In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, debates about religion and national identity increasingly shape public discourse. This paper examines the pedagogical challenges and opportunities involved in teaching the history of early Christianity in contemporary American classrooms, particularly in culturally conservative contexts where students may arrive with strong assumptions about the unity and continuity of Christian tradition. By introducing students to the diversity of early Christian communities and the historical development of doctrine—such as debates surrounding the Council of Chalcedon (451)—courses on early Christianity can complicate confessional narratives while fostering critical historical analysis. The paper explores strategies for distinguishing historical inquiry from theological evaluation, encouraging constructive classroom dialogue, and helping students understand how Christian traditions have developed through ongoing processes of debate and interpretation. These pedagogical approaches highlight the continuing relevance of early Christian history for contemporary discussions about religion and public life.

As the United States prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Christian nationalists are promoting the myth that the founding fathers were predominately orthodox Christian men. I argue that recent efforts to sustain this myth by Christian nationalists like Doug Wilson center on a historical figure who was nowhere near the Pennsylvania State house in 1776: the Protestant reformer John Calvin. I demonstrate how Christian nationalists’ mobilization of Calvin rely on historical narratives advanced during the late nineteenth century by Dutch pastor and politician Abraham Kuyper. Throughout his writings, Kuyper valorized Calvinist rebels across time, from the sixteenth-century religious wars in France to the eighteenth-century American Revolution. Identifying Christian nationalists’ appropriation of Kuyper’s Calvinist genealogy helps us better to understand their efforts to dissociate the American Revolution from the Enlightenment and read founding documents like the Declaration of Independence in ways that promote Christian hegemony. 

In Ukraine, war did not simply reshape religious institutions—it generated a new model of military chaplaincy. While in most countries chaplaincy developed gradually within stable state structures, Ukraine followed a different trajectory: it emerged during an ongoing war and was initially driven by civil society rather than state policy. Drawing on original qualitative research, including a personal interview with Colonel Larysa Polianska, head of the Military Chaplaincy Service of Ukraine, this study examines how volunteer clergy, interfaith cooperation, and institutional improvisation shaped chaplaincy under wartime conditions. The Ukrainian case reveals a model of bottom-up institutionalization, in which grassroots religious initiatives preceded state recognition. It also shows how interfaith cooperation, gender transformation in leadership, and the legacy of Soviet secularism are reshaping the relationship between religion, civil society, and the military in contemporary Ukraine.

Anne Frank’s diary, from its original conception to its modern multifaceted existence as an object of Jewish memory and transmission, has long been a site of writing, harmonizing and interpreting, all with various objectives and by various editors (including herself). Philip Roth, too, has participated in the tradition of transmitting and reimagining Anne Frank in the “Femme Fatale” section of his 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer; Roth quotes Frank’s own words—as published in the 1952 English translation of her diary—rendering these words, unattributed, in italics. This paper explores the literary effects of this resurrection and the limits and implications of using Frank as a mechanism of exploring contemporary Jewish American life. Like reinventions that came before (and after) Roth’s, Frank, through constant borrowings, becomes a malleable symbol belonging to Jewish society and representative of the tragic Jewish past, the ever-slipping-away Jewish present, and the uncertainty of a Jewish future.

This paper analyses the efforts made by Jewish agencies, early scholars of antisemitism and State intelligence services to identify the author(s) behind the "Plot against the Church", first distributed at VaticanII, before becoming a long-standing bestseller for opponents to the aggiornamento on the Church teaching on the Jews. Archival findings outline an uncanny obsidional alliance between three groups, all embodying a specific form of antisemitism but with no prior contacts with the other two: Mexican antimodernist Catholics, Italian neofascists and Egyptian diplomacy.  

Building upon Stoler's "epistemic anxieties", the paper addresses not only the antisemitic networks behind The Plot, but also the representations of antisemitism conveyed in the hypotheses made by the investigators aiming to identify its authors. While The Plot was often seen as a derivation of the Protocols, we argue on the contrary that it embodies a complete shift of dynamics and power balance in transnational antisemitism after WWII.

What can we learn about the reproduction of fascism (and fascist desires) by re-staging the well-known antagonisms between the phenomenology and politics of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas? In this paper I read Levinas's "Heidegger, Gagarin and Us" — which chronicles the Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin's successful outer-space orbit in 1961 and takes the occasion to refute Heidegger's ontological attachment to "Place" — along with the latter essays of Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking" and "The Question Concerning Technology." Heidegger's essays have a provincialist, rooted, anti-technological and at times polytheistic ethos that Levinas expresses a strong aversion to. Levinas's aversion to "the Place" and human "rootedness" follows from his belief that Heidegger's attachment to place has fascist potentials. I ask however, if Levinas's thought fails to overcome what he most fears in his philosophical predecessor through his attachment to the idea of Jewish ethical exemplarity in the newly founded State of Israel?

Searching the term “Nephilim” on YouTube will produce results that may surprise most scholars of religion and historians of American evangelical Christianity. The past two decades have witnessed the proliferation of self-proclaimed “Nephilim researchers,” who increasingly argue that the myth of the Nephilim in Gen 6:1–4 contains the key for understanding the entire Bible and the coming eschatological age. In books, documentary films, podcasts, and sermons, these self-proclaimed “Nephilim researchers” blend elements of fundamentalist Christian eschatology (e.g., dispensational premillennialism) with conspiracy and fringe theories about alien abductions, megalithic architecture, the New World Order, cryptozoology, transhumanism, etc. In this paper, I will describe the basic contours of this “evangelical Nephilim conspiracy theory,” as reflected in the foundational writings of figures like I.D.E. Thomas, Chuck Missler, Thomas Horn, Stephen Quayle, and L.A. Marzulli, before situating this conspiracy and its proponents within the broader intellectual and institutional history of American evangelicalism.

Genesis 6:1–4 recounts the sexual union between divine beings and human women and the birth of their hybrid offspring, the Nephilim. Biblical scholarship has long recognized that this tradition likely reflects a late redactional adaptation of older Mediterranean mythological motifs. Despite its seemingly marginal place in the Hebrew Bible, Gen 6:1–4 occupies a central role in the writings of modern “Nephilim researchers” and Christian conspiracy theorists. According to I. D. E. Thomas, the passage “could prove to be the missing clue in solving the UFO mystery” (2008, 23). This paper examines the Nephilim tradition within this interpretive framework. First, it analyzes Thomas’s The Omega Conspiracy (1986), a foundational text for this interpretive community, in order to outline the epistemology and hermeneutics that structure this conspiracy discourse. It then considers how such readings of Gen 6:1–4 circulate in contemporary online “Nephilim researcher” media and generate broader political and cultural implications.

Matthew’s Jesus says the coming of the Son of Man will be like the days of Noah (Matt 24:37). What will this look like? The late evangelical Christian, Chuck Missler, claims, “UFOs and alien intrusions appear to be a big part of what’s coming” (2003: 234). For biblical scholars, Missler’s suggestion seems non-intuitive. But for an increasingly influential group of “Nephilim researchers,” this conclusion makes sense of the Bible, ancient literature, and current events. In this paper, I examine how Nephilim researchers read Matthew 24 and Luke 17, the process by which they connect these passages with other ancient texts, and the assumptions that guide this process. I also consider which features of the biblical texts can provide justification for the methods employed. I close by positioning their approach within larger discussions of Christian interpretation, asking whether their approach represents a fringe movement or simply one manifestation of common Christian reading practices. 

Evangelical conspiracism is part of a broader sociopolitical pattern of conspiratorial thinking with a long history, and which is critically analysed by an established community of scholars in the social sciences and humanities. This presentation will contextualize Nephilim-related evangelical conspiracism in the broader scholarly discussion of conspiracy theories and society (e.g., Butter, Knight, and Thalmann). Drawing on the specific literature on conspiracism and Christianity, this paper will show how the Nephilim serve a specific, instrumentalized, but no less spiritualized function in the rhetorical and persuasive milieu of “Nephilim research” where a focus on biblical literalism collides with the symbolic capital found in uses of scholarly language without scholarly accountability. By focusing on the Nephilim as a functional stand-in for a variety of other concerns about the relationship between Christianity and civil society, this presentation shows just how patterned and revealing this particular embodiment of conservative American Christianity is. 

Searching the term “Nephilim” on YouTube will produce results that may surprise most scholars of religion and historians of American evangelical Christianity. The past two decades have witnessed the proliferation of self-proclaimed “Nephilim researchers,” who increasingly argue that the myth of the Nephilim in Gen 6:1–4 contains the key for understanding the entire Bible and the coming eschatological age. In books, documentary films, podcasts, and sermons, these self-proclaimed “Nephilim researchers” blend elements of fundamentalist Christian eschatology (e.g., dispensational premillennialism) with conspiracy and fringe theories about alien abductions, megalithic architecture, the New World Order, cryptozoology, transhumanism, etc. In this paper, I will describe the basic contours of this “evangelical Nephilim conspiracy theory,” as reflected in the foundational writings of figures like I.D.E. Thomas, Chuck Missler, Thomas Horn, Stephen Quayle, and L.A. Marzulli, before situating this conspiracy and its proponents within the broader intellectual and institutional history of American evangelicalism.

Genesis 6:1–4 recounts the sexual union between divine beings and human women and the birth of their hybrid offspring, the Nephilim. Biblical scholarship has long recognized that this tradition likely reflects a late redactional adaptation of older Mediterranean mythological motifs. Despite its seemingly marginal place in the Hebrew Bible, Gen 6:1–4 occupies a central role in the writings of modern “Nephilim researchers” and Christian conspiracy theorists. According to I. D. E. Thomas, the passage “could prove to be the missing clue in solving the UFO mystery” (2008, 23). This paper examines the Nephilim tradition within this interpretive framework. First, it analyzes Thomas’s The Omega Conspiracy (1986), a foundational text for this interpretive community, in order to outline the epistemology and hermeneutics that structure this conspiracy discourse. It then considers how such readings of Gen 6:1–4 circulate in contemporary online “Nephilim researcher” media and generate broader political and cultural implications.

Matthew’s Jesus says the coming of the Son of Man will be like the days of Noah (Matt 24:37). What will this look like? The late evangelical Christian, Chuck Missler, claims, “UFOs and alien intrusions appear to be a big part of what’s coming” (2003: 234). For biblical scholars, Missler’s suggestion seems non-intuitive. But for an increasingly influential group of “Nephilim researchers,” this conclusion makes sense of the Bible, ancient literature, and current events. In this paper, I examine how Nephilim researchers read Matthew 24 and Luke 17, the process by which they connect these passages with other ancient texts, and the assumptions that guide this process. I also consider which features of the biblical texts can provide justification for the methods employed. I close by positioning their approach within larger discussions of Christian interpretation, asking whether their approach represents a fringe movement or simply one manifestation of common Christian reading practices. 

Evangelical conspiracism is part of a broader sociopolitical pattern of conspiratorial thinking with a long history, and which is critically analysed by an established community of scholars in the social sciences and humanities. This presentation will contextualize Nephilim-related evangelical conspiracism in the broader scholarly discussion of conspiracy theories and society (e.g., Butter, Knight, and Thalmann). Drawing on the specific literature on conspiracism and Christianity, this paper will show how the Nephilim serve a specific, instrumentalized, but no less spiritualized function in the rhetorical and persuasive milieu of “Nephilim research” where a focus on biblical literalism collides with the symbolic capital found in uses of scholarly language without scholarly accountability. By focusing on the Nephilim as a functional stand-in for a variety of other concerns about the relationship between Christianity and civil society, this presentation shows just how patterned and revealing this particular embodiment of conservative American Christianity is. 

Central to Nietzsche’s philosophy is his exhortation to ‘become what one is.’ This exhortation is addressed to a reader who is not yet himself, but something embryonic and unformed. Against narratives of maturation that predicate a redemptive arc of progress, such as those derived from Christian morality and nineteenth century evolutionary theory, Nietzsche counsels a course of development patterned upon the metamorphosis of a fantastic creature that transforms from a camel into a lion and finally a child. In this paper, I consider his metamorphic creature as a progenitor of the strange hybrid figures that populate the imaginary of the surrealist painter and writer, Leonora Carrington. I aim to show how Carrington, whose hybrid figures express possibilities for becoming something unthinkable within the constraints of patriarchal modernity, responds to the call to become what one is in a way that puts pressure on Nietzsche’s generally antipathetic view of the ‘herd.’

Despite the oft-lauded contributions of virtue ethics, virtue was and is a contested concept. Beyond its historical injustices, virtue ethics, and eudaimonism in particular, have been viewed as inherently egoistic and incapable of securing justice. Taking these criticisms seriously, this paper argues that virtue ethics, when attentive to its historical failures and its complicity in structural injustice, not only withstands its critiques but also is especially conducive for liberatory efforts. Virtue ethics brings to the table precisely what its critics need for their theories of justice to work: an answer to how we come to care about the right things, deliver on our obligations, and manage the complications that arise in holding institutions and one another accountable in our pursuit of a just world. In making my argument, I contend that the self-regarding nature of eudaimonism is not an egoistic defect but a liberative strength.

The Buddhist no-self teaching opposes the view that a human being is (or has) a nonphysical ātman as a persisting substrate, and in its place offers a nondualist account of human beings. How should this teaching of “selfless persons” be understood? In Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self (Princeton, 2022), philosopher Jay Garfield argues that the Buddhist no-self teaching is best understood in a nominalist way. Here, a person’s name refers to no entity in the world but is merely a conventional way of thinking and speaking. In this paper, I argue against this reductive account and recommend instead an emergentist account of personhood. On an emergentist account, a person’s name refers to an entity in the world with novel powers not possessed even partially by its constituent parts (e.g., powers of subjectivity and agency). This paper debates the no-self teaching in light of contemporary philosophy and neuroscience. 

In mainstream public debates, AI is consistently measured against a presumed human baseline. Because this comparative register privileges a one-dimensional definition, "the human" now functions as the medium through which AI becomes thinkable, lovable, governable, and saleable. Yet the gap between AI's uneven capabilities and the intensity of public reactions (panic, awe, hope, or resignation) suggests that our projections of AI's future originate less in the technology itself than in our imagination of ourselves. To theorize this dynamic, I propose a definition of AI as an extimate technology. AI externalizes our most intimate cultural artifacts and returns them to us in a form that appears to belong to someone else. I show that technologists and futurists who anticipate the technological singularity fail to see this constitutive relation and are thus unable to ask questions that could guide a path toward a more ethical future of AI. 

This paper analyzes the pastoral practice and synodal ecclesiology of Catholic Small Christian Communities (SCCs) in Kenya. Initiated in the 1960s and 1970s, eastern African SCCs (known as “jumuiyas” in Kiswahili) exemplify Vatican II’s communion ecclesiology as well as the 1994 First African Synod’s vision of the “Church as the Family of God.” Building from recent ethnographic research in Nairobi, the paper considers how these communities connect the Catholic faith to daily life, empower women leaders within a patriarchal society and church, grapple with the challenge of expanding lay male and youth participation, interact with parish ecclesial structures, and struggle with clericalism especially when it comes to fundraising. I will synthesize lessons in local synodality that emerge from the lived practice of base communities in Africa that exemplify Vatican II’s People of God ecclesiology and Pope Francis’s calls for the church to become a “home to everyone in the neighborhood."

The Catholic church in the 19th century Protestant imagination was one in which women were held captive in convents and sexually abused by priests and children born from assault were baptized, killed, and cast into pits under the church. For almost a century, Catholic studies has turned to these narratives as evidence of Anglo-Americans’ anti-Catholic sentiments. However, recent revelations about the activities of the Catholic church, namely increased scholarship on and awareness of the horrors Native boarding schools, Magdalene laundries, and clerical sexual abuse, reveal the reality of many anti-Catholic narratives. This paper returns to anti-Catholic literature as a source of both the Protestant imagination of Catholicism and a revelation about the historical experience of Catholicism in North America, putting these fictional accounts in conversation with the experiences held captive and abused at Catholic-run Native boarding schools and Magdalene laundries in the 19th century.

This paper examines the early ministry of the Little Sisters of the Assumption, a congregation of nursing sisters founded in Paris in 1865. Unlike most women’s nursing congregations, the Little Sisters did not establish hospitals or care institutions. Instead, they cared for the sick poor in their own homes. In a time of working-class alienation from a Church increasingly perceived as aligned with industrial elites, the Sisters' intimate, domestic ministry functioned as a visible sign of the Church’s commitment to the urban poor.

I argue that the early ministry of the Little Sisters exposes a theological tension within emerging Catholic social thought: the effort to alleviate the material suffering of the poor while simultaneously believing suffering is redemptive. By tracing how the Sisters navigated this paradox, this paper also challenges cleric-centered narratives of social Catholicism and recovers women religious as significant contributors to its formation.

In this paper, I will argue that the virtue of attention is a liberative virtue that is necessary to think about the future constructively. Looking to the historical thread of the method of “See, Judge, Act” and to the theology of attention by Simone Weil, I investigate the virtue of attention in the midst of constant crisis. Attention is a necessary tool for the “See” in the See, Judge, Act Method, for the first step of charity is the attention to see the other; the poor are considered non-people, and attention heals in granting visibility. However, this vision is not an abstract gaze; rather, it is a communal act of prophetic hope. The good is never static but dynamic, requiring an attentiveness that allows beauty to become liberating justice. The liberative virtue of attention is transfigurative; it leads to a theology that attends to the world with patience.

Decisions about how children should be raised and educated are an important arena of future negotiation. Drawing on ethnographic research with women at First Baptist Dallas, this paper examines how evangelical mothers envision the future through choices about their children’s schooling. Conversations about whether to homeschool, enroll in private Christian schools, or remain in public schools reveal concerns not only about moral formation and religious identity but also cultural authority and social change. Based on fieldwork conducted from 2018–2021, the paper analyzes how mothers frame schooling decisions as part of their responsibility to shape the moral future of the next generation. These everyday deliberations illuminate broader debates in Texas over the role of religion in public education, including legislation related to the Ten Commandments in classrooms and expanded scriptural references in state curricula. Mothers’ stories reveal how struggles over schooling are struggles over whose vision of the future will prevail.

This paper presents key findings from a historical mapping project, which This paper presents key findings from a historical mapping project, which investigates religious organizations' space-sharing relationships with LGBTQ+ organizations during the 1960s and 1970s. Movement narratives have long attributed the grassroots insurgency to the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, an incident popularly remembered as "the birthplace of pride." This project complicates the remembered history of Stonewall-era organizing with a focus on the local movement spaces that facilitated grassroots LGBTQ+ growth. This analysis builds on queer community histories, which de-center the Stonewall narrative and trace the distinct local conflicts that galvanized local and regional activism. My research, in turn, maps the surprising and largely forgotten role of local congregations and other religiously-connected spaces as an infrastructure for this growth. These religious organizations facilitated LGBTQ+ movement as meeting spaces and movement centers. This grassroots focus on religious infrastructure offers a new framework for mapping--and analyzing-- LGBTQ+ movement emergence. 

One significant audience, or public, for the voluminous scholarly and journalistic literature on (white) Christian nationalism is progressive Christians. Many of them peruse polling data, listen to podcasts, subscribe to Substacks, and read articles and books to understand their political opponents and co-religionists. This paper explores how progressive Christians have engaged with the term “Christian nationalism” in order to organize, define their opponents, and motivate political action.  Our research is based on interviews and fieldwork with several local chapters of the group Christians Against Christian Nationalism. We also offer discursive and visual analysis of their digital products, including podcasts and social media. In tumultuous times, these groups have found Christian nationalism to be a useful way to name their political opponents, even when they are loved ones, family members, and fellow church members. And at a time of potential resurgence of progressive Christianity, we offer detailed accounts of grassroots mobilization.

In the aftermath of the global reorganization of the Second World War, Protestants found themselves in a precarious place. In this paper, through  archival letters and memoirs of key interlocutors such as Santiago Canclini, in his efforts, who, during a period of hostility towards Protestants in the first Peron government, tried to establish themselves not only as active members in the political, religious and social life of the country. Through letters and internal documents, we will see how Baptist pastors lobbied for new notions of citizenry and religious freedom that transcended national borders. This work of advocacy can be conceptualized into three areas, which I have denominated: external and internal advocacy, the circulation of publications, and strategic coalition building. 

In this paper, I show that in post-Bolsonaro Brazil, where Bolsonarismo continues to affect communities despite Bolsonaro’s 2022 electoral defeat, we can find continuities within the sense of change. Specifically, both senses of persistence and senses of change can be found in the recurrence of an allegorical way of seeing used to orient action: a temporal, spatial, and Christian reckoning (but not only Christian) that looks out for how God, the devil, and evil entities operate in human time. What is unique about Post-Bolsonaro Brazil, at least for the settler Amazonians I work with, is that many feel that others are interpreting the allegorical signs in inappropriate ways. While the discussion of allegory builds on my recent book, I extend that discussion with new ethnography about allegorical reversals under Bolsonaro, which offer insight into the new times animated by age-old temporal and spatial practices and political ambivalences.

In the last decade, Peru has seen vast political turmoil amidst religious stability, if not growth of practitioners too. As the country politically crumbles, is faith a prevailing factor for those residing within and outside of the country? Through the observations and celebrations of El Señor de los Milagros, Peruvian practitioner show resilience, and the importance of preserving traditions over highlighting political turmoil.