This roundtable examines how religious communities in South Korea have engaged—and become entangled—with political power in a period marked by heightened polarization and episodic crisis under the Yoon Suk-yeol administration. Tracing developments from Yoon’s presidential campaign in 2022 through his tenure in office and the political turmoil surrounding the December 2024 martial law declaration, the roundtable explores these entanglements with respect to the communities most frequently cited in public narratives and discourses: Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, and Shamanism. The roundtable features four presenters, each focusing on one of these communities, along with a presider. Together, the panelists analyze how religious actors have interpreted, negotiated, and contested political authority in a time of crisis, highlighting both convergences and divergences across traditions.
In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book
The 2026 November Annual Meeting in Denver, CO: Friday, November 20 - Tuesday, November 24. All times are listed in Mountain Time Zone. For more information about the November Annual Meeting, co-hosted with the Society of Biblical Literature, click here.
Please note that this is the preliminary schedule and is subject to change. We anticipate a mostly final schedule in mid-August. If you have any questions, please contact annualmeeting@aarweb.org. For Other Events, your event is not confirmed until you received notification from AAR staff.
This roundtable brings together five instructors to reconsider pedagogical strategies for teaching Sufism in the undergraduate classroom. Although Teaching Mysticism (Parsons 2011) offers valuable frameworks, its broad comparative scope leaves unresolved the specific challenges of introducing Sufism to American students shaped by gaps in knowledge about Islam and by Protestant‑normative assumptions about religion. The presentations highlight practical and reflexive approaches informed by classroom experience: introducing Sufism through the history of religious‑studies categories; expanding sensory pedagogies to include visual and sonic forms of Sufi knowledge; inviting students to inhabit Sufi modes of interpretation through creative commentary; adapting “traditional” text‑centered methods to modern classroom needs via guided notes and structured annotation; and situating Sufism within medieval philosophy to foreground experiential epistemologies and female Sufi figures. Together, these perspectives offer strategies informed by lived Islam, aesthetic expression, textual interpretation, and intellectual history to encourage critical and imaginative undergraduate engagement with Sufism.
This panel focuses on the new volume Sacred Encounters: Stories of Christian Pioneers of Interreligious Dialogue. Some of the contributors to this volume will share some of the elements of their own story, while also reflecting on the process and challenges of writing a short interreligious autobiography and deciding which elements to highlight in remembering one's process of spiritual and theological development and change through encountering another religious tradition. The panel will offer a taste of the fascinating and very different stories that are brought together in the volume.
This panel focuses on the new volume Sacred Encounters: Stories of Christian Pioneers of Interreligious Dialogue. Some of the contributors to this volume will share some of the elements of their own story, while also reflecting on the process and challenges of writing a short interreligious autobiography and deciding which elements to highlight in remembering one's process of spiritual and theological development and change through encountering another religious tradition. The panel will offer a taste of the fascinating and very different stories that are brought together in the volume.
This panel focuses on the new volume Sacred Encounters: Stories of Christian Pioneers of Interreligious Dialogue. Some of the contributors to this volume will share some of the elements of their own story, while also reflecting on the process and challenges of writing a short interreligious autobiography and deciding which elements to highlight in remembering one's process of spiritual and theological development and change through encountering another religious tradition. The panel will offer a taste of the fascinating and very different stories that are brought together in the volume.
This panel features papers employing diverse approaches to the study of the Qur'an and its interpretation.
Papers
The history of Qur'anic exegesis (tafsīr) in the modern period has until now lacked discussion on the genre's encounter with print technology. This paper offers a global survey of printed tafsīr works published in the 19th century. To this end, I have compiled a database of 242 tafsīr editions printed in this time period, and sorted and analyzed their publication data by date, title, language, place of publication, publisher, and religious orientation, with the data presented in tables and maps. This survey reveals in quantitative terms the dominance of two primary global tafsīr printing hubs, in Cairo and North India, the rise of vernacular tafsīr works, the decline of the scholastic gloss tradition, and the rise of radical Qur'anic hermeneutics. This paper concludes by drawing parallels between the varied print economies of Reformation-era Europe with the 19th-century Muslim world.
This paper considers exegesis of Qurʾān 11:106–108 by three influential commentators: Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144), and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1209). The commentaries of these authors reveal early and sustained debate regarding the possibility of universal salvation. This exegetical debate centered around the idea that God will provide an exception (istithnāʾ) to his own threat of eternal damnation. All three exegetes examined in this paper limit the scope of this exception and hold that unbelievers will be punished in hell forever. At the same time, all three bear witness to the views of other Muslims, who (centuries prior to the well-known universalist writings of IbnʿArabī and Ibn Taymiyya) held that God will exempt all people from eternal punishment and bring everyone to a future state of happiness. The paper thus suggests the diversity of Islamic reflection about the ultimate future of humanity.
This paper examines Qurʾānic recitation (tajwīd) as a mediation of the divine voice, offering new understandings of the sonic sublime in Islam. It foregrounds an original understanding of tajwīd as an act of mediation that brings the lethal divine into realms possible for human sensation. The paper traces the topos of emotional recitation across the Qurʾān, ḥadīth, and Sufi writings, adopting an interdisciplinary approach drawing on ethnomusicology, philology and phenomenology. In doing so, it highlights the sonic properties of recitation, an understudied dimension in this context. It emphasizes the role of eschatological imagery in cultivating the emotional dynamics of tajwīd, highlighting the sensual imagination of recited futures. It further examines how the Qurʾān frames listening to its recitation, identifying a sensual-emotional vocabulary tied to sound. The study argues that this modality centers on khushūʿ, a form of “sonic humility” expressed through practices such as weeping and prostration.
Respondent
Our forthcoming anthology, Devotional Creatures: Bugs in Chinese Religions, investigates the roles played by insects and amphibians in the development of Chinese religions from an animal-centric anthropomorphic perspective, to imagine the “small agencies” at the intersection of animal-human lifeworlds. Devotional Creatures presents chapters on frogs, silkworms, ants, centipedes, locusts, and hornets in a wide variety of Chinese religious and historical contexts, from medieval Buddhist monastic regulations, Daoist rituals, and late imperial morality tracts to contemporary popular deity icons. It is our contention that little creatures helped shape ethical codes, omenology, and merit-making. Silkworms, hornets, and centipedes co-created Daoist-inspired popular rituals to control baleful forces. Flies and mosquitoes instigated advances in Buddhist monastery regulations and hygiene. More-than-human religious studies has prompted serious investigation of the impact of nonhuman animals on human religions. Our anthology, too, presses up against the boundaries of this idea to discover its generative force and investigative limits.
Respondent
Our forthcoming anthology, Devotional Creatures: Bugs in Chinese Religions, investigates the roles played by insects and amphibians in the development of Chinese religions from an animal-centric anthropomorphic perspective, to imagine the “small agencies” at the intersection of animal-human lifeworlds. Devotional Creatures presents chapters on frogs, silkworms, ants, centipedes, locusts, and hornets in a wide variety of Chinese religious and historical contexts, from medieval Buddhist monastic regulations, Daoist rituals, and late imperial morality tracts to contemporary popular deity icons. It is our contention that little creatures helped shape ethical codes, omenology, and merit-making. Silkworms, hornets, and centipedes co-created Daoist-inspired popular rituals to control baleful forces. Flies and mosquitoes instigated advances in Buddhist monastery regulations and hygiene. More-than-human religious studies has prompted serious investigation of the impact of nonhuman animals on human religions. Our anthology, too, presses up against the boundaries of this idea to discover its generative force and investigative limits.
Respondent
This panel convenes scholars situated in different contexts—private universities, public universities, and divinity schools—with the goal of reflecting on an urgent cluster of questions. How ought one to think about Christian theology as a normative mode of inquiry? What kinds of commitments do Christian theologians bring to their academic work, what constituencies and communities do they serve (and, perhaps, abjure), and what responsibilities do they have? Is a particular kind of normativity peculiar to Christian theology, one that bears comparison to the normativities found in other disciplines? How do other modes of inquiry/fields/disciplines shape Christian theology, and how do Christian theologians position themselves within and/or in relation to the broad world of religious studies? Now that a quarter of a century has elapsed since the differentiation of “critics” and “caretakers,” are there new models for thinking about Christian theology in relation to religious studies?