In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Max Weber’s “disenchantment” thesis casts science as a carrier of secularization, dissolving mystery and ultimacy. Yet theorists such as Hans Joas and Charles Taylor suggest modernity reconfigures transcendence rather than simply erasing it, generating “cross-pressures” and longings for “fullness” within the immanent frame. This paper draws on 104 interviews with physicists and biologists in the US, UK, Italy, and India to examine how scientific practice elicits experiences of wonder, mystery, and “otherness”--and how these experiences can function as pathways into spiritual yearning, especially among nonreligious scientists. We conceptualize enchantment as a relational mode of engagement marked by (1) encounter with alterity, (2) orientation toward the world as a meaningful cosmos, and (3) affective engagement. Comparing religious and nonreligious narratives, we show how immanent and liminal forms of enchantment enable yearnings for connection and higher meaning without stable doctrinal commitment, reframing science as a consequential site of contemporary spirituality.

The U.S. is becoming more religious diverse while trust in religious institutions and leaders is declining.  And more Americans are growing reticent to connect across religious divides. These trends raise critical questions about the benefits of religious diversity and the role of religious leaders in civil society. Drawing on interviews and focus groups (N=81) with a diverse group of religious leaders in Houston, Texas, we examine their attitudes towards religious diversity. We found that nearly all see religious diversity as a benefit to the city. They argue that religious diversity provides an opportunity to appreciate religious difference, for reflexivity in one’s religious beliefs, for everyone to find a religious home, and it serves as a crucible for developing democratic capacities. Challenges include intolerance, polarization, and logistical challenges of connecting in a large city. Our findings illuminate how religious leaders appraise religious diversity and the implications for inter-religious collaboration, pluralism, and civil society.

This study examines Taegyo, a traditional Korean prenatal practice, as a form of prenatal religion among Korean immigrants in the U.S. Taegyo emphasizes ethical conduct and spiritual cultivation during pregnancy and reflects Korea’s historically hybrid religious traditions, including Confucianism, Buddhist ethical teachings, Daoism, Shamanistic spirituality, and contemporary Christian devotional practices. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews with Korean immigrants in the U.S. who have experienced pregnancy and childbirth (target N = 30), this study analyzes how participants interpret pregnancy as a spiritually meaningful period during which religious values and moral environments may influence fetal development. Many participants describe Taegyo as a spiritual practice while also reporting social isolation during pregnancy due to the absence of extended family support networks. The paper argues that Taegyo functions as both prenatal religion and part of broader processes of reproductive religion through which immigrants reproduce cultural traditions, religious meanings, and intergenerational care practices in diaspora contexts.

This paper interrogates the rise of AI-mediated relationality in Black communities asking how such technological interventions may reshape relationships across the lifespan and how digital religion offers expanded discourse for exploring these new connections. Using autoethnography, qualitative data from both social media and digital religion participants, and sociological research on artificial intelligence and religion, this paper examines how AI engagement reconfigures embodiment, desire, and expectations of intimacy. The paper ends by critically situating AI intimacy within longer histories of racialized embodiment, moral regulation, and technological mediation ultimately offering insight on emergent technologies and Black religion.

This paper explores the long tradition of Christian–Muslim solidarity in Palestine and considers how this history can inform contemporary solidarity efforts in the United States and beyond. Palestinian Christians and Muslims have often worked together in shared political, social, and cultural struggles. Drawing from this history, this paper argues that the Palestinian experience offers an important model for strengthening relationships between Muslim and Christian communities with solidarity for Palestine as their focus. Such partnerships can deepen interfaith engagement and strengthen faith-based advocacy for justice and human dignity.

 At the beginning of his sixth of seven “sessions” (majālis) with Abbasid vizier ‘Ali al-Maghrebi (d. 1027), Church of the East metropolitan Elias of Nisibis (d. 1046) declares his intention to show that the Syriac language is “better, more useful, and of greater merit” than Arabic. In response to various questions posed by his Muslim counterpart, Elias enters into an analysis of grammar, handwriting, and speech that reflects his awareness of not only foundational principles of Arabic grammar, but also of contemporaneous debates among Islamic grammarians regarding the interpretation of the Qur’an. Following a 2009 study of David Bertaina, this paper will place Elias’ linguistic analysis within its broader Islamic intellectual context, thereby demonstrating that the dialogue might best be read as a Christian theological critique of the Islamic conception of revelation, ultimately occasioned by Christian concern about the increasing prevalence of Arabic over Syriac in the medieval Middle East. 

Palestinian Orthodox Christians, the largest Christian population in historic Palestine, have formed, sustained, and long been affiliated with the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, tracing their origins to the apostles and the leadership of James the Just. Since the Ottoman period, the patriarchate’s clerical hierarchy has been dominated by foreign Greek nationals, producing persistent tensions between church leadership and the indigenous laity. This paper examines how Palestinian Orthodox Christians navigated authority, representation, and communal identity from the nineteenth century to the present. It situates the community within its historical and religious context, analyzes the establishment of a Greek ecclesiastical monopoly over the patriarchate, and explores the consequences of this structure. Drawing on fragmentary historical sources and community accounts, it argues that Palestinian Orthodox Christians have experienced overlapping structures of spiritual, cultural, and political domination—through ecclesiastical hierarchy and colonial governance—shaping both their identity and the broader dynamics of Middle Eastern Christian communities.

This paper examines a paradox at the intersection of technology, religion, and political imagination: Eastern Orthodox influencers in the United States who utilize digital media infrastructures to propagate an explicitly anti-modern vision of Christian civilization. Drawing on science and technology studies, political theology, and media theory, we analyze how these influencers synthesize patristic sources, conspiracy epistemologies, and geopolitical commentary to articulate a vision of the future that is imbued with “trad” aesthetics and anti-capitalist economic formations while also being eschatologically charged. Their use of technology is neither incidental nor contradictory in their own framing—rather, digital media becomes a weapon seized from the enemy, a temporary instrument for building the conditions under which technology's dominion might be refuted. We argue that trad futurism represents a form of religiously-motivated technological ambivalence, complicating simple Luddite or anti-modern categorizations by embedding technological critique within a constructive, if deeply illiberal, vision of future human flourishing.

This paper analyzes radical renunciation of science and technology through the lens of Philip Sherrard (1922-1995). Sherrard, a poet, theologian, and translator, was a convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and is most known in Greece for his introduction of modern Greek literature to the west. In the 1970s, increasingly concerned about the environmental crisis, he abandoned modernity and built a primitive haven on the Greek island of Evia—a home without electricity, phones, heating, air conditioning. However, beyond Orthodoxy, much of Sherrard’s thinking was influenced by the shadowy world of the Traditionalist School. But where many Traditionalists tend towards right-wing extremism in response to environmental destruction and technological dehumanization, Sherrard charted an alternate path through pacifism and a unique brand of theologically-motivated technological asceticism. While his response to climate change is not sustainable, it raises serious questions about the intersection of ecological despair, anti-modernism, and right-wing extremism.

Since the 2022 release of ChatGPT, writers have been among the most vocal sources of resistance to AI. Some have been drawn into a broader and deeper form of tech-resistance. This paper poses a critical question: can anti-tech resistance guard, or protect, the process and practice of writing? The paper examines the work of British writer, “recovering” environmentalist, and recent convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, Paul Kingsnorth who offers a scathing critique of the modern dream of progress. Progress has become, for him, a form of totalizing technological capture that he names the Machine. The paper argues that primitivist critiques like Kingsnorth’s suffer from a genealogical amnesia that leads them to misunderstand their own resistance and takes for granted the technologies (like writing) that support it. In conversation with Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, the paper argues that writing should instead be guarded as a form of technological inheritance.

The Japanese occupation of Burma (1942-1945) is often invoked in Burmese as “khit-pyet,” an “era of disorder.” Histories of this period are primarily shaped by nationalist narratives put forth in the memoirs of Myanmar’s male political elite. Biographical writing by Buddhist female renunciants (thilashin), however, offer new perspectives on this era. This paper takes up narratives of khit-pyet voiced by women like Daw Malayi, whose nunnery was commandeered by the Kempetai, the military police of the Japanese army, and Daw Nyanacari, who welcomed refugees from the fall of Rangoon to her Myanaung nunnery while continuing to train her thilashin students preparing for their monastic exams. I bring these and other biographical accounts together to investigate how thilashin relied on practices of institutional maintenance and mental cultivation to deal with the violence, confusion, and deprivations of the occupation, and how the disorder of “khit-pyet” has shaped representations of Buddhist institutional history.

Myanmar’s conservative monastic bodies and associated government regulators have consistently argued that the bhikkhunī (higher ordained nun) lineage died out and therefore, according to the scriptures, it cannot be reinstated. And in fact, Myanmar’s nuns are not bhikkhunīs but a form of female renunciate called a thilashin. Yet in the early 1900s a thilashin named Daw Konmayi and the  famous monk, the Maha Gandhayon Sayadaw of Sagaing, knew that in the absence of the Bhikkhunī Vinaya there needed to be rules to protect the thilashin, thereby creating a monastic code of conduct. In 1994, the State Saṅgha Mahā Nāyaka Committee, completed a revised version of these rules. This paper compares the two works and similar to Martin Seeger (2018), makes the case for looking at how these nuns have made a space for themselves in which scholars miss when focusing on the bhikkhunī debate.

This paper demonstrates how the historical paintings in the Capitol Rotunda contributed to the formation of an American national identity by constructing memories of a heroic past, animated by a religious imagination. It considers these paintings in light of Anthony D. Smith’s work on nationalism and reads them alongside primary source materials relating to their production and reception. Despite the sometimes differing, even competing, political and theological visions of these paintings, they cohere in the (re)production of a national creation myth in order to make visible an imagined providential destiny for the American project. This usable past continues to fund nationalist futures that understand domination as America’s divine mission and sacralize regenerative violence, which prompts the question of whether other futures are possible. And if not, what forms of forgetting must be cultivated for the sake of a livable future?

This paper explores how Korean immigrant leaders in the United States from the 1930s to 1940s reformulated the story of their country’s past toward advancing a vision of a future sovereign Korea. Drawing on petitions and letters written by Korean immigrant organizations to American government agencies as well as news articles, it situates these efforts within a moment when Korean immigrant leaders began to see the growing possibilities of forming kinship with the United States in opposition to the Japanese empire. By doing so, this paper argues that Korean immigrant leaders glorified their country’s history to highlight their racial superiority—or their racial “fit”—and thus position Korea less as a colonized country than as an equal player among other national powers on the global stage. 

Since Jan Gross called attention to Poles’ complicity in the murder of Jews during the Second World War with the publication of Neighbors in 2000, a populist “backlash” (Forecki 2018) to critical historiography on the Holocaust in Poland has emerged among Polish ethnonationalists seeking to defend the “good name” of Poland. In this paper, I critically analyze one salient locus of this ethnonationalist backlash: The Chapel of Remembrance (Kaplica Pamięci) in Toruń, which commemorates Poles murdered for helping Jews during the Holocaust. Building on recent sociological engagements with the Chapel of Remembrance, I offer a theological analysis and critique of the chapel’s portrayal of the “dead rescuers” (Łysak 2023) it commemorates as martyrs. Ultimately, I argue that the Chapel of Remembrance deploys the symbolic grammar of martyrdom for nationalist ends and, in doing so, sacralizes the Polish nation in a manner fundamentally at odds with a Christian theology of martyrdom. 

This paper introduces the concept of phronetic injustice—a form of epistemic injustice that specifically wrongs individuals as moral knowers—and demonstrates how it constitutes a systematic pathway to moral injury. When powerful actors perpetrate epistemic malpractice by manipulating, concealing, or fabricating morally relevant information, they corrupt the epistemic foundations necessary for virtuous moral deliberation. From propaganda obscuring ongoing genocides to educational sanitization and ideological censorship, these manipulations are able to compromise the exercise of practical wisdom (phronesis) on a massive scale, causing otherwise virtuous individuals to become complicit in atrocities through epistemic manipulation rather than personal moral failure. This corruption frequently results in moral injury as agents discover themselves complicit in actions that fundamentally violate their deepest moral commitments. In an era of mass atrocities and sophisticated disinformation campaigns, deepfakes, and AI-amplified information warfare, understanding this concept of phronetic injustice is critical for both individual flourishing and collective responses to injustice.

International humanitarian law and modern just war reasoning lead some to interpret many veterans’ moral injuries as mistaken attributions of guilt to themselves rather than to the aggressors responsible for the negative consequences of a just war. This rejection of morally injured veterans’ knowledge is similar to what Miranda Fricker describes as testimonial injustice. Unlike the cases Fricker describes, however, this particular injustice is based not on identity prejudices against veterans but rather on prejudices against the other characters in their testimonies: the combatants and civilians they’ve harmed. As such, rejecting morally injured veterans’ testimonies as mistaken constitutes an injustice not only against the veterans themselves, but represents an expansion of the category of testimonial injustice because it perpetrates an injustice against those of whom the veterans speak. The result is a failure to recognize both harmed persons and the harms they’ve suffered. 

This paper considers critiques of religious forgiveness proposed through recent moral injury research by psychologist Brett Litz and the recent book Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice by psychiatrist Judith Herman. Religious discourses on forgiveness do not locate justice first in relationship to the individual or the community but in relationship to repentance before the divine. This undoubtedly can be abused in certain contexts such as Christian perpetrators who use God’s offer of forgiveness through Jesus Christ as a “free pass” to avoid true accountability or reparations. But I argue this does not have to be the case. Transcendent claims about Christian or other forms of religious forgiveness draw from rich communal traditions of penitence and repentance which also do not necessarily force a choice between confronting the therapeutic or structural issues at hand in moral injury.