In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This paper takes interest in the converging discourse surrounding a perceived 'great American sexlessness' from two seemingly incompatible sides: right-wing pronatalists on the one hand, and sex-positive progressives on the other. Over the past few years, countless studies and op-eds have explored the now widely-accepted notion that generation Z is not having sex, a reverse kind of moral panic which turns deprioritizing sex into a diagnosis of puritanism and stokes pronatalist fears of declining birthrates. What sets of cultural anxieties do these twinned discourses articulate? And how is religion differentially wielded to the same end? While articulating very different political orientations, I argue, both pleas to have more sex index a cruelly optimistic set of shared national fantasies rooted in the goods attributed to sex and sexual desire, and the formations of whiteness, heterosexuality, and able-bodiedness which subtend them. 

“Wokeism” as a term enters the U.S cultural lexicon at a moment of 21st century racial reckoning, and it is the concept of racial/cultural reckoning that continually shapes its lexical field. While liberals/progressives describe “wokeism” as a movement towards global liberation, conservatives describe “wokeism” as representative of the inherent problems of a liberal political order.

In this lightening paper, I think through and with “wokeism” using Saidiya Hartman’s "Position of the Unthought" and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments in conversation with 90s Hip Hop Thanatologies. Hartman's work refuses hopeful solutions to the reality of an antiblack world while documenting illegible and anarchic means of Black survival. Meanwhile, thanatologies of 90s hip hop provide a variegated field to understand “woke” on different registers. Taaken together, I highlight how "wokeism" as code for “multi-cultural equity” not only sustains an antiblack world, but ignores the phrase's operationalization as a “wayward” means of survival. 

Ironically, by diving into the ideological commitments inherent within "Gender Ideology," queer individuals can create more room for self-understanding and authenticity.

By stripping the medico-juridical insinuations that intentionally stoke fear, exploring the social interconnectivity of queer identities recenters "social contagion" in a way that uncovers new ways of being while prioritizing agency and joy over imposed normativity and alleged immutability.

This paper thinks queerly about “social contagion” vis-à-vis postwar theologies of the family. Drawing on archival materials, I trace how the rise of pastoral psychology within the theological academy was, on the one hand, a response to homosexual panic: early issues of Pastoral Psychology reveal persistent anxieties about the family and the figure of the homosexual. On the other hand, its diagnostic vocabularies provided new language to articulate previously inchoate sexual desires. I argue that pastoral psychology—and practical theology more broadly—spread fears and fantasies that reshaped how theology students thought about sex and the family in postwar America, prompting new and unintended political possibilities. Queer/trans contagion moved precisely through the theories and methods meant to quarantine it. This history of pastoral psychology demonstrates how contemporary anxieties surrounding “social contagion” might paradoxically generate the very political movements they aim to inoculate in the name of “family" or "the child."

“Toxin-free” is a central marketing buzzword within the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement and political imaginary. The word functions as a secular liturgy of purity, while obscuring a deregulatory agenda. This very short paper thinks against the hypocrisy of a MAHA vision for a toxin-free America by turning toward a different archive: the queer-led farm. By treating the queer farm as a living archive and moral framework, this paper challenges the MAHA obfuscation of policy that leads to mass debilitation. I will demonstrate how queer-led agriculture reclaims "toxin-free" as a rigorous, shared practice of environmental and social care.

This presentation explores a Yogācāra approach to sickness by drawing from Kuiji’s Commentary of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa. Reading the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa as a manual for bodhisattvas’ practice, Kuiji extends the Yogācāra theory of body to the embodiment of sickness. Instead of reducing sickness to a malfunction of material corporeality, Kuiji analyzes this embodiment to elucidate how illness for a person is karmically cohered into the saṃsāric cosmology of degeneration. When sickness is contextualized in the shared lifeworld of ignorance, a teleological life-trajectory becomes habitually indoctrinated to naturalize health and happiness as the social norms while stigmatizing sickness as a deviation or an inability. The transformation of ignorance to awakening recontextualizes the lived experience of sickness, through which bodhisattvas rehabitualize themselves to embody impermanence as a skillful means for criticizing and correcting social stigmas. It follows that the cultivation of compassion on the bodhisattvas’ path informs a critical-transformative social ethics.

This paper reconsiders the Nara-period Yogācāra monk Dōkyō (d. 772), who has long been portrayed as a corrupt monk who attempted to seize imperial power through Empress Shōtoku. Recent Japanese scholarship has begun to challenge this narrative. Building on this reassessment, the paper argues that Dōkyō may be better understood as an ethical agent operating within Yogācāra and bodhisattva frameworks. It examines his healing practices and use of esoteric Buddhist texts in attempts to cure the empress. Situating Dōkyō within a broader culture of Nara-period “bodhisattva monks,” the paper asks how Yogācāra ethics functioned as a lived moral system expressed through compassion, ritual efficacy, and skillful means. From this perspective, Dōkyō’s activities reveal how bodhisattva ethics could both support and destabilize the moral authority of the ritsuryō state.