In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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 paper looks at nineteenth-century Black Shakers in Philadelphia and South Union, Kentucky to investigate how those Shakers helped shape their communities, and particularly their communities’ responses to enslavement and inequality. Despite increasing interest, there is woefully little historical research on Black believers, participants, and observers. Scholars of Shakers tend to make similar arguments: Shakers were pacifists, opposed to enslavement, and committed to racial equality. This portrayal of Shakers is not wrong, but it is not quite right. Shaker communities had diverse and complex approaches to Black members, and Black participants in Shaker communities were at times deeply committed, and at times deeply critical of the Society, and often both. African American Shakers in Philadelphia and South Union developed communities of critique that helped shape their Shaker communities. 

The October 21, 1967 March on the Pentagon represented an expansive slice of nationwide dissent against US involvement in the Vietnam War. As part of the protest, counterculture leaders engineered an attempt to exorcise the US military headquarters via levitation, which comprised a ten-step ritual and spoken invocation that borrowed from religious traditions across time and space. The paper argues that the visibility of this action confounds a classic conception of ritual, while renegotiating the terms by which to adjudicate ritual success. Further, the paper resituates accusations of Hippie appropriation within a metaphysical tradition, while seeking to expose those reactionary currents stirred during a so-called revolutionary decade that remain salient today. A brief episode in the turbulent history of the American 1960s, the levitation of the Pentagon critically triangulates discourse around the efficacy of ritual, the ethics of combinative religion, and the possibility of revolution by metaphysical means.

Seventy-five years after the publication of Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath, it has become a well-worn truth that that book privileges time over space. That is not quite true; for Heschel, we should use the things of space in accordance with the primacy of time, with a philosophy of history premised on the claim that history is God's to steer, not humans'. Focusing on Heschel's argument in this manner helps to clarify some of the puzzling (and overly aphoristic) claims in Heschel's 1969 book Israel: An Echo of Eternity. Reading that book in light of The Sabbath allows us to see that Heschel's Zionism is limited. The point of Zionism and its historical successes is only to verify that God's promise is still in effect, not to fulfill those promises. And any expression of Zionism that privileges power over others is to be rejected.

Thinking about Shabbat as crip time involves what Alison Kafer calls “a reorientation to time.” For Autistics the Day of Rest provides what Heschel calls a day to “reclaim our authentic state . . . in which we are what we are . . . it is a day of independence of social conditions.” This paper will examine Heschel’s premise through the lenses of Critical Disability Theory, Crip Theory, Critical Autism Studies, and Neuroqueer Theory to explore the meaning and practice of Shabbat as disability justice from an Autistic perspective. As Heschel frames Shabbat, it is a time away from socially constructed enabled time in which neurodivergent people are dis-abled. For an Autistic person who is dis-abled in neurotypical time, Shabbat time then becomes crip time which is both a liberatory practice and a space where “social conditions” are no longer dis-abling for the neurodivergent.

This paper reexamines the mid-1960s debate between Abraham Joshua Heschel and Joseph B. Soloveitchik over Jewish-Christian dialogue following the Second Vatican Council. While often portrayed as a clash between an open and a restrictive vision of Judaism, the paper argues that the debate must also be understood within the specific context of American Judaism in the Cold War era. Analyzing their writings and newly examined archival material, it shows that Heschel’s support for interfaith dialogue was rooted in a vision of a Judeo-Christian alliance grounded in the Hebrew Bible and united against communist atheism and moral nihilism. Soloveitchik, by contrast, opposed this alliance, fearing it would blur religious boundaries and threaten Jewish distinctiveness within a Christian-majority culture. The debate therefore reflects broader struggles over identity, ideology, and cultural integration in postwar American Judaism.

Recent research in Finland suggests a growing interest in Christianity among young men, challenging assumptions about linear religious decline and the feminization of religiosity. This paper examines young men’s engagements with Christianity through a typological analysis of religious orientations, based on in-depth interviews with 30 young Christian men conducted in 2024–2025. Rather than interpreting young men’s religiosity as either reactionary or aligned with hegemonic masculinity, the analysis highlights diverse ways in which Christian commitment becomes intertwined with meaning-making, moral agency, and identity construction in a highly secularized Nordic context. Drawing on scholarship on plural masculinities and individualized religious engagement, the paper proposes a typology that complicates dominant frameworks for studying religious masculinities. The typology is offered as an analytic provocation, inviting comparative discussion on how religious masculinities are negotiated beyond hegemonic and oppositional models in contemporary societies.

Lutheranism as the main Christian denomination in the Nordic countries has defined the religious, ethical, and societal discourse in the area since the Reformation era. Rulers and societal norms drawn from Lutheranism have been recognized as an essential factor behind the development of Nordic societies. Lutheran hegemony is characteristic in ideals relating to gender roles in family, society, and church. Lutheran masculinity, however, has historical and theological roots expanding beyond hegemonic masculinity in different contexts.

This paper provides insight to the development of Lutheran masculinity ideals, beginning with Reformation era sources and contexts of early Lutheran theological teaching about ideal masculine attributes and behavior. The paper concludes with an example from contemporary politics where Nordic Lutheran masculinity ideals are taken into global context. Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, has recently gained global attention in world politics and a seat next to major Western leaders. 

I argue that the men from the new global-hit TV show Heated Rivalry have become both icons and disruptors: models and inviters of detoxification of masculinity as much as sex symbols and icons of gay love. Moreover, I argue that it is both the four main men characters in the show — given how both straight and gay men have been engaging their stories — and the men who portray the two leading men who are doing this work of inviting viewers of all genders to explore alternative ways of relating masculinity, male physicality, and care.