philosophically considered, resists the possibility of communication in the first place by exceeding the conditions of communicability. As such, revealed religion cannot expect to transmit the revelation that constitutes it to future generations by legitimate means. Thus, under what immanent conditions might divine transcendence appear as communicable without violating divine transcendence? I argue that epistemological and phenomenological approaches to revelation have not adequately answered this question. I argue  that philosophical hermeneutics in a Gadamerian vein offers conceptual tools for conceiving of language as the medium required for a robust notion of revelation as communicable. Gadamer's philosophy of transmission (Überlieferung) trades on concepts of transcendence that can countenance religious revelation.