In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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.

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.