The growing number of Americans who identify as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) has become a central focus in the social-scientific study of religion. Terry Shoemaker’s Spiritual Resurgence: Cultural Transformations and the Spiritual but Not Religious situates this development within the broader transformations of the Information Age. Shoemaker argues that information overload, ideological polarization, and the entanglement of religion with political and economic institutions have contributed to widespread disillusionment with organized religion while enabling new forms of individualized spirituality. This Author-Meets-Critics panel brings together scholars of contemporary spirituality and religious change to critically engage Shoemaker’s analysis. Panelists will explore how digital media, shifting institutional authority, and evolving cultural norms are reshaping spiritual identities and practices, inviting broader discussion about how scholars conceptualize spirituality and religious change in contemporary society.
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.
The growing number of Americans who identify as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) has become a central focus in the social-scientific study of religion. Terry Shoemaker’s Spiritual Resurgence: Cultural Transformations and the Spiritual but Not Religious situates this development within the broader transformations of the Information Age. Shoemaker argues that information overload, ideological polarization, and the entanglement of religion with political and economic institutions have contributed to widespread disillusionment with organized religion while enabling new forms of individualized spirituality. This Author-Meets-Critics panel brings together scholars of contemporary spirituality and religious change to critically engage Shoemaker’s analysis. Panelists will explore how digital media, shifting institutional authority, and evolving cultural norms are reshaping spiritual identities and practices, inviting broader discussion about how scholars conceptualize spirituality and religious change in contemporary society.
Recent scholarship has increasingly recognized the body as a central problem in the study of religion. The special issues “The Body Religious in Japan, Part 1” (2024) and Part 2 (2025) in the journal Japanese Religions brought this perspective into focus by examining how bodies in Japanese traditions functioned as historically contingent media through which religious meaning was articulated. This panel presents new research that extends this discussion. The papers analyze three distinct configurations of embodiment in Japan: the female divine body of Kisshōten (Lakṣmī) as a model of political legitimacy for women; the imperial body ritually aligned with Senju Kannon through devotional practice; and the androgynous body of the chigo in A Long Tale for an Autumn Night, where desire, gender, and religious revelation converge. Together, the papers demonstrate how bodies served as key loci through which sovereignty, devotion, and doctrinal meaning were articulated in Japanese religion.
Papers
This study examines the goddess Kisshōten as an embodiment of female sovereignty in early to medieval Japanese Buddhism, emphasizing how her female body functioned as a medium of political and spiritual authority. Tracing her origins to the Hindu deity Lakṣmī, Kisshōten inherited associations with fertility, beauty, and queenship, which were re-expressed in eighth-century Japan through statuary, ritual practice, and Buddhist texts offering instructions for creating and worshipping her image. Her divine body was central to repentance rites and temple art, allowing devotees to experience her presence ritually and materially. Powerful Fujiwara women, including Empresses Kōmyō and Kōken (later Shōtoku), actively promoted Kisshōten’s worship, using her female form as a model to articulate and legitimize their own authority. Through hidden statues, mandalas, and ritualized images, Kisshōten’s body operated as both a symbolic and material medium of female-centered rulership, shaping ideals of sovereignty, power, and gender in Nara-period Japan.
The 1,000 life-sized statues of Senju Kannon in the thirteenth-century Sanjūsangendō temple in Kyoto contain hidden votive deposits—dhāraṇī texts, moon disks, and images of the bodhisattva—dating to the hall’s original construction in 1164. Placed inside the hollow statues, these materials form a concealed ritual layer complementing the hall’s multiplicity. This paper argues that the hall functioned as a space for esoteric ritual, where the retired emperor Goshirakawa (1127–1192) could ritually align his body with the bodhisattva through the “three mysteries.” The deposits correspond to mudrā, mantra recitation, and visualization practices, materializing esoteric ritual logic within the statues themselves. The hall integrates human, sculptural, and divine bodies into a network of correspondence, enacting a political theology in which sovereign authority is embodied. By linking visible multiplicity with hidden ritual objects, Sanjūsangendō emerges as a site where ritual, material culture, and political power converge through the shared language of the body.
This paper examines Aki no yo no naga monogatari (“A Long Tale for an Autumn Night”), a late medieval narrative that recounts the tragic relationship between a Tendai monk and a youthful monastic acolyte (chigo). Despite it’s the sophistication and complex visual program in the illustrated scrolls preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the work has received limited attention. The paper argues that the work deploys the body of the chigo as a medium through which notions of gender, desire, and religious meaning are articulated. The chigo is a liminal figure whose feminized beauty—marked through tonsorial, sartorial, and physical semiotics—renders his body both an object of attraction and a divine presence. The narrative further associates him with the natural envinronment, and with Ishiyama Kannon, an androgynous being. The paper will show that Aki no yo is important for understanding conceptions of the body in medieval Japanese religion.
Respondent
Recent scholarship has increasingly recognized the body as a central problem in the study of religion. The special issues “The Body Religious in Japan, Part 1” (2024) and Part 2 (2025) in the journal Japanese Religions brought this perspective into focus by examining how bodies in Japanese traditions functioned as historically contingent media through which religious meaning was articulated. This panel presents new research that extends this discussion. The papers analyze three distinct configurations of embodiment in Japan: the female divine body of Kisshōten (Lakṣmī) as a model of political legitimacy for women; the imperial body ritually aligned with Senju Kannon through devotional practice; and the androgynous body of the chigo in A Long Tale for an Autumn Night, where desire, gender, and religious revelation converge. Together, the papers demonstrate how bodies served as key loci through which sovereignty, devotion, and doctrinal meaning were articulated in Japanese religion.
Papers
This study examines the goddess Kisshōten as an embodiment of female sovereignty in early to medieval Japanese Buddhism, emphasizing how her female body functioned as a medium of political and spiritual authority. Tracing her origins to the Hindu deity Lakṣmī, Kisshōten inherited associations with fertility, beauty, and queenship, which were re-expressed in eighth-century Japan through statuary, ritual practice, and Buddhist texts offering instructions for creating and worshipping her image. Her divine body was central to repentance rites and temple art, allowing devotees to experience her presence ritually and materially. Powerful Fujiwara women, including Empresses Kōmyō and Kōken (later Shōtoku), actively promoted Kisshōten’s worship, using her female form as a model to articulate and legitimize their own authority. Through hidden statues, mandalas, and ritualized images, Kisshōten’s body operated as both a symbolic and material medium of female-centered rulership, shaping ideals of sovereignty, power, and gender in Nara-period Japan.
The 1,000 life-sized statues of Senju Kannon in the thirteenth-century Sanjūsangendō temple in Kyoto contain hidden votive deposits—dhāraṇī texts, moon disks, and images of the bodhisattva—dating to the hall’s original construction in 1164. Placed inside the hollow statues, these materials form a concealed ritual layer complementing the hall’s multiplicity. This paper argues that the hall functioned as a space for esoteric ritual, where the retired emperor Goshirakawa (1127–1192) could ritually align his body with the bodhisattva through the “three mysteries.” The deposits correspond to mudrā, mantra recitation, and visualization practices, materializing esoteric ritual logic within the statues themselves. The hall integrates human, sculptural, and divine bodies into a network of correspondence, enacting a political theology in which sovereign authority is embodied. By linking visible multiplicity with hidden ritual objects, Sanjūsangendō emerges as a site where ritual, material culture, and political power converge through the shared language of the body.
This paper examines Aki no yo no naga monogatari (“A Long Tale for an Autumn Night”), a late medieval narrative that recounts the tragic relationship between a Tendai monk and a youthful monastic acolyte (chigo). Despite it’s the sophistication and complex visual program in the illustrated scrolls preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the work has received limited attention. The paper argues that the work deploys the body of the chigo as a medium through which notions of gender, desire, and religious meaning are articulated. The chigo is a liminal figure whose feminized beauty—marked through tonsorial, sartorial, and physical semiotics—renders his body both an object of attraction and a divine presence. The narrative further associates him with the natural envinronment, and with Ishiyama Kannon, an androgynous being. The paper will show that Aki no yo is important for understanding conceptions of the body in medieval Japanese religion.
Respondent
“Ideology” has always been a dangerous word in religious studies. In its classical formulations, ideology seems to mostly undermine the credibility of religion as a distinctive, or even interesting domain of human behavior, relegating religion to the domain of mere falsity. This has led many scholars of religion to avoid the term altogether, or, in other cases, to deploy it as a blunt instrument in polemical contest against scholarship disparaged as theologically compromised. This roundtable adopts a different approach. Convening a group of scholars whose work engages ideology from different vantage points, we contend that there is more to the concept than its history of use and misuse in our field. Together, we seek to move beyond the tokenization of ideology that has characterized its uptake in religious studies, and to exemplify how a sustained reappraisal of ideology might open neglected trajectories for critical discourse within the field.
The place that is now Denver was home to the Cheyenne and Arapaho when gold prospectors claimed the territory in 1858. It quickly became a commercial and then governmental capital. Within decades it was a railroad hub and educational center. This crossroads of the Front Range has attracted people from all over the world, who have shaped Denver’s religious spaces. This year’s sacred sites tour will introduce participants to the intersections and diversities that formed the city. Anticipated sites include a community center for Denver’s indigenous population, the Colorado Muslim Society, Temple Emmanuel (Reform Judaism), and the Denver Buddhist Temple. Everyone is welcome. This is a bus tour, but there will be some walking. This tour will depart from and return to the Colorado Convention Center.
Tour guides: David Bains, Samford University & Daniel Sack, Washington, DC
This panel discussion, convened to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Theta Alpha Kappa, the national honor society for religious studies and theology, will address vital current and future issues in the academic study of religion and theology in undergraduate contexts.
This panel examines how religious practice, theological imagination, and spiritual epistemologies shape movements contesting state violence, racial domination, and carceral power in the United States. Bringing together ethnographic, historical, and theological approaches, the papers challenge assumptions that contemporary left political movements are secular, instead showing how ritual, cosmology, and moral vision function as central modes of resistance and world-making.
The panel spans key sites of struggle, including anti-lynching campaigns in the Jim Crow South, movements to abolish militarized policing infrastructures such as Atlanta’s proposed “Cop City,” and debates over race, migration, and human dignity amid intensified immigration enforcement. Across these contexts, the state emerges as both a political and moral order, contested through competing theological claims.
By foregrounding abolition as a political and spiritual project, the panel highlights how diverse religious traditions—from Black Protestant critique to Africana and Vodou cosmologies—reconfigure dominant narratives of criminality, sovereignty, and belonging.
Papers
"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.
The work of Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025) has occasioned a paradigm shift in philosophical ethics, politics, social theory, and Christian theology. This round-table panel explores MacIntyre’s legacy through the lens of critical appreciation: highlighting what elements of his thought can be carried forward to enrich theology and religious studies for the future, while sorting through what could be left behind. Can his synthesis of Marx-friendly critique with virtue ethics and historical consciousness stand as he construed it? Can we separate his communitarian-friendly, tradition-bound critique of late-twentieth-century society from contemporary postliberal politics? Must understanding “tradition” in a broader context than his broadly Greco-Christian background alter his account of tradition’s role in our theoretical and practical knowing? These and similar probing questions will be the subjects of consideration on this panel of scholars who find a definitive future (although not an uncritical one) for MacIntyre’s work.
Take a rare look inside a high school world religions classroom, captured in the feature-length documentary, All of the Above. Filmed in a “fly-on-the-wall” style, the film brings intimate, unscripted moments that reveal how students and teachers navigate complex conversations about belief, identity, and understanding in real time.
Accompanied by selected clips from the documentary, a panel discussion will feature perspectives from one of the filmmakers, scholars of religion and education, and K-12 and university religion teachers. Panelists will share personal experiences of learning about religion through the filmmaking process, insights into pedagogical and practical dimensions of teaching religion, and reflections on the challenges and possibilities of engaging high school students in this vital topic.
All of the Above features John Camardella’s 12th grade World Religion class in Mount Prospect, Illinois and offers a powerful exploration of how education inspires change, sparks self-discovery, and fosters a more compassionate society.