In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Whether denounced or defended, Genesis still sparks interminable debate in Christian discourses of religion and ecology: Is imago dei anthropocentric? Yet when unearthing the notorious “curse of Ham” text (Gen. 9:24-27), the reception histories tend to focus—for good reason—not on the text’s environmental dimensions, but its fraught role in the origins of racialized slavery. In this paper, I contend that this separation of environmental frameworks from critical race studies, of soil questions from slavery questions, winds up impoverishing both. I explore what fresh lines of inquiry might open for the religion and ecology conversation if we read Noah’s enslaving curse as vividly disclosing the perennial human tendency toward political ecology: that is, toward the use of power, domination, and difference in distributing ecological harms and benefits.

Ecological crises increasingly displace communities into host societies that frequently conceptualize them as threats to social stability. This paper examines how host societies recast displaced populations as dangerous outsiders and justify exclusion through borders and social fragmentation. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s concept of dirt as "matter out of place," I show how dominant narratives code displaced people as intrusions within imagined national or cultural orders, rendering their suffering morally illegible. I analyze mutual aid food-sharing initiatives as counter-rituals that confront fear and indifference through radical hospitality. These meals identify fear, exclusion, and indifference as the real social toxins and use shared food to dissolve the boundaries that sustain them. By feeding people in public spaces, these gatherings meet immediate needs and model resilient, non-state forms of collective life that embody a compassionate ecological future in the present.

Vehicle-dwelling nomads on western public lands offer a case study of ecological belonging without settlement. In contrast to ecological futures grounded in permanence, property, or linear progress, nomadic life is structured around mobility, impermanence, nonlinearity, and the constraints of state territorialization. This paper draws on participatory ethnography—including oral history interviews and my own experience living nomadically since 2022—alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology and scholarship in religion and ecology. It follows dispersed campers who cultivate temporary forms of dwelling as campsites appear and disappear and community gathers and disperses. Rather than diminishing dwelling, nomadic life intensifies ecological attunement as the quotidian becomes oriented around weather, terrain, water, wildlife, and seasonal movement across the landscapes of the western cordillera.

Industrial pollution, global-warming-intensified natural disasters, and ineffective governmental policy have converged to produce enduring environmental injustices in Buenos Aires’ Matanza-Riachuelo River Basin, presenting both ethical and political. Drawing on scientific, economic, ethnographic, and journalistic sources, as well as political analyses, I argue that ongoing attempts to meaningfully improve the lives of marginalized residents have been ineffective because they fail to sufficiently (re-)imagine and innovate both in activist strategies and in policy proposals. Religion(s) can serve as (a) resource(s) for guiding responses and policymaking in the Matanza-Riachuelo, reflecting their potential to support environmental justice movements more generally. Rather than abandoning existing efforts in the Matanza-Riachuelo, this paper suggests that a strategy that both builds on their successes and drawing on religions’ cosmological creativity could best support the imagination and implementation of new political, social, environmental and economic responses. 

This paper examines an unlikely alliance between a Pentecostal megachurch and an ecofeminist movement within a 2025 environmental conflict in El Salvador. Salvadoran sociologist Rafael Cartagena’s concept of socio-ambientalismo, defined as the convergence of distributive and ecological critiques, is expanded to incorporate the agency of the land in fostering this solidarity. Utilizing Actor-Network Theory, the study challenges the understanding of the social as a purely human domain by positioning more-than-human entities as actants rather than passive backdrops.

In this framework, material elements also shape the relations, mobilizations, and alliances that define the conflict. Such unlikely alliances reimagine the conceptual scope of the ecological community and planetary consciousness proposed by ecofeminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether. Rather than relying on a shared progressive ideology, this paper demonstrates that within this instance of environmental resistance, ideologically distant groups can participate in productive solidarity through the agency of the land.

Drawing on my embodied experience as a young woman survivor of clerical abuse, this paper critiques the limited embodied scope of victims of the clerical abuse crisis in the Catholic church as children, highlighting young adult women among the victims/survivors of clerical abuse. In this paper, I argue that the almost exclusive focus on abuse victims as children has prevented young women from seeing themselves in such dialogue, and that theologically reimagining the Eucharist can offer victims/survivors of clerical abuse a critical approach to a relationship with the Catholic tradition once more. In this sacrament, both trauma/abuse and healing/reconciliation are present, representing the need to denounce and critique unjust ecclesial structures and the need to find ecclesial space to open victims to God’s healing and reconciling love. This engagement is essential for the discourse to be expanded, for without this bodies will continue to be harmed and marginalized. 

This paper advances an intersectional feminist theological analysis of men’s ritual discourse in Malagasy communal life, examining patriarchy, postcolonial legacies, and culturally entrenched structures of silencing, including self-censorship and a culture of silence. Women’s absence in public speech is interpreted not as tradition, but as the outcome of interlocking systems that regulate authority, leadership, and communal decision-making, constraining spiritual, social, and political agency.

Drawing on intersectional feminist theory, the study situates male-dominated ritual speech in dialogue with the lived experiences of Malagasy women. Methodologically, it employs a qualitative and decolonizing approach, centering women’s voices as legitimate sites of knowledge and critical reflection.

By highlighting collective interpretation, leadership formation, and mutuality, the paper explores pathways through which women reclaim voice, agency, and authority, contributing to gender-just communal and spiritual futures, where women participate fully as agents of change and co-creators of shared decision-making.

Is diakonia a “women’s ministry”? And if so, how and when is that helpful, limiting, or problematic? This paper examines the historical and present relationships between gender and diakonia within Christian history and practice. As gender is constructed and shifting, so is Diakonia [diaconal ministry, deacons, deaconesses, and the diaconate]. It matters how and when we tell stories of women in ministry and in diakonia; the words we choose to justify, rationalize, describe, relate, and humanize such ministries. Practices of diakonia have been shaped by gender and likewise have shaped concepts of gender itself within Christian communities. Framed as gender-defined, gender-restrictive, gender-“blind”/-less, and gender-conscious, this paper identifies the historical gifts and limitations of coupling diakonia and gender. Understanding these can offer wisdom as we discern how to conceptualize and articulate the relationship between modern expressions of diakonia and gender in the 21st century, in North America and globally.

“The boke is not yet performed.” Fourteenth-century anchorite Julian of Norwich ends her Long Text with this admission. By the standards of modern academic religious discourse, this admission might be read as evidence for failure. And yet, Denys Turner’s 2011 reading of Julian takes up this admission as key to Julian’s theological systematicity, albeit a systematicity expanded to mean the alignment of form with content. In this paper, I read Julian’s Long Text alongside those of her modern readers, like Turner, whose refusal to mine this text for its argument serves as a crucial example of the stakes of reading for what a text does, or performs, as it unfolds before its reader. I argue for renewed readerly attention to textual form as a constitutive of the text and trace a lineage of women's theological writing that uses  form as an intervention into normative conceptions of knowledge as argument. 

This presentation takes a new materialist approach to exploring the particularities of matter that entwine around the task of online theological education across regional contexts. Crucially, it appropriates Tara Page's new materialist pedagogy of placemaking for digitally networked theological education–in dialogue with writings on theological formation by Charles Foster, Willie James Jennings, and Katherine Turpin, Etienne Wenger's social theory of learning in practice, and indigenous insights on Land-based pedagogy from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robin Wall Kimmerer. It argues for the construction of curriculum with the differential practical mattering of learners in the online environment as its starting place, inviting students to pay increasing attention to their peculiarities of place and practices of placemaking.

This paper makes two main interventions. First, I will elaborate a new method for theological reflection rooted in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Marxist geography: what I am calling queer abolition geography. Second, to demonstrate the affordances of this geographical method of theological reflection, I will present a case study from my work as a spiritual care provider at a community hospital in San Francisco: hospital chaplaincy as queer abolition geography. 

This query begins with Vine Deloria Jr.’s text, For This Land, delineating an indigenous sense of “belonging-to-the-land” quite different from colonial approaches presuming ownership and mere aesthetic appreciation.  This difference involves not only generations of reflection provoked by a given topography of dwelling, carried forward in myth and ritual, but also sudden moments of “revelation” when a piece of the land by means of uncanny dread, communicates itself off-limits to humans, reserved-to-itself.  Tracing such an earth-respecting “haunting” of landscape in relation to various cultures’ notions of “hungry ghosts” of community members untimely dispatched, re-visiting the living with disruption, Zimbabwean understanding of even clear-cut trees as capable of such ghosting, we will focus on Irish experiences of “hungry grass” arising from the 19th century Potato Famine and Oweynagat Cave’s 4,000-year-old Samhain tradition of ghostly “Halloween” appearances, alongside consideration of Jesus’ Mt. Hermon (verboten) encounter with haunting ancestry (Mark 9).

In the early 2000s, a number of Christian women participated in the tradition of Christian life writing through a newly accessible technology. Christian women bloggers, like Glennon Doyle, Ann Voskamp, Jackie Hill Perry, and Melanie Shankle have been insufficiently considered by scholars and their own communities as Christian thought leaders. Drawn from my dissertation project examining twenty-first century women bloggers-turned-authors as theorists of the self, this paper interrogates these women’s shared investment in the craft of writing. Together, they imagine writing not as a practice of formation but as a practice of attention. They understand writing to be a technology of the self, but given their belief in a true, unchanging self, writing can only reveal, not transform. Drawing from other theorists of writing and my memoirists own reflection, I argue that writing is transformative and formative. Nevertheless, to acknowledge this would require my memoirists to accept a dynamic self.

Star Trek has shaped modern fandom in numerous ways that have had profound impacts on popular culture. I argue that fandom in general is best understood as a type of spirituality, a type of communal experience that provides key tools to the project of life integration. The Star Trek fandom in particular demonstrates this as the optimistic vision of Star Trek provides the necessary conditions for a fandom to thrive in the first place. This inclusive and diverse vision has shaped modern fandom as a whole, enabling it to be places of intense community and shared imagination. This is spirituality precisely because fandom is so central to the lives of millions, and Star Trek has influenced this like few other franchises.

Speculative fiction has often been a place where questions of morality, theodicy, and ethics are wrestled with. While Star Trek has often portrayed a post-Christian (and perhaps even post-religion) universe, several of its characters, particularly its captains, have played the role of chaplain or spiritual director, guide, and mentor. Star Trek’s Discovery and Strange New Worlds have given us the opportunity to see Christianity remixed. Captain Christopher Pike, whose father taught both science and comparative religions, provides a glimpse into the tension between science and faith. Although not explicitly a priest or minister, Pike fulfills that role to his crew (and to some of his fans), to the point that one fanfic author reinterprets him as a Jesuit priest from the Vatican Science Observatory. This paper explore how Star Trek captains, particularly the most recent incarnation of Christopher Pike, provides fandom with ethical guides and fictional spiritual directors.

This paper argues that the Trill are more than a science-fiction metaphor for transness; they offer a theological framework for Jewish reflection on embodiment, memory, and communal responsibility. In Star Trek, a joined Trill is a composite self in which host and symbiont become interdependent, carry memories of previous lives, and ritually bring past selves into the present. Read this way, the Trill function as a contemporary midrash, opening Jewish questions about identity, continuity, and transformation. Drawing on queer and trans Jewish scholarship, this paper explores how halakha can be read through the Trill. The roles of host and symbiont, along with Trill social and religious norms, challenge assumptions that personhood is singular, stable, and biologically fixed. The Trill help articulate a Jewish queer/trans theology in which covenant is grounded in relational continuity, sacred becoming, and belonging, so that transition may be understood as tamim tihyeh, becoming whole with the Divine.