In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

"Cop City Will Never Be Built" examines the spiritual and religious practices that animated the movement to prevent the construction of a militarized police training facility in Atlanta’s South River Forest. Contrary to popular depictions of contemporary leftist movements as inherently irreligious, militant “Stop Cop City” activists consistently deployed religious ritual and practice as modalities of political organizing and future-oriented world-making. Through analysis of the political impact of the movement’s spiritual ceremonies, rituals, and direct actions, interviews with movement activists, engagement with a multimedia movement archive, and comparison with resonant movements, this paper reveals spiritual practice as a cornerstone of the Stop Cop City movement, as well as other anti-colonial land defense movements across the Global South.

This paper argues that anti-lynching campaigns should be understood within the historical tradition of abolitionist movements in the United States and as a resource for our contemporary abolitionist future. Spectacle lynchings in the South relied on myths of Black southerners’ inherent criminality and were enabled by sheriffs and the broader penal apparatus. By challenging the racial tethering of criminality to Blackness and critiquing the state’s role in mob violence, anti-lynching activists engaged in abolitionist practice. Examining anti-lynching activism as abolition, however, complicates the contemporary abolitionist demand for nonreformist reforms. To grapple with this tension, this paper compares the anti-lynching campaigns of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). It further interprets lynching as a religious practice and anti-lynching activism as a competing theology that challenged the moral order sustaining racial violence.

Keeping in mind the 2026 American Academy of Religion presidential theme, “Future/s,” this paper argues that theological discourse on race must move beyond the traditional Du Bois–Cone paradigm in order to address the evolving realities of race, immigration, and human dignity in the United States. While W. E. B. Du Bois’s analysis of the color line and James H. Cone’s theological critique of white supremacy remain foundational for Black liberation theology, the racial politics of the present moment increasingly operate through what may be described as the “border line,” where immigration status, nationality, and state power shape experiences of marginalization.

Engaging Haitian Vodou as an Africana religious lens, the paper develops a pneumatocentric ethic of human dignity rooted in Vodou ritual practice, particularly spirit possession as a form of ontological affirmation. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of "heterotopia", Vodou ritual space is interpreted as a site where marginalized communities cultivate dignity and resilience in the face of racialized immigration regimes. Africana religious epistemologies and pneumatologies thus offer critical resources for reimagining the future of theological discourse on race.

This paper argues that Augustine’s account of beatific enjoyment offers a theologically and metaphysically robust alternative to two contemporary eschatological trajectories. Eschatological naturalism locates human fulfilment largely within the imminent order of nature while radical divine immanence collapses the distinction between God and creatures. Surveying proposals from biblical studies, philosophy of religion, and theology, the paper highlights how these trends either naturalize the creature’s end or imply an already realized divinizing participation of nature in God. By contrast, Augustine depicts created being as dependent, fragile, and oriented beyond itself towards its transcendent origin–fulfillable only in the intellectual vision of God. Drawing on texts from the Cassiciacum dialogues to the Confessions and City of God and important letters and sermons, this paper shows how Augustine’s conception of createdness, grace, and divine agency enriches current debates by recentring divine transcendence and the gratuity of beatitude. 

In her book Motherhood, Natalie Carnes speaks on behalf of many mothers when she expresses her dismay with Augustine’s neglect of his experience as a parent in his Confessions. Indeed, Augustine barely mentions his son and leaves his feelings about Adeodatus’ life and death unusually hidden. However, a close reading of Augustine's earlier texts written shortly after Adeodatus died suggests that there is more of Adeodatus in the Confessions than the few words Augustine devotes explicitly to him. In those earlier texts, Augustine introduces his doctrine of ordered love through the metaphor of temporal syllables in a poem “passing away.” This metaphor and doctrine, later incorporated into the Confessions, suggest that he was confronting his dysphoria over Adeodatus’ young death. Reading the Confessions with an eye toward unearthing Adeodatus’ hidden presence there opens up new possibilities for parents to engage with it in understanding their relationships with their children.

This paper sheds new light on the debate over the philosophical origins of the uti-frui distinction by examining the influence of Scripture on Augustine’s interpretation of uti-frui. Several candidates have been proposed for having influenced Augustine’s understanding of uti-frui: Varro, Cicero, and Stoicism. In response, I argue that there is no special source for Augustine’s formulation of the distinction, since this distinction was widespread in antiquity. Augustine’s own interpretation of uti and frui, while indebted to ancient philosophy, took its shape from three Scriptural texts: Ephesians 5:29, 1 Corinthians 7:31, and 1 Timothy 1:5-8. Ephesians helped him articulate an account of the goodness of natural goods, in line with the Old Academy but opposed to Manicheism. 1 Corinthians 7:31 gave him the insight that everything should be used in this life. 1 Timothy 1:5-8 specifies the end of use: love of God and all things as related to God. 

The key development in the history of logic in India is the formulation and application of the trirupahetu, or the three forms of a (logical) reason. The Tarkasastra (Ru Shi Lun T1633) adopts the trirupahetu to distinguish good arguments from bad arguments (T1633 31b11 ff.).

The Tarkasastra (Ru Shi Lun), as we have it, comprises three chapters. The first chapter is an extended debate pertaining to the claim that there are truths. The second chapter enumerates and critically discusses 16 fallacies (jati). The third lists and explains 22 situations in which a participant in a debate is deemed to have lost (nigrahasthana). The paper critically assesses the text's treatment of five fallacies: the first, the second and the fourth, where the text applies the trirupahetu; and the fifth and sixth, where the text discusses two arguments typically associated with Nagarjuna (3rd century ce).

The famed Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna appears to talk in contradictions, denying both that some P is the case and that it is not the case. Both ancient and contemporary interpretations fall in two camps: (1) let the contradiction stand dialethically or (2) qualify Nāgārjuna's negata to escape a contradiction. I offer a third interpretation, drawing on parallels to Brouwer's (1881-1966) intuitionism. To put it succinctly: no qualification is needed, but because Nāgārjuna is in the business of denying without assertion, he also escapes contradiction.

To build my case of interpreting Nāgārjuna in this vain, I focus on his Vigrahavyāvartanī, namely verses 28-29 and their commentary. I give a philosophical defense of my interpretation following Arend Heyting's (1898-1980) intuitionistic logic, which allows for the weak denial of both P and ~P without contradiction. I argue that both Nāgārjuna and the intuitionist advance cases where neither P nor ~P is provable.

Buddhist logicians from Dignāga onward require that a valid logical reason satisfy three modes (trairūpya): (1) the reason holds of the subject; (2) it is present wherever the probandum is present (anvaya); (3) it is absent wherever the probandum is absent (vyatireka). In first-order logic, modes (2) and (3) — ∀x(Hx → Sx) and ∀x(¬Sx → ¬Hx) — are contrapositives, i.e., logically equivalent. Yet Buddhist logicians unanimously insist both are necessary. I call this the “Trairūpya Puzzle.” After examining Oetke’s epistemic solution and Dharmakīrti’s treatment of the equivalence, I argue that the puzzle exposes a genuine limit of extensional formalization. Drawing on Dharmottara’s niyamavat doctrine and Durvekamiśra’s concept of svagata dharma — intrinsic capacities of the reason itself — I conclude that the second and third modes encode intensional content that the material conditional of first-order logic cannot capture. The trairūpya is a presentation of phenomenological relation.