In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Within the last 25 years a new genre of devotion has developed in Twelver Shi'ism: the online English-language majālis. Subsequently new digital savvy Shī‘a authority create and curate English online content. Some communicate almost on the daily with their audience not only about theology and ritual commemorations but about current issues and politics that have direct impact on the Shi'a world. This paper will offer a new perspective on Shī‘a authority in this current moment of intense uncertainty where theological visions are overlapping with current military aggression from both the US and Israel.  This is the very region ḥadīth describe as related to the messianic figure, the Mahdī.  In addition, this paper will explore three modes of messaging from these new authorities to imagine a future beyond despair, rooted in messianic expectation to create a just religious and political community envisioned in Shī‘a eschatology: preparation, keeping faith, and political action.

This paper examines the Mālikī doctrine of sedd al-zarāʾiʿ  as a model of future-sensitive normativity in Islamic law. Under this principle, an action that is permissible in itself may be prohibited if it foreseeably leads to morally impermissible outcomes. While acknowledged across Sunni schools, Mālikī jurists systematically develop it as a coherent, ethically grounded method that integrates probabilistic reasoning, proportionality, and social welfare considerations. By foregrounding potential consequences, sedd al-zarāʾiʿ demonstrates a historically informed anticipatory approach to moral and legal regulation, offering an alternative to abstract equality or procedural rule-following. The paper situates this principle within contemporary debates on anticipatory ethics, risk governance, and the moral imagination of the future, highlighting its relevance to questions of bioethics, digital governance, and emerging technologies. Ultimately, the study shows that classical fiqh contains conceptual resources for ethically navigating uncertainty and preemptively mitigating harm, providing insights for both historical understanding and modern moral reasoning.

In 1928, Rashid Rida published The Ease of Islam: A Commentary on God’s Statement, “Do not ask about things which, if made known to you, might make things difficult for you” (Qur’an 5:101). Rida had long critiqued his peers for blindly deferring to tradition or blindly imitating non-Muslims. Here, he applies that to the law, his thesis hinging on Qur’an 5:101. He finds that the “things” God refers to concern ritual and doctrine. Here, asking unnecessary questions can lead to avoidable burdens, constricting and distorting an easy religion. But when it comes to human interactions with other humans, he finds, God grants Muslims “the widest scope,” sanctioning ijtihad in the interests of securing public welfare. This paper addresses the implications: does Rida’s thesis point to an effective partitioning of religious and secular? Or does such a reading imply a more clear-cut division of religion and non-religion that his discourse allows.  

In recent years, there has been ongoing debate about the characteristics of Barth’s doctrine of atonement. Some scholars argue that his understanding of atonement is fundamentally forensic, in which Christ bore judgment on sinners for their justification. Others contend that Barth’s atonement is a cosmic battle, centering on the defeat of das Nichtige and the deliverance of enslaved humanity. Despite the excellent work exploring different dimensions of Barth’s soteriology, the relationship between these two dimensions is rarely addressed. In other words, how do justification and deliverance relate to one another? This paper seeks to demonstrate the compatibility of these two interpretations, as shown in Church Dogmatics §§50 and 59, arguing that atonement, for Barth, is a judgment on das Nichtige through das Nichtige, thereby defeating it and bringing both justification and deliverance to humanity. Ultimately, the forensic and cosmological interpretations represent two dimensions of the same atoning event in Christ.

This paper examines judgment in the Reformed tradition through a constructive engagement with the theology of Karl Barth, focusing on the relation between divine judgment, grace, and moral discernment in the Church Dogmatics. While Barth is often read as radically restricting human judgment in light of God’s sovereign judgment, I argue that his mature theology reconstitutes judgment as a grace-shaped practice of analogical discernment. Divine judgment, enacted in Jesus Christ, is not opposed to grace but is itself a mode of grace that summons human response. Drawing on Barth’s doctrine of analogy (analogia fidei) and theology of glory, the paper engages Andrew Dunstan’s interpretation of Barth’s theological aesthetics to show how divine beauty forms human judgment perceptually and ethically. Against readings influenced by Hans Urs von Balthasar, it argues that Barth allows a chastened acknowledgment of creaturely beauty as an aid to moral discernment.

The constructive move of this paper, engaging especially Barth's Church Dogmatics III/3, is to interpret the cross as a judgment upon the potency of God’s original electing decision for covenant and creation as it also resulted in the emergence of that which was rejected by God, nothingness or evil. In this reading the judgment God pronounces through the cross is not primarily a “No” to humanity’s “no” to God, or put differently, not God’s rejection of the rejection of grace, but instead is a final “No” that counters the primordial “No” pronounced before creation as God rejected chaos. 

The contemporary mainline Protestant deployment of Barth against Christian nationalism constitutes the latest in a series of American domestications of his theology, following Niebuhr’s Cold War conscription and Hauerwas’s ecclesial recruitment. Each repeats the same formal error: converting Barth into a resource for a prior political commitment rather than receiving his theology as a disruption of the legitimating enterprise as such. Reading this reception history through Barth’s critique of religion in Church Dogmatics I/2, §17, the paper contends that the progressive mainline’s invocation of Barth functions as the very cultural-theological self-assurance Barth identified as religion’s Unglaube. Yet the argument does not terminate in negation. Following Barth’s own logic, religion is judged and justified in the same divine act. The church’s opposition to Christian nationalism is true only insofar as it knows itself under the same judgment it pronounces.

Scholarship on Sufism in South Asia often oscillates between analyses of metaphysics and studies of lived devotional practices. This paper aims to merge the two approaches by looking at theoretical and practical Sufism through a close analysis of four legal treatises written by Ahmad Raza Khan (1856-1921), the founder of the Barelvi movement in colonial India. I argue that this portrays Sufism as a legally regulated theological tradition capable of engaging with modern debates. 

In these texts, Khan not only justifies theoretical Sufism when it was challenged by Muslim reformists and modernists alike. He also draws legal boundaries around impermissible Sufi practices, such as women’s visitation to shrines and the usage of musical instruments in Sufi gatherings under the pretext of Sufi reform. By engaging with scholarly and ordinary publics simultaneously, Khan’s Urdu fatwas and their Arabic and Persian citations show his scholarly mastery in addition to their vernacular accessibility.

This paper studies contemporary Eid-i Milad celebrations in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh. Focusing on public processions and domestic gatherings, it examines how Prophetic devotion is performed, embodied, and collectively authorized beyond scholarly, textual arenas. 

The commemoration of the Prophet’s birth has long been a site of intra-Muslim polemic among competing Sunni maslak (orientations). Situating contemporary celebrations against this history, it argues that Eid-i Milad in Bareilly materializes the theological and legal reasoning articulated by Ahmad Raza Khan and his followers in defence of the practice. For practitioners, the city is a “fortress” of Prophetic devotion, marked by the legacy of the Barelvi tradition. Ritual practice here does not merely express doctrine but renders it sensorial, affective, and spatial. At the same time, devotees also contend with a crackdown on Muslim public devotion by an increasingly majoritarian state. 

In Bareilly, devotion is not only theorised but claimed and contested in public space.

The coming together of a Pan-Asian religious infrastructure and the emerging consciousness of being “Buddhist” gave rise to a what I am calling “Buddhist internationalism,” a form of anti-imperial worldmaking in the late 19th and early 20th century. The focus of this paper, I approach Buddhist internationalism through two conferences held in Burma in 1954, the Sixth Council and Third General Council of the World Federation of Buddhists. By exploring accounts in Burmese and Japanese periodicals, my focus is on the delegation sent to Burma by the Japanese Buddhist Federation, an initiative of heritage diplomacy that gave way to a more radical act of internationalism through the creation of the North-South Buddhist Exchange. The members of this exchange eventually built the World Peace Pagoda in Kyushu in the late 1950s, a symbol of Buddhist solidarity that, I argue, challenges many of our prevailing cold war narratives.         

This paper argues that succession crises within Tibetan Buddhist reincarnation lineages could become catalysts for institutional transformation rather than moments of decline. Focusing on Labrang Monastery in Amdo, a frontier region linking Tibetan, Mongolian, Chinese, and Muslim communities, it examines the crisis that followed the death of the First Jamyang Shepa. Disputes over the recognition of his reincarnation, combined with institutional constraints and tensions with regional political authorities, threatened the stability of one of the most influential Gelug monasteries in Inner Asia. Drawing on Tibetan, Chinese, and Mongolian primary sources—including biographies, correspondence, and newly available archival materials—the study analyzes how the Second Jamyang Shepa consolidated legitimacy, reconciled rival factions, and reorganized Labrang’s religious and administrative structures while cultivating new patronage networks with regional leaders, the Ganden Phodrang government, and the Qing court. The paper highlights the interdependence between religious leadership, monastic institutions, and political authority in Inner Asian history.

The relationship between Buddhism and war has long been a topic of research, yet most scholarship has focused on human-centered warfare. This paper examines an exemplary war narrative in Buddhist literature: the god–Asura war described in the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra. The text adapts a pan-Indian myth into a distinctly Buddhist reflection on violence, morality, and cosmic order. Drawing primarily on Abhidharmic cosmological literature, the authors/compilers of the Sūtra reinterpret the bellicose Asuras, demonic rivals of the gods, within a framework of recurring cosmic struggle. Meanwhile, the narrative incorporates moral instruction through the “sixteen human norms,” using this moral framework to justify the violence and victory. Rather than functioning as a political allegory, the god–Asura war narrative reflects broader Buddhist concerns with existential anxiety and moral conduct. Thereby, this narrative presents a Buddhist imagination of “religious war,” where cosmic conflict becomes a vehicle for ethical instruction and cosmological reflection.

According to a Pew Research survey from 2022, 40% of US adults believe humanity is ‘living in end times’, although it would not be difficult to believe that the present number is significantly higher. These views are informed by current events, but also substantially informed by representations of the apocalypse in popular culture. This paper will concentrate on how apocalyptic fiction allows us to confront hard questions about personhood, race/othering, and human rights. 

I look at three post/apocalyptic works: Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark, C. Robert Cargill’s Sea of Rust, and Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home. Through these examples, I highlight some of the ways we can critically read popular fiction texts as spiritually and socially relevant to how we imagine humanity will exist in the future, as well as point to the challenges we must navigate in our present apocalyptic era.

In this paper, I will look at two popular music artists who express prophetic critiques of space colonization as a solution to the ecological crises of our time. The first is the 2019 thrash-metal album Infest the Rats' Nest by the protean Melbourne-based rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (KGLW). The second is the 2024 "yacht doom" album How to Think Like a Billionaire by the Nottingham prog rocker Bill Fisher. Placing Fisher's and KGLW's music in the context of metamodernism, an emerging cultural dominant characterized by superhybridity, as well as the work of Mary-Jane Rubinstein on science and religion, I will argue that both artists draw on science fiction, mythical images of fiery destruction, and the tropes of heavy metal to dash the dreams of technofuturists at a time when SpaceX and Blue Horizon were positioning themselves as the ones to sell humanity a post-apocalyptic future. 

This paper revisits ScareMare, the long-running hell house attraction operated by Liberty University. Earlier scholarship carefully documented how “hell houses” relied on graphic theatrical scenes culminating in vivid depictions of hell designed to provoke immediate conversion. Drawing on ethnographic observation, interface analysis, and sustained interaction with the AI chatbot hosted by TrueLife.org, this paper argues that ScareMare has shifted from shock-based evangelism to a dispersed digital infrastructure of persuasion. Visitors can now enter into an online environment of testimonials and chat with an AI interface that promises answers to questions about God. Within this framework, conversion becomes an extended question-and-answer process mediated by algorithmic authority that relies on limited training data containing neither information from the Bible nor past user's contributions. Relying instead on the history of material culture, the AI's evangelical strategy simulates dialogue while limiting the improvisational exchange often central to evangelical witnessing.

Plotinus actively engages with the notion of sacred space and mystical initiation (Enn. 1.6.7–9). He presents the individual soul as a self-sculpted statue in the temple of the One. He returns to the temple/statue imagery to explicate its ontological syntax: the One as the god inside the temple; Intellect as the first statue in the temple’s precinct; the intelligible as living temple, Soul as constructing images of gods in the sensible world; finally, the individual soul as a sculptor and a statue. The series of references presents the intelligible itself as a self-animated divine complex. For Plotinus, animation is the top-down process of emanation which results in self-animation. Because animation is embedded in the ontological fabric of the universe itself, theurgy and ritual animation of statues are, for Plotinus, ontologically superfluous.

In this paper I outline a number of ways Jewish philosophy, Neoplatonism, and Islamic scriptural exegesis (tafsīr) interact with each other in the writings of Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī. Taking into account the wealth of mystical texts accessible to philosophers of his time period (12th cen. CE), I show how these texts attempt are used by him to model the intelligibility of the natural world. While some of the most famous cases include the Sefer Yeṣira and its commentary by Saʿadya Gaon, or the lettrism of al-Ḥallāj and other earlier Ṣūfī’s, there are lesser well known and still as deeply influential modelling techniques. Such techniques include the atomism of Ashʿarite kalām; the substance-theory of Plato and Aristotle, the eclecticism of Galen’s humoral theory, as well as the numerological theories of Evagrius and Ps.-Hippocrates’ Hebdomads. I argue that Abū l-Barakāt is a case of combinging these models to develop a theologically pregnant understanding of nature as the "Scroll of Existence".

n this paper, I wish to try to reconstruct the mystical scenes of intimacy in Plato’s erotic dialogues, taking cues from other mystical literature, including the Divan of the 13th century Persian poet, Rūmi, and the Enneads of Plotinus. I especially draw on Plotinus’ mystical interpretations of the Symposium’s erotic imagery, especially as we find them in Enneads I.6, III.5, VI.7, and VI.9. 

In his Mathnawī-i ma‘nāwī, Rūmī offers a view of the apparently inanimate—such as minerals, stones, and mountains—as rather being alive, in love, and in prayer. Far from being a sentimental projection onto the natural world, Rūmī offers a robust epistemology in which spiritual realization deepens intellectual perception. Those who know God are also those who truly know the world, thereby witnessing, for example, a tree’s prayers, a stone’s invocation, and the love of all cosmic beings for their Beloved. In other words, those who are spiritually realized are more capable to perceive nature in her true state, dispelling the illusion of inanimateness and unveiling an animate spiritual life of the “inanimate.” The condition for encountering nature as “thou” rather than “it” is the encounter with the Divine “Thou,” which necessitates a transformation of self for seeing the world as it really is. 

This paper addresses Thomas Traherne’s notorious theme of ‘want’ as it appears in the Centuries of Meditation - the desire and want of God for human beings and the symmetrical desire and want of human beings for God. For all its rhetorical and poetical flourish, Traherne’s meditations on want are shown to be rooted in the Platonic tradition of eros and have their precursor in Pseudo-Dionysius’ model of mutual yearning between God and humanity. This theme is examined through Traherne’s inheritance of the Neoplatonic structure of procession and return and the Thomistic metaphysics of efficient and final causality. Traherne ultimately urges towards configuring the divine-human relationship in terms of  reciprocity and reciprocal desire. 

Recent scholarship has highlighted how modern religious education remains shaped by Protestant assumptions about what religion is and how it should be studied. Drawing on Jenny Berglund’s concept of the Protestant “marinade” of Scandinavian religious education, this paper analyzes Norwegian RE textbooks published after the 2020 curriculum reform (LK20). The reform partially sought to move beyond the traditional “world religions paradigm,” but textbook analysis demonstrates that religions such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism continue to be constructed through categories historically derived from Protestant Christianities, including scripture, doctrinal belief, and theological concepts such as salvation and messianism. These frameworks implicitly position Christianity as the normative model for understanding religion and therefore present other traditions through a Christian lens. The paper concludes by proposing a pedagogical shift to relocate these categories within the study of Christianity, allowing other traditions to be presented through categories more closely aligned with their own internal logics.

This dissertation project focuses on developing an integrative approach to values education for Islamic Religious Education (IRE) in Germany. In a pluralistic society, teachers face the complex challenge of reconciling genuine Islamic theology and normative teachings with socio-political educational mandates. This study addresses the research gap at the intersection of ethics and Islamic religious pedagogy. As a solution, the legal-philosophical concept of maqāṣid (intentions of Sharia) is didactically modeled. Methodologically, the work combines discourse-analytical hermeneutics with a qualitative content analysis of core curricula (North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg). Embedded within a Design-Based Research (DBR) framework, the research aims to construct and test a criteria-oriented guideline as an educational intervention. This theory-driven, real-world approach empowers Muslim students to develop religious dialogue and judgment skills, contributing to peaceful coexistence in a secular constitutional state.

This paper analyzes the regulatory, surveillance, and operational infrastructures in the US and France that affect religiously oriented private, independent, or otherwise alternative-to-public schooling projects. Rather than strictly comparative, a juxtapositional approach is used for this analytical review to better observe the contrasts and surprising "overlaps between, across, and within” these different systems (author redacted). I argue that these divergent systems reflect each country’s relationship with religion, as well as undergirding national attitudes about whether parents or the state is most responsible for the education of children. With an eye toward the future of education, this analysis offers insight into trends emerging in both countries, which converge with respect to demands for increased diversity of schooling options, and diverge in terms of what kinds of options come to fruition. 

This paper examines how freedom of conscience is configured in postcolonial Hong Kong’s curriculum, focusing on the Ethics and Religious Studies (ERS) subject as a hinge between constitutional guarantees and classroom practice. Drawing on a distinction between freedom of conscience and freedom of religion (Trigg, 2010; Maclure & Taylor, 2011) and on debates about “Asian values” in education (Bell & Ham, 2003; Cummings, 1996; see also Pye, 1985), I argue that Hong Kong’s Basic Law and denominational school system offer thick protections for religious institutions while providing thin safeguards for students’ autonomy—the right to believe, not believe, and change belief. Through qualitative analysis of ERS curriculum guides (2007, 2014, 2019, 2024) and Basic Law articles, paired with comparisons to Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand, the paper shows how school systems promote civility, harmony, and orthodoxy while leaving conscience largely implicit, and sketches what a conscience-centred religious education might entail.

Early in Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989), the line “baptize me in coconut oil and cum” reworks the language of Black Protestant ritual into a queer invocation of spirituality and desire. Read alongside Joseph Beam’s anthology In the Life (1986), this paper argues that Black queer cultural production draws from, subverts, and reconfigures Black religious forms rather than existing outside them. It reads Tongues Untied as both an extension of and response to Beam’s earlier call for Black gay self-representation in In the Life. Their titles signal this relationship: Tongues Untied invokes Pentecostal glossolalia and the refusal of silence, while In the Life names Black queer community in language resonant with sanctified existence. Through testimony, Riggs and Beam mobilize Black Protestant rhetorical forms to voice Black queer life during the AIDS crisis. Together, these works stage Black queer expression as a liturgical practice of voice, body, intimacy, and communal witness in a moment of imminent death.

In recent years, the profile of Courage International, the Catholic Church's official apostolate to gay, lesbian, and bisexual Catholics, has risen both in public discourse and within the Vatican itself. This paper explores the historical and ideological development of Courage, along with the testimony of liberation that many gay men claim to have found through the organization. Ultimately, this paper suggests two problems with the Courage model. First, the liberation Courage offers is predicated upon anti-trans and anti-queer violence. Second, Courage's theology of grace is nothing less than a betrayal of the Catholic theological tradition. In conversation with Hanna Reichel, Micah Cronin, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Raher, and Elizabeth Johnson, this paper suggests the contours of a theology of queer grace that could form a foundation for greater solidarity among LGBTQ+ Catholics.

This paper examines how a particular strand of Black gay consumer culture has become complicit in its own surveillance through what I term "predictable desire." Drawing on Michel Foucault's theory of internalized power, Simone Browne's genealogy of anti-Black surveillance, and Denise Ferreira da Silva's critique of the "transparent-I," the paper argues that the normalization of Black gay desire—expressed through repetitive aesthetics, digital performance, and aspirational consumption—renders Black gay subjects, particularly the ‘butch queen,’ mathematically predictable and therefore controllable. Against this condition, I propose a Christian practice of mystical discernment, rooted in Howard Thurman's mysticism and Georges Bataille's theory of sacrifice, as a mode of radical detachment. Reading Matthew 5:29–30 theologically and phenomenologically, the paper calls for a thoroughgoing destabilization of the sedimented self—not self-destruction, but an ecstatic, Spirit-led dispossession that disrupts the surveillance economy by making the Black gay subject harder to track, to sell, or to contain.

This paper examines the MAGA movement as a theological and temporal struggle over the meanings of history, progress, and national belonging in the United States. By invoking a nostalgic vision of a mythic American past, MAGA political discourse often frames movements for racial justice, immigration reform, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights as evidence of national decline rather than democratic progress. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s theory of decolonization alongside the liberationist theologies of Gustavo Gutiérrez and James H. Cone, the paper interprets these conflicts as struggles over colonial memory and the haunting presence of unresolved histories of slavery, racial violence, and exclusion. Engaging the theme of “Haunting Future/s,” the paper develops a Pan-Africanist Fanonian pneumatology of liberation in which ancestral memory and diasporic spiritual practices challenge Christian nationalist narratives and reimagine the ethical promise of the Kingdom of God.

Indigenous communities globally have produced a precise but unstudied diagnostic figure: a human outsider who extracts vital substance from invaded communities and commodifies it through transcontinental networks. This paper proposes the term extractivore—extraneous, excessive extraction and consumption—as the analytic capable of including the myriad historical iterations of this figure while excluding its common conflations with supernatural or chthonic beings. Following a Derridean pharmakon approach to the social sciences, religious studies uniquely enable this analysis by taking seriously what secular-scientific commitments foreclose: the prophetic traditions that diagnosed extractivorism before colonial contact materialized it, transmitting ancestral warnings as memory-work and future-work alike. Reviewing key cases from Central Africa, the Andes-Amazon region, and Native North America through this lens reveals that extractivorism haunted colonial futures before they arrived—spectral presences named in advance of their necropolitical embodiment—and that the countermeasures these traditions prescribed constitute the most rigorous antiextractive methodology available to contemporary scholars.

Are ICE renditions reminiscent of slave patrols or Nazi Gestapo? The answer to this timely, critical question is a bilateral yes. Comparisons of ICE and DHS tactics which link them to the consolidated police power of Nazi Germany and to slave patrols in the United States bear much fruit by way of historical analogy. Yet one must also recognize the white supremacist political theology shared by both of these historical precedents if one is to appreciate the gravity of ICE renditions in the 21st century. This paper explores the anti-Black necropolitical theology of chattel slavery and demonstrates its genetic link to Nazi fascism through Jim Crow, before demonstrating the continuity of both with contemporary secret police in the US. The paper simultaneously traces the role of white Christian nationalist imaginaries that, in turn, must give way to a Christian abolitionist politics of friendship. 

Theologies of conversion are haunted. Christian conversion exists in a complex temporality, haunted by echoes of the past and specters of the future. Hauntings are recognized by their ghosts. This paper will identify three kinds of ghosts that evidence how conversion is haunted. Engaging with Elaine Enns and Ched Myers’ Healing Haunted Histories as well as Homi K. Bhabha’s “Our Neighbours, Ourselves” essay, this paper will examine the ghosts of conquest, ghosts of doubled identity, and ghosts born out of conversion. Identifying these ghosts and reckoning with their ambivalent hauntings enables conversion to regain a sense of complexity, which will open up possibilities for how it can become a more useful resource in theological inquiry as we find our way to “futures for which we hope.”

This paper examines the way Puerto Rico’s neocolonial status reverberates from the myth and political memory of its first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín. By examining the theological import of Muñoz Marín’s poetry, political rhetoric, and his party symbol this paper demonstrates how el jíbaro became synonymous with the governor and how he became a messianic figure against which Puerto Rican leaders are evaluated (whether in formal political office or not); even artists like Bad Bunny cannot escape the specter of Muñoz Marín. To imagine a future for Puerto Rico, therefore, begins by contending with the long and institutionalized shadow of its first governor. This paper deconstructs the mythology around Muñoz Marín’s history, ideology, and political project, before briefly proposing a Puerto Rican future rooted in Afro-diasporic spirituality (life in the Spirit).