In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Searching the term “Nephilim” on YouTube will produce results that may surprise most scholars of religion and historians of American evangelical Christianity. The past two decades have witnessed the proliferation of self-proclaimed “Nephilim researchers,” who increasingly argue that the myth of the Nephilim in Gen 6:1–4 contains the key for understanding the entire Bible and the coming eschatological age. In books, documentary films, podcasts, and sermons, these self-proclaimed “Nephilim researchers” blend elements of fundamentalist Christian eschatology (e.g., dispensational premillennialism) with conspiracy and fringe theories about alien abductions, megalithic architecture, the New World Order, cryptozoology, transhumanism, etc. In this paper, I will describe the basic contours of this “evangelical Nephilim conspiracy theory,” as reflected in the foundational writings of figures like I.D.E. Thomas, Chuck Missler, Thomas Horn, Stephen Quayle, and L.A. Marzulli, before situating this conspiracy and its proponents within the broader intellectual and institutional history of American evangelicalism.

Genesis 6:1–4 recounts the sexual union between divine beings and human women and the birth of their hybrid offspring, the Nephilim. Biblical scholarship has long recognized that this tradition likely reflects a late redactional adaptation of older Mediterranean mythological motifs. Despite its seemingly marginal place in the Hebrew Bible, Gen 6:1–4 occupies a central role in the writings of modern “Nephilim researchers” and Christian conspiracy theorists. According to I. D. E. Thomas, the passage “could prove to be the missing clue in solving the UFO mystery” (2008, 23). This paper examines the Nephilim tradition within this interpretive framework. First, it analyzes Thomas’s The Omega Conspiracy (1986), a foundational text for this interpretive community, in order to outline the epistemology and hermeneutics that structure this conspiracy discourse. It then considers how such readings of Gen 6:1–4 circulate in contemporary online “Nephilim researcher” media and generate broader political and cultural implications.

Matthew’s Jesus says the coming of the Son of Man will be like the days of Noah (Matt 24:37). What will this look like? The late evangelical Christian, Chuck Missler, claims, “UFOs and alien intrusions appear to be a big part of what’s coming” (2003: 234). For biblical scholars, Missler’s suggestion seems non-intuitive. But for an increasingly influential group of “Nephilim researchers,” this conclusion makes sense of the Bible, ancient literature, and current events. In this paper, I examine how Nephilim researchers read Matthew 24 and Luke 17, the process by which they connect these passages with other ancient texts, and the assumptions that guide this process. I also consider which features of the biblical texts can provide justification for the methods employed. I close by positioning their approach within larger discussions of Christian interpretation, asking whether their approach represents a fringe movement or simply one manifestation of common Christian reading practices. 

Evangelical conspiracism is part of a broader sociopolitical pattern of conspiratorial thinking with a long history, and which is critically analysed by an established community of scholars in the social sciences and humanities. This presentation will contextualize Nephilim-related evangelical conspiracism in the broader scholarly discussion of conspiracy theories and society (e.g., Butter, Knight, and Thalmann). Drawing on the specific literature on conspiracism and Christianity, this paper will show how the Nephilim serve a specific, instrumentalized, but no less spiritualized function in the rhetorical and persuasive milieu of “Nephilim research” where a focus on biblical literalism collides with the symbolic capital found in uses of scholarly language without scholarly accountability. By focusing on the Nephilim as a functional stand-in for a variety of other concerns about the relationship between Christianity and civil society, this presentation shows just how patterned and revealing this particular embodiment of conservative American Christianity is. 

Searching the term “Nephilim” on YouTube will produce results that may surprise most scholars of religion and historians of American evangelical Christianity. The past two decades have witnessed the proliferation of self-proclaimed “Nephilim researchers,” who increasingly argue that the myth of the Nephilim in Gen 6:1–4 contains the key for understanding the entire Bible and the coming eschatological age. In books, documentary films, podcasts, and sermons, these self-proclaimed “Nephilim researchers” blend elements of fundamentalist Christian eschatology (e.g., dispensational premillennialism) with conspiracy and fringe theories about alien abductions, megalithic architecture, the New World Order, cryptozoology, transhumanism, etc. In this paper, I will describe the basic contours of this “evangelical Nephilim conspiracy theory,” as reflected in the foundational writings of figures like I.D.E. Thomas, Chuck Missler, Thomas Horn, Stephen Quayle, and L.A. Marzulli, before situating this conspiracy and its proponents within the broader intellectual and institutional history of American evangelicalism.

Genesis 6:1–4 recounts the sexual union between divine beings and human women and the birth of their hybrid offspring, the Nephilim. Biblical scholarship has long recognized that this tradition likely reflects a late redactional adaptation of older Mediterranean mythological motifs. Despite its seemingly marginal place in the Hebrew Bible, Gen 6:1–4 occupies a central role in the writings of modern “Nephilim researchers” and Christian conspiracy theorists. According to I. D. E. Thomas, the passage “could prove to be the missing clue in solving the UFO mystery” (2008, 23). This paper examines the Nephilim tradition within this interpretive framework. First, it analyzes Thomas’s The Omega Conspiracy (1986), a foundational text for this interpretive community, in order to outline the epistemology and hermeneutics that structure this conspiracy discourse. It then considers how such readings of Gen 6:1–4 circulate in contemporary online “Nephilim researcher” media and generate broader political and cultural implications.

Matthew’s Jesus says the coming of the Son of Man will be like the days of Noah (Matt 24:37). What will this look like? The late evangelical Christian, Chuck Missler, claims, “UFOs and alien intrusions appear to be a big part of what’s coming” (2003: 234). For biblical scholars, Missler’s suggestion seems non-intuitive. But for an increasingly influential group of “Nephilim researchers,” this conclusion makes sense of the Bible, ancient literature, and current events. In this paper, I examine how Nephilim researchers read Matthew 24 and Luke 17, the process by which they connect these passages with other ancient texts, and the assumptions that guide this process. I also consider which features of the biblical texts can provide justification for the methods employed. I close by positioning their approach within larger discussions of Christian interpretation, asking whether their approach represents a fringe movement or simply one manifestation of common Christian reading practices. 

Evangelical conspiracism is part of a broader sociopolitical pattern of conspiratorial thinking with a long history, and which is critically analysed by an established community of scholars in the social sciences and humanities. This presentation will contextualize Nephilim-related evangelical conspiracism in the broader scholarly discussion of conspiracy theories and society (e.g., Butter, Knight, and Thalmann). Drawing on the specific literature on conspiracism and Christianity, this paper will show how the Nephilim serve a specific, instrumentalized, but no less spiritualized function in the rhetorical and persuasive milieu of “Nephilim research” where a focus on biblical literalism collides with the symbolic capital found in uses of scholarly language without scholarly accountability. By focusing on the Nephilim as a functional stand-in for a variety of other concerns about the relationship between Christianity and civil society, this presentation shows just how patterned and revealing this particular embodiment of conservative American Christianity is. 

Central to Nietzsche’s philosophy is his exhortation to ‘become what one is.’ This exhortation is addressed to a reader who is not yet himself, but something embryonic and unformed. Against narratives of maturation that predicate a redemptive arc of progress, such as those derived from Christian morality and nineteenth century evolutionary theory, Nietzsche counsels a course of development patterned upon the metamorphosis of a fantastic creature that transforms from a camel into a lion and finally a child. In this paper, I consider his metamorphic creature as a progenitor of the strange hybrid figures that populate the imaginary of the surrealist painter and writer, Leonora Carrington. I aim to show how Carrington, whose hybrid figures express possibilities for becoming something unthinkable within the constraints of patriarchal modernity, responds to the call to become what one is in a way that puts pressure on Nietzsche’s generally antipathetic view of the ‘herd.’

Despite the oft-lauded contributions of virtue ethics, virtue was and is a contested concept. Beyond its historical injustices, virtue ethics, and eudaimonism in particular, have been viewed as inherently egoistic and incapable of securing justice. Taking these criticisms seriously, this paper argues that virtue ethics, when attentive to its historical failures and its complicity in structural injustice, not only withstands its critiques but also is especially conducive for liberatory efforts. Virtue ethics brings to the table precisely what its critics need for their theories of justice to work: an answer to how we come to care about the right things, deliver on our obligations, and manage the complications that arise in holding institutions and one another accountable in our pursuit of a just world. In making my argument, I contend that the self-regarding nature of eudaimonism is not an egoistic defect but a liberative strength.

The Buddhist no-self teaching opposes the view that a human being is (or has) a nonphysical ātman as a persisting substrate, and in its place offers a nondualist account of human beings. How should this teaching of “selfless persons” be understood? In Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self (Princeton, 2022), philosopher Jay Garfield argues that the Buddhist no-self teaching is best understood in a nominalist way. Here, a person’s name refers to no entity in the world but is merely a conventional way of thinking and speaking. In this paper, I argue against this reductive account and recommend instead an emergentist account of personhood. On an emergentist account, a person’s name refers to an entity in the world with novel powers not possessed even partially by its constituent parts (e.g., powers of subjectivity and agency). This paper debates the no-self teaching in light of contemporary philosophy and neuroscience. 

In mainstream public debates, AI is consistently measured against a presumed human baseline. Because this comparative register privileges a one-dimensional definition, "the human" now functions as the medium through which AI becomes thinkable, lovable, governable, and saleable. Yet the gap between AI's uneven capabilities and the intensity of public reactions (panic, awe, hope, or resignation) suggests that our projections of AI's future originate less in the technology itself than in our imagination of ourselves. To theorize this dynamic, I propose a definition of AI as an extimate technology. AI externalizes our most intimate cultural artifacts and returns them to us in a form that appears to belong to someone else. I show that technologists and futurists who anticipate the technological singularity fail to see this constitutive relation and are thus unable to ask questions that could guide a path toward a more ethical future of AI. 

This paper analyzes the pastoral practice and synodal ecclesiology of Catholic Small Christian Communities (SCCs) in Kenya. Initiated in the 1960s and 1970s, eastern African SCCs (known as “jumuiyas” in Kiswahili) exemplify Vatican II’s communion ecclesiology as well as the 1994 First African Synod’s vision of the “Church as the Family of God.” Building from recent ethnographic research in Nairobi, the paper considers how these communities connect the Catholic faith to daily life, empower women leaders within a patriarchal society and church, grapple with the challenge of expanding lay male and youth participation, interact with parish ecclesial structures, and struggle with clericalism especially when it comes to fundraising. I will synthesize lessons in local synodality that emerge from the lived practice of base communities in Africa that exemplify Vatican II’s People of God ecclesiology and Pope Francis’s calls for the church to become a “home to everyone in the neighborhood."

The Catholic church in the 19th century Protestant imagination was one in which women were held captive in convents and sexually abused by priests and children born from assault were baptized, killed, and cast into pits under the church. For almost a century, Catholic studies has turned to these narratives as evidence of Anglo-Americans’ anti-Catholic sentiments. However, recent revelations about the activities of the Catholic church, namely increased scholarship on and awareness of the horrors Native boarding schools, Magdalene laundries, and clerical sexual abuse, reveal the reality of many anti-Catholic narratives. This paper returns to anti-Catholic literature as a source of both the Protestant imagination of Catholicism and a revelation about the historical experience of Catholicism in North America, putting these fictional accounts in conversation with the experiences held captive and abused at Catholic-run Native boarding schools and Magdalene laundries in the 19th century.

This paper examines the early ministry of the Little Sisters of the Assumption, a congregation of nursing sisters founded in Paris in 1865. Unlike most women’s nursing congregations, the Little Sisters did not establish hospitals or care institutions. Instead, they cared for the sick poor in their own homes. In a time of working-class alienation from a Church increasingly perceived as aligned with industrial elites, the Sisters' intimate, domestic ministry functioned as a visible sign of the Church’s commitment to the urban poor.

I argue that the early ministry of the Little Sisters exposes a theological tension within emerging Catholic social thought: the effort to alleviate the material suffering of the poor while simultaneously believing suffering is redemptive. By tracing how the Sisters navigated this paradox, this paper also challenges cleric-centered narratives of social Catholicism and recovers women religious as significant contributors to its formation.

In this paper, I will argue that the virtue of attention is a liberative virtue that is necessary to think about the future constructively. Looking to the historical thread of the method of “See, Judge, Act” and to the theology of attention by Simone Weil, I investigate the virtue of attention in the midst of constant crisis. Attention is a necessary tool for the “See” in the See, Judge, Act Method, for the first step of charity is the attention to see the other; the poor are considered non-people, and attention heals in granting visibility. However, this vision is not an abstract gaze; rather, it is a communal act of prophetic hope. The good is never static but dynamic, requiring an attentiveness that allows beauty to become liberating justice. The liberative virtue of attention is transfigurative; it leads to a theology that attends to the world with patience.

Decisions about how children should be raised and educated are an important arena of future negotiation. Drawing on ethnographic research with women at First Baptist Dallas, this paper examines how evangelical mothers envision the future through choices about their children’s schooling. Conversations about whether to homeschool, enroll in private Christian schools, or remain in public schools reveal concerns not only about moral formation and religious identity but also cultural authority and social change. Based on fieldwork conducted from 2018–2021, the paper analyzes how mothers frame schooling decisions as part of their responsibility to shape the moral future of the next generation. These everyday deliberations illuminate broader debates in Texas over the role of religion in public education, including legislation related to the Ten Commandments in classrooms and expanded scriptural references in state curricula. Mothers’ stories reveal how struggles over schooling are struggles over whose vision of the future will prevail.

This paper presents key findings from a historical mapping project, which This paper presents key findings from a historical mapping project, which investigates religious organizations' space-sharing relationships with LGBTQ+ organizations during the 1960s and 1970s. Movement narratives have long attributed the grassroots insurgency to the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, an incident popularly remembered as "the birthplace of pride." This project complicates the remembered history of Stonewall-era organizing with a focus on the local movement spaces that facilitated grassroots LGBTQ+ growth. This analysis builds on queer community histories, which de-center the Stonewall narrative and trace the distinct local conflicts that galvanized local and regional activism. My research, in turn, maps the surprising and largely forgotten role of local congregations and other religiously-connected spaces as an infrastructure for this growth. These religious organizations facilitated LGBTQ+ movement as meeting spaces and movement centers. This grassroots focus on religious infrastructure offers a new framework for mapping--and analyzing-- LGBTQ+ movement emergence. 

One significant audience, or public, for the voluminous scholarly and journalistic literature on (white) Christian nationalism is progressive Christians. Many of them peruse polling data, listen to podcasts, subscribe to Substacks, and read articles and books to understand their political opponents and co-religionists. This paper explores how progressive Christians have engaged with the term “Christian nationalism” in order to organize, define their opponents, and motivate political action.  Our research is based on interviews and fieldwork with several local chapters of the group Christians Against Christian Nationalism. We also offer discursive and visual analysis of their digital products, including podcasts and social media. In tumultuous times, these groups have found Christian nationalism to be a useful way to name their political opponents, even when they are loved ones, family members, and fellow church members. And at a time of potential resurgence of progressive Christianity, we offer detailed accounts of grassroots mobilization.

In the aftermath of the global reorganization of the Second World War, Protestants found themselves in a precarious place. In this paper, through  archival letters and memoirs of key interlocutors such as Santiago Canclini, in his efforts, who, during a period of hostility towards Protestants in the first Peron government, tried to establish themselves not only as active members in the political, religious and social life of the country. Through letters and internal documents, we will see how Baptist pastors lobbied for new notions of citizenry and religious freedom that transcended national borders. This work of advocacy can be conceptualized into three areas, which I have denominated: external and internal advocacy, the circulation of publications, and strategic coalition building. 

In this paper, I show that in post-Bolsonaro Brazil, where Bolsonarismo continues to affect communities despite Bolsonaro’s 2022 electoral defeat, we can find continuities within the sense of change. Specifically, both senses of persistence and senses of change can be found in the recurrence of an allegorical way of seeing used to orient action: a temporal, spatial, and Christian reckoning (but not only Christian) that looks out for how God, the devil, and evil entities operate in human time. What is unique about Post-Bolsonaro Brazil, at least for the settler Amazonians I work with, is that many feel that others are interpreting the allegorical signs in inappropriate ways. While the discussion of allegory builds on my recent book, I extend that discussion with new ethnography about allegorical reversals under Bolsonaro, which offer insight into the new times animated by age-old temporal and spatial practices and political ambivalences.

In the last decade, Peru has seen vast political turmoil amidst religious stability, if not growth of practitioners too. As the country politically crumbles, is faith a prevailing factor for those residing within and outside of the country? Through the observations and celebrations of El Señor de los Milagros, Peruvian practitioner show resilience, and the importance of preserving traditions over highlighting political turmoil. 

"Rāmānuja's Worldliness" explores three senses in which the influential south Indian theologian Rāmānuja (11th century) might be considered a worldly thinker. In the first, “worldly” simply means “believing that the world exists.” In the second sense, “worldliness” amounts to a respect for the ordinary and everyday—for example, appeals to facts that no honest person could deny—as well as a disdain for obscurantism. In the third sense, “worldly” means intervening in the world, wanting to change it somehow rather than simply withdraw from it. Many hagiographies remember Rāmānuja as a social reformer, and regardless of their veracity, they witness a desire to attribute to Rāmānuja yet another way of caring about the world. The paper concludes by reflecting on how (or whether) these three senses of worldliness—philosophical realism, respect for the ordinary, and a commitment to social change—are related to each other.

As with his other works, the century-poem Rakṣā Śatakam (“A Plea for Protection in a Hundred Verses”) by the thirteenth-century Kannada poet Hampeya Harihara did not conform with contemporaneous literary practices in Kannada, both thematically and stylistically. The choice of the śataka style was unusual; the choice of voice and theme unprecedented, with a personal lamenting about the woes of a devotee’s life. While some scholars have read this century-poem autobiographically, I propose to consider this work, rather, as a public appeal for constructing a new and composite self for the community of Śiva-devotees in the Kannada-speaking region. This self is a full participant in householder life, but one who finds solace only in ritual worship of the god. In this way, the Rakṣā Śatakam carves an ethical prescription for a worldly life that is, despite its worldliness, centered on devotional self-surrender.

The Vairākkiya Catakam (“One Hundred [Verses] on Dispassion”) is a seventeenth-century Tamil poem composed in the vicinity of Pērūr, in what is now western Tamil Nadu, that encourages devotion to Śiva. Significantly, it is divided into a “treatise” enjoining the mind to abandon its worldly attachments, and a “hymn” appealing directly to Śiva for liberation. This formal innovation appears designed to reform a group of “worldly people” (Tm. ulakar) by instructing them in the aspirations and sensibilities of a Śaiva devotee. Enhancing this project is the poet’s repeated mentions of his personal experiences of Śiva, which likely allude to the contemporaneous construction of a golden hall in the Pērūr temple by the Madurai Nāyakas. Ultimately, I suggest that the poem’s effort to replace its audience’s worldliness with devotion is inextricable from wider political and religious processes that drew the previously marginal Tamil hinterlands into an expansive early modern Śaiva ecumene.

Kōpālakiruṣṇa Pārati’s (Bharati; 1811-1896) composition Nantaṉār Carittirakkīrttaṉaikaḷ (1861) catalyzed the bhakta Nantaṉār’s popularity across Tamil country. Bharati reimagined the stigmatized saint’s story of union with Śiva as musical drama and agrarian struggle. In the narrative, Nantaṉār, the laboring aṭimai (slave), struggles to convince both his Brahmin master, Vētiyar, and Dalit caste kin of his desire to see Śiva. In this talk, I explore Bharati’s discourse on the body at three levels: (1) theological, grounded in popular and doctrinal Śaivism, (2) devotional, through embodied action, and (3) labor, the system of bonded labor and modes of punishment and supplication. Taken together, I argue that while Bharati, like many authors of bhakti literature, brings to the fore the inherent tensions of the exceptional individual’s devotional journey against societal structures and expectations, he explores the way caste and untouchability permeate the so-called worldly and other-worldly divide.