In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper argues that John Wesley stands within the patristic tradition of deification exemplified by Gregory of Nyssa. In both late antiquity and early industrial England, bodies were rendered vulnerable within hierarchical and economic regimes that disciplined and exhausted embodied life. I contend that Nyssen’s theosis and Wesley’s sanctification share a participatory grammar in which salvation is understood as transformative participation in divine life that reconfigures mortal embodiment. Under industrial modernity, Wesley reformulates this patristic vision as an embodied holiness capable of resisting the reduction of the body to labor utility. By centering embodiment, this study reframes deification as a counter-formation of embodied existence rather than a purely metaphysical doctrine. It further suggests that this participatory logic bears implications for contemporary regimes of racialized vulnerability, where socially imperiled bodies remain sites of theological and political struggle.

The great Byzantine saint Gregory Palamas (1296-1357) explicitly rejected the Platonic idea of the World Soul. I argue, however, that certain structural features of the World Soul remain in the superstructure of Palamas's accounts of the creation and deification of the sensible world through the human soul. I thus argue that through its rational movements in cooperation with the activities of the divine Nous, Logos, and Eros the human soul becomes a functional World Soul in Palamas's thought.

Zizioulas’ landmark work Remembering the Future articulates a powerful vision of eschatology as a central ontological category for Christian theology. Zizioulas' interest in eschatological ontology, however, begins earlier in his career. Already in Being as Communion, he interprets Maximus' triad of genesis–movement–rest as comprehensible only "from the end" rather than organically unfolding "towards the end" (96). In this position we find the seeds of Zizioulas' later more sustained treatment of the question of eschatological ontology in Remembering the Future. In this paper, one element of this discussion will be examined, namely Zizioulas' hard separation of the notion of teleology (captured by the phrase "towards the end") from that of eschatology ("from the end"). This division between teleology understood in a negative light and eschatology understood in a positive light, is discussed at some length in Remembering the Future, 101–109, and will form the basis for this paper's exploration. 

This paper examines the emergence and impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) fatwa generators, also known as fatwa engines, in and on contemporary Islamic belief and practice. It contributes to the arena of digital humanities due to its use of humanistic research into digital objects and culture, and to the field of digital Islam by offering a survey and analysis of these fatwa-generating applications. It uses small-scale data mining as well as visual and textual content analysis to understand the characteristics of these fatwa generators, and draws upon relevant literature in both fields in its analysis. It argues that the disclaimers offered by each application reveal a reticence to fully blur the historical distinctions between fatwas as authoritative, actionable jurisprudence and all other religious advice, no matter how well intended or grounded in scripture.

This paper examines the challenges and stakes of American Sign Language translation among Deaf Muslims. Drawing on the public archives of Global Deaf Muslim (GDM), a Washington, D.C.-based educational and advocacy organization, the paper considers such translational work within a broader ethic of ta'arruf, which rejects deficiency-driven concepts of deafness in favor of one that incorporates Deafness within Islam's overall cultural, linguistic, ethnic diversity. What are the stakes of "thinking" Deafness this way, and what are the technologies and translational techniques required to carry out this work? Examining GDM's video translations of Qur'anic verses into ASL, as well as interpretation techniques in other educational materials, I demonstrate how the semantic and sensory challenges of this work also implicate theological problems of divine "voicing." I argue that by meeting such challenges, GDM interpreters are “deafening” their faith, defining it in ways that enrich its ethics of ta‘arruf through Deaf epistemologies.

The Mega Masjid is both a physical space and an institutional variety. It boasts key features of Sunni masajid, producing a sense of universality while iteratively reimagining the American Masjid as a location of placemaking and cultural innovation. This paper explores how the Mega Masjid responds to and adopts features of American Protestant congregationalism to produce a unique and culturally salient masjid model. Through a comparative analysis of the Mega Church, the Mega Masjid emerges as more than a product of Protestant Hegemony, but rather a space aimed at meeting the ever-evolving spiritual and material demands of an American Muslim future. It is designed and redesigned to serve as an oasis retreat for American Muslims, a break from the aggressive heat of protestant hegemony, secularist pressures, and anti-Muslim racism. A ‘one-stop-shop’ for the American Muslim Family, Mega Masjids reimagine and redefine masjid space, programming and amenities beyond traditional ritual worship.

Since the early twentieth century, Konkōkyō, a Sect Shinto new religious movement, has conducted war memorials and spirit pacification rituals (ireisai) on behalf of Japan’s civilian and military war dead. I trace the development of Konkōkyō ireisai from the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) through the present to demonstrate how marginalized religions utilize memorial rituals to mediate their position in wartime and postwar society. Konkōkyō’s ireisai evoke the group’s history of service to the wartime Japanese state while reifying its postwar pacifist identity. I examine continuities and shifts in Konkōkyō ireisai to show how rhetorics of peace and war coexist in spirit pacification rituals across time. Postwar Konkōkyō relies on local bodies rather than the national organization to conduct these rituals, avoiding nationwide attention and controversy. Konkōkyō postwar ireisai transform the institution’s wartime activities into an ongoing pacifist mission, seeking to pacify the war dead and war responsibility tensions.

In 1938, Prince Demchugdongrub, a descendant of Chinggis Khan and leader of a Japanese-backed Pan-Mongolist movement, stood on Shika Island in Kyushu to honor Mongol soldiers slain there during the thirteenth-century invasions of Japan. The site, once feared as a “Mongol mound” marking the execution of captured invaders, had been transformed by the Nichiren priest Takanabe Nittō into the Great Memorial Stūpa for the Mongol Army, dedicated to the war dead of both sides under the ideal of onshin byōdō (equality of friend and foe). This paper examines how medieval memory was reframed in 1920s-30s Japan to align with impartial Buddhist compassion with imperial Pan-Asianism. Through textual analysis and attention to Mongol and Chinese responses, the paper argues that the monument functioned as a hinge between pacification and expansion and reveals how Buddhist ritual became a contested medium of transnational diplomacy on the eve of total war. 

My paper takes up the shifting meanings of Kyoto’s “ear mound” (mimizuka) over the course of the modern and contemporary periods, particularly as it is articulated in relation to other sites of commemoration organized around the entombing of bodily remains. The ear mound is understood to contain not ears but noses, taken from Korean and Chinese soldiers and civilians killed during the failed Japanese invasions of Korea in the late sixteenth century and brought back to Japan as trophies. The burial mound seems to have operated during the early modern period both within a framework of spectacle and one of spirit pacification. In the paper, I explore how ritual pacification becomes connected to post-war rhetorics of “peace.” I am interested especially in how the ear mound and places like it become sites of cathexis for competing national interests and thus sites of contestation. 

This presentation examines contemporary rituals dedicated to Koreans who died as a result of colonial mobilization during World War II. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it analyzes ceremonies performed either by ritual specialists—Buddhist monks or mudang (Korean shamans)—or by non-specialists drawing on the model of Confucian-inspired ancestral offering rites (chesa). It shows how the ritual's aim of appeasing the dead becomes articulated with broader political and social issues, including claims for historical justice, the division of the Korean peninsula, and relations—at both grassroots and diplomatic levels—between South Korea and Japan.

Karl Barth’s critique of German Christian nationalism is well known, but some American Christian nationalists have drawn on the theology of Barth and Barmen to justify and support their agenda—notably John MacArthur’s Grace Church during the COVID-19 crisis, the masterminds behind Project 2025, Kevin Roberts and Russell Vought, and antiabortion activist Katelyn Walls Shelton. This paper argues that Barth’s political writings in the 1930s evince a characteristic weakness—an overly abstract notion of Christian freedom and an overly sanguine confidence in the self-evidence of the Bible’s witness against Christian nationalism. Both points may have made sense within the context of Germany, but they have translated poorly in the American context. Those committed to Barth’s intentions must recover elements of his earlier theology from the first Romans commentary and his more overtly socialist writings as a necessary supplement and corrective to his later work.

This paper explores how a doctrine of sin drawn from resources found in Karl Barth might contribute to theological reflection on nationhood, nationalism, and patriotism. Focusing on my own Scottish and British context while engaging broader theoretical questions, I argue that attentiveness to sin provides an essential tool for Christian engagement with the modern nation-state. Rather than offering any prescriptive political conclusion, the paper proposes that a robust doctrine of sin, developed in conversation with Barth, can help to reframe discussions of nationalism within churches in ways that are both chastening and constructive. I argue that a well-constructed hamartiology based on a critical and appreciative reading of Barth illuminates the dynamics of (self) deception, the insidious functioning of ideology, and the potential of all states and nations to become “at least a little Leviathan,” whilst also preserving the possibility of responsible, hopeful political discernment with regard to the nation. 

This session brings together two papers that examine how social and cultural boundaries are constructed, maintained, and challenged. The first paper explores mimetic theory in a prison context, focusing on dynamics of purity, exclusion, and the challenge of extending compassion to the most marginalized. The second paper reconsiders the Vattimo–Girard debate through the lens of Henza culture, highlighting how more fluid forms of identity (“loose ontology”) open new possibilities for rethinking gender, metaphysics, and the role of difference in social life.

This essay reframes the debate between Vattimo and Girard—between ‘weak thought’ and anthropological facts—through Okinawa’s Henza culture where identities are established through a ‘loose’ ontology. This ontology presents a mythical-metaphysical reality that structures male-female complimentarity, though also allowing individuals to cross genders for cultural reasons. This essay contrasts ‘loose’ ontology with the ‘strong’ ontologies of western culture/religion where individual identities are ‘fixed’. For his part, Girard defines cultural intelligibility through acts of exclusion (scapegoating), though when the ‘other’ is not a fixed entity—even if an anthropological fact—new possibilities appear for metaphysics in relation to identity. Susan Sered’s reading of Henza culture enables a reimagining of the nominalist-realist dispute replayed in the Vattimo-Girard debate, and provides a solution akin to Martin Jay’s‘ magical nominalism’. We need neither get rid of metaphysics nor fully identify with it—something Girard had foreseen with profound theological consequences.