In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper develops a genealogy of the “minor” in relation to religion, tracing a shift from “minority” as a juridico-political category toward “minor” as a postidentity, critical mode of theorizing religion. Contemporary approaches to religious diversity and inequality remain largely framed by recognition, rights, and inclusion, yet often reproduce the epistemic hierarchies through which religion is defined and governed.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the minor, alongside queer-of-color critique (Muñoz) and postsecular feminist theory (Mahmood), I conceptualize “minor religion” not as identity but as practice: a process of becoming that destabilizes majoritarian norms in theology and religious studies. Examples from space - such as the “Overview Effect” and adapted ritual practices - highlight religion as relational, situated, and open to alternative futurities beyond identity-centered paradigms.

Indigenous calls to repatriate human remains rehumanize objects in museum contexts: skulls, skeletons, hair, once called specimens, become relatives (again). This profound moral shift from ‘objects’ to ‘subjects’ recognizes violence in a field that was once progressively named "science." This paper considers a critique of violence in the rehumanization process in one repatriation, in this example, through the return of 14 Yawuru and Karajarri ancestors to Broome, Australia, from an Ethnographic Museum in Leipzig, Germany. It draws on ethnographic and historical research alongside Walter Benjamin's essay Toward a Critique of Violence to consider how naming kin allows speakers to understand something anew as violence without issuing guilt, catalyzing a sense of obligation and not punishment. Drawing from her experience as a repatriation coordinator and museum conservator as well as historical research on Yawuru kinship systems, Hamburger will discuss repatriation and religion in terms of the rhetoric of kinship that might describe an Aboriginal critique of violence that asks Western institutions to consider relations to Indigenous people. 

This paper reports on transdisciplinary scenario planning workshops that imagine viable futures with Indigenous and settler communities in the Rocky Mountains, home to headwaters of three major rivers with Indigenous heritages that provide water for millions of people downstream: the Snake River (Columbia River), the Wind River (Missouri River), and the Green River (Colorado River).  As water futures grow more uncertain on a warming Earth, the risk of violence increases. The paper frames the relationship between natural resource scarcity and the activation of religious language to justify violence. With the ascent of settler community Dominionism and white Christian nationalism, water futures adaptation planning networks on both sides of the contact zone might shelter burgeoning Indigenous, sustainable worldmaking.   The orientations forged in scenario planning workshops, where memories and stories meet best science future scenarios recall parable and storytelling traditions and provide a vehicle for religious studies analysis and community engagement.

With the aim of advancing the study of Islam’s contributions to anticolonialism in southern Africa, this paper focuses on the legacies of ʿAlawiyyah Sufi thought and practice in diasporic engagements with the global coffee trade.  Bringing my fieldwork and archival research in South Africa’s Western Cape to literary analysis, I explore the ways in which the pleasures and perils of coffee have constituted and re-animated ʿAlawiyyah-centered strategies for building solidarity against the ravages of Euro-Asiatic slavery and mortgage capitalism.  In line with Africana studies, my paper considers insights made available through greater attention to global histories of food and the environmental humanities.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Chinese Christian organizations expanded social service programs into rural areas of the wartime interior. This paper examines the gendered dynamics of these initiatives, focusing on women workers associated with the National Christian Council of China and related Christian institutions in wartime West China. It argues that gender structured the everyday practice of Christian rural service: while Protestant leaders promoted rural reconstruction as part of a broader project of “Christianizing society,” female teachers, nurses, and social workers carried these programs into village communities. Drawing on institutional records, field reports, and local sources, including village surveys and county-level materials, the paper reconstructs how women workers adapted reform initiatives to village conditions. In doing so, it highlights the central role of women’s labor in shaping Christian engagement with rural society during wartime.

This paper examines Taiwanese Christian women’s transpacific political activism through the case of Elieen Yiyi Chang, who founded the Voice of Taiwan, a New York-based broadcast network, in 1977. Analyzing recordings of three broadcasts and the three kingdoms ideology of Chang, I argue that Chang fused political reporting with Christian moral conviction and that, although she was not in Taiwan during the democratic movement, her influence on democratization was not constrained by her physical location. Instead, the fact that she was in the United States empowered her to conduct transpacific Christian activism without the Kuomintang government’s direct interference and to freely reflect her Christian faith alongside her Taiwanese identity. Centering a Taiwanese Christian woman’s leadership within Cold War transpacific activism, this paper challenges the predominant assumption of Christian women being passive in political activism and demonstrates how Taiwanese Christian women contribute to imagining alternative political futures beyond East Asian settings.

This paper analyzes LGBTQ+ contestations and ecclesial retrenchments in Taiwanese churches during the marriage-equality transition (2017–2019). Using a bounded public corpus—network statements and pastoral guides, recordings and handouts from an evangelical forum, and reflections by LGBTQ+ Taiwanese Christians—it reads these debates as theological anthropology-in-practice. I argue that the controversy activates a two-layer “grammar of desire”: a Cheng–Zhu–inflected tianli/renyu binary that codes desire as moral risk and a received Protestant idiom often imagined through a competitive grace/nature frame. When these grammars resonate, desire is construed less as a site of formation than as a danger-sign; LGBTQ+ lives become especially legible within a single moral register, and ecclesial futures are narrowed in advance. Drawing on Kwok Pui-lan as a lens on taboo and normativity, the paper concludes with an imago Dei-centered alternative that treats desire as formable and proposes examen-like discernment to reopen horizons of possibility for communion and vocation.

This paper reinterprets Kierkegaard’s discourse on suffering by placing it in dialogue with Avgi Saketopoulou’s psychoanalytic concept of traumatophilia. Rather than reading Kierkegaard as affirming the intrinsic value of suffering, the paper argues that both thinkers locate the possibility of transformation in the subject’s encounter with an originary and irremissible opacity at the core of human existence. Drawing on resonances between Kierkegaard and Jean Laplanche’s metapsychology, the paper shows how suffering exposes this constitutive vulnerability and can become an opening beyond the consolations of repair. The analysis culminates in a Kierkegaardian, traumatophilic reading of Sofie Laguna’s Infinite Splendours, which narrates a life shaped not despite but through trauma. The novel also highlights mourning as a missing conceptual element in Kierkegaard and Saketopoulou. Mourning is the labor that allows trauma to become generative without being justified. Together, these threads offer a constructive rethinking of suffering, subjectivity, and transformation.

The Wounded Self: Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Trauma in The Sickness Unto Death

This paper interprets Søren Kierkegaard’s account of despair in The Sickness Unto Death as a phenomenology of wounded selfhood. Contemporary trauma theories describe trauma as a disruption in the subject’s capacity to sustain a coherent relation to itself and its past, producing fragmentation and forms of alienation that resist ordinary processes of meaning-making. I suggest that Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair anticipates this structure of wounded subjectivity.

For Kierkegaard, the self is “a relation that relates itself to itself,” grounded in its dependence upon the power that established it. When this relation becomes disordered, the result is despair—an existential and spiritual distortion in the self’s relation to itself, others, and God. Read alongside contemporary trauma theories, Kierkegaard’s account illuminates the rupture of self-relation and the difficult struggle to recover a self reconciled before God.

This paper will explore traumatized individuals' experiences of meaning.  A traumatized individual in a depressed state can have a fragmented experience of meaning that becomes tied to their mood: as their experience of trauma becomes acutely present, they lose touch with a felt sense of meaning.  This raises an important question: Is it possible for such a person to have a commitment to meaning that is independent of mood, that can sustain them throughout their various reactions to trauma? This paper will examine Soren Kierkegaard’s distinction between “mood” and “earnestness” in his discourse “At a Graveside” as one possible answer.  It will argue that earnestness transcends moods like those experienced by who suffer from traumatic pasts because (1) it is active and (2) it is rooted in the eternal. This implies that Kierkegaardian earnestness, understood with clinical sensitivity, might provide grounding for those who struggle with trauma.

My paper reflects on the question of who can legitimately preach Islam. Is preaching the reserve of the madrasa-trained ‘ulama, or can ordinary believers lacking any formal religious training also lay claim to it? The Tablighi Jama‘at, an early-twentieth-century Indian pietist movement of faith renewal, offers a productive vantage point for addressing this question. Founded by Ilyas Kandhlawi, an ‘alim from Delhi, the Jama‘at encouraged ordinary believers to preach Islamic ideals. The paper discusses the competing forms of religious authority where Tablighi leaders, despite being scholars, could not endorse exclusive religious authority for ‘ulama as traditionally the rightful preachers. They also espoused ordinary believers as legitimate preachers, albeit with a perplexing anxiety to control this authority by exhorting them to avoid complex Islamic thought and always seek the guidance of ‘ulama. I argue this recalibration of religious authority was the product of the anxiety of the Muslim scholarly elite to safeguard Islam in modernity.

Classical Islamic jurisprudence prohibits Muslim women from marrying non-Muslims while permitting Muslim men to marry Christians and Jews. Yet in contemporary Western contexts, many Muslim women enter interfaith marriages, raising questions about the limits of juridical authority and the dynamics of lived Islam. This paper draws on qualitative interviews with over fifty Muslim women in interfaith relationships and 10-12 American Muslim religious leaders, examining how women’s experiences engage with religious guidance. My findings show that women challenge inherited norms—e.g., managing family opposition, creating their own ethical approaches, and raising children inclusively—while navigating conflicts and reconciliation. I propose that a woman’s choice to intermarry speaks to the importance of experiential knowledge: women’s experiences with injustice, often justified through scripture, can generate new, ethically grounded engagements with the Qur’an. This study demonstrates that interfaith marriage is a site where Islamic legal norms, gendered authority, and ethical practice are contested.

This paper examines Islamic religious education in public schools in German-speaking countries as it undergoes a “stress test” amid overlapping crises: events such as October 7, the current war in Iran, refugee movements, rising right-wing populism, diversity conflicts, and discourses on radicalization shape a precarious setting. It analyzes tensions between the constitutional educational mandate, political expectations (integration, prevention, democracy education), identity-political and theological-pedagogical expectations of Islamic communities, and the intra-Islamic diversity of Muslim students (linking to Ibrahim Kocyigit’s paper on multiple understandings of religion among Muslim youth). 

Key questions are: What significance does Islamic religious education have for public negotiations of belonging and for articulating Muslim horizons of the future? In what institutional and discursive settings does it take place, and with what diversity? Which structural and discursive challenges limit its potential, and what future scenarios—from dismantling to a professionalized, reflexive-theological subject—emerge?

In European diversity discourses, it is negotiated both as a social reality and as a normative value. This gives rise to hierarchies between “good” and “bad” diversity. Religious affiliation, especially Muslim visibility, functions as a marker around which recognition, normality, and security are negotiated. This paper examines how such distinctions are translated into institutional expectations and what they mean for Muslim youth’s multiple understandings of religion. “Orientation” is understood as a situational competence that arises from the interplay of agency, recognition orders and institutional frameworks. It focuses on how Muslim youth interpret religious content, reinterpret traditions and negotiate questions of belonging, normativity, and lived practice within Islam. Orientation is also a process of theological and religious self-positioning. This paper is linked to Ulvi Karagedik's presentation on Islamic religious education, while extending it through a focus on youth orientation processes and intra-Islamic negotiations of religion.

In this paper, I offer an analysis of altarcitos devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe as an act of futuring rooted in the material religious practices of Mexican American women. I link altars to mothering in how this material practice communicates a maternal “care perspective” that refuses to reproduce harmful structures and sheds light on the epistemological authority of Mexican American women, affirming their role as propagators of cultural values, religious belief/practice, and traditions among their communities.

This paper examines how transnational Catholic mothers mobilized motherhood as material religion through the embodied practice of wearing headscarves in public protest—purple for South Korean Minkahyup mothers of political victims under authoritarian regimes and white for Argentine Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. This paper unearths a historically significant moment of transnational encounter in June 1994 in South Korea, when Minkahyup invited the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo into solidarity activism in South Korea’s gwangjang (public square). I argue that the headscarves that the mothers wore in public protest functioned as portable “altars” of counter-memory: sensory, visible, and repeatable artifacts that resignified traditional motherhood into a moral vocation of political resistance, oriented toward justice, truth, and restoration of human dignity. In this paper, the headscarf is not a mere symbol but a lived religious practice that operates at the intersection of devotion, grief, and moral agency.

What do Hājar and women such as Sumayya, Umm Ayman, Fizza, and the enslaved concubine mothers (umm walad) of several Shiʿi Imams have in common? Across Islamic narrative traditions, these women appear as enslaved women of African origin whose maternal labor contributed to the birthing and sustaining of influential male figures who shaped Islamic thought, ritual, and sectarian memory. Yet while the authority of their sons is preserved in historical and genealogical records, the mothers themselves appear only briefly in the archive. Sumayya is remembered primarily through the later prominence of her son Ammār b. Yāsir; Umm Ayman appears in sources that emphasize her transfer as property alongside her role in raising the Prophet; and the enslaved mothers of Imams are preserved mainly in genealogical lists. This paper argues that even where historical narratives fall silent, ritual practice and communal memory continue to bear the imprint of their maternal labor.

This paper returns to an old question—“Is critique secular?”—in order to ask a new one: “Is the post-critical turn post-secular?” The famous 2007 symposium on the question of secular critique imagined a shared affective posture between secularism and critique itself: relentless skepticism towards perceived reality, and an equally relentless hunger to unveil the worldly constructions masquerading as metaphysical Absolutes. Almost 20 years later, “post” critical and “post” secular both gesture vaguely towards a revisionist mood that hungers for more hopeful, more horizontal, more constructive, and more ethically responsible paradigms of interpretation. By reading Sedgwick’s description of reparative reading alongside Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, I take stock of the post-secular’s strange critical posture, one as uninvested in distinguishing between representation and the real as it is invested in affect as an interpretative apparatus.

Scholars invested in the so-called “post-secular turn” often argue that critically deconstructing the religion-secular binary and interrogating the modernist assertion that the political and legal spheres should remain epistemologically “secular” will promote religious pluralism and respect for religious difference. As this paper seeks to demonstrate, however, the very same theoretical claims underlying notions of the “post-secular” are also, ironically, being exploited with increasing frequency by the American conservative legal movement (CLM) to advance Christian supremacy. Through a critical examination of the language, structure, and organizing logics of recent Supreme Court decisions, I elucidate a significant and problematic inconsistency pervading majority opinions that aids in this work: whereas recent non-establishment holdings deconstruct the religion-secular binary into a nullity so that state actions may countenance distinctly Christian practices, symbols, and truth claims, concurrent free exercise rulings reify the binary in order to posit “secular” state animus toward conservative Christian beliefs.

This paper intervenes into the debate on the secular and the postsecular by offering a decolonial interpretation of the postsecular that does not entail a regressive process of “desecularization,” as Walter Mignolo has argued for. Following a reflexively dialectical account of the historical process of secularization, I argue that the “post” in the “postsecular” ought to be understood as a shifting self-consciousness of secularity that makes possible the re-constitution of an ongoing process of secularization. So rather than expecting to jettison “the secular” in its entirety, there is room for a decolonial rebuilding of secularity that critically re-draws the boundaries between the secular and the religious without necessarily endorsing the well-known Eurocentrism of conventional postsecular positions. This dynamic is illustrated by way of the transmodern proposal developed by Enrique Dussel, which aims to systematize what it means to think “beyond the assumptions of modernity, capitalism, Eurocentrism, and colonialism.”

How should scholars of religion take supernatural phenomena seriously without abandoning critical explanation? This paper revisits that question--long important to the cultural history of the study of religion--through the late nineteenth-century writings of Mary Baker Eddy and other Christian Science practitioners. We argue that supernatural healings became experientially real through practitioners’ disciplined religious labor and their engagements with texts, bodies, and objects, while also remaining shadowed by doubt, failure, and dispute. We further posit that the Christian Science case exposes limits in approaches associated with the “ontological turn,” on the rise in religious studies today, which posits multiple incommensurable worlds and insulates religious claims from analysis. Against this trend, we propose a method grounded in ontological realism (the claim that all actors inhabit a shared world structured by common constraints and resources), which treats Christian Science healing as a creative but contestable composition of our shared world. 

This paper offers theoretical and empirical insights into the ecology of peace within Hindu texts and the lived experience of the minority Hindu religious community during and after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It examines how the ecology of peace is understood and applied in Hindu thought and practice through concepts such as ahimsa, karma, dharma, and vegetarian diet. It then examines how these ideas are articulated in concrete war and post-war contexts, and the ontological relationship between humans and Bhumi (the Earth), suggesting a moral responsibility toward people and the land during both periods. Through a comparative analysis, the paper establishes a framework that constitutes peace ecology from the Hindu perspective.  By examining the contemporary role of minority communities and grassroots initiatives in the ongoing dialogue, the paper places the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina within broader conversations on religion and the peace ecology.

            This paper examines contemporary ascetic performance in the Orthodox Christian monasteries of Mount Athos, Greece. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, it analyzes how forms of ascetic withdrawal and discipline are exercised in, and shaped by, the spiritual, political, and economic networks that connect Mount Athos to the ‘world’ beyond its border. It argues that contemporary forms of Christian ascetic detachment and soteriology constitute a moral, social, and material boundary regime that shapes how monks order their lives, make decisions about themselves and their community, and embrace or reject connections to others. By reflecting specifically on the interactions of Athonite monks with pilgrims, men and women in parishes, and  wage-workers, it illustrates the effects of contemporary asceticism on the lives of individuals living at different degrees of distance from the community. The paper offers insights about how asceticism intersects with contemporary social forces, global discourses, and diverse human experiences. 

In an NGO office in suburban Athens, a bureaucrat draws narrative parallels between historical and contemporary examples of displacement, arguing that the Church’s role has been identical in each. On an island in the Ionian Sea, a volunteer at a historic monastery tells tales of a walking saint that continues to protect those in need centuries after his death. At a church in downtown Athens, a priest pontificates about the future of Christianity, the borders of the Greek state, and the political incorporation of those within it. Across three distinct ethnographic vignettes, this presentation argues that the Orthodox Church of Greece both theorizes and strategically mobilizes an understanding of time as cyclically layered in which people both living and dead can act across generations and the Church’s institutional influence can withstand the waves of historic and political change.