In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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.