In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper examines an unexpected resonance between Daoist cosmology and European continental philosophy by examining the womb motif as a challenge to phallocentric metaphysics. Bringing Jacques Derrida’s reading of Martin Heidegger into conversation with the Daoist notion of the “gate of the obscure she-beast” (玄牝之门) in the Daodejing, it asks how womb cosmology might reopen the question of sexual difference beyond metaphysical opposition. The paper revisits Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s concept of Geschlecht, which seeks a primordial unity underlying sexual differentiation yet risks neutralizing difference within a phallocentric framework. Derrida’s reading of khōra in Plato’s Timaeus introduces a “third genos,” an impersonal spacing beyond paternal and maternal figures, though this abstraction remains tied to metaphysical neutrality. By contrast, the Daodejing presents the obscure femininity as a generative threshold where masculine and feminine function as shifting polarities rather than fixed oppositions, offering a dynamic model of generativity that destabilizes phallocentric mastery.

In the Indic scene, we find many cosmological images that reflect the overall Feminine Principle as an all-pervasive generative power that is at once full and empty. The Great Goddess contains the seed syllables of creation that spontaneously arise from the Void energy that a practitioner can experience in deep samadhi. This principle is imagined in female forms precisely because it is not a remote deity but is intimately entangled in the world, and it captures a paradox in which materiality and transcendence dance together. This paper will explore a couple of select Tantric texts to contend that such gynocentric cosmological articulations present a thealogy that is not about a fixed belief system but a continuous presenting of life’s magical manifestations that can be experienced within the body itself. 

Jaina birth narratives distinguish themselves among other Āyurvedic texts for their emphasis on reproduction as an impure, but necessary, process that especially implicates the “womb trio” of women, embryo-fetus, and nonhuman beings. Descriptions of pregnancy and birth found in the Jaina Tandula-veyāliya and Kalyāṇa-kāraka describe women’s reproductive capacity as generative, but also defiled. In this cosmological labor, women are not alone but joined through communal interactions with the embryo-fetus and nonhuman beings to co-create an immanent space of necessary life through food, bi-directional affects of the double-heart (dvai-hṛdaya), maternal emotions and cravings (dohada), as well as the transformation of consumed nonhuman living beings into the physical body of the fetus. Beyond a simple account of gender/species subordination, the mutual impurity and solidarity of the womb-trio invites fresh ethical reflections upon the metaphysical indebtedness to those who jointly the karmic cost for providing existential opportunities for other’s birth and advancement.   

Drawing on my embodied experience as a young woman survivor of clerical abuse, this paper critiques the limited embodied scope of victims of the clerical abuse crisis in the Catholic church as children, highlighting young adult women among the victims/survivors of clerical abuse. In this paper, I argue that the almost exclusive focus on abuse victims as children has prevented young women from seeing themselves in such dialogue, and that theologically reimagining the Eucharist can offer victims/survivors of clerical abuse a critical approach to a relationship with the Catholic tradition once more. In this sacrament, both trauma/abuse and healing/reconciliation are present, representing the need to denounce and critique unjust ecclesial structures and the need to find ecclesial space to open victims to God’s healing and reconciling love. This engagement is essential for the discourse to be expanded, for without this bodies will continue to be harmed and marginalized. 

This paper advances an intersectional feminist theological analysis of men’s ritual discourse in Malagasy communal life, examining patriarchy, postcolonial legacies, and culturally entrenched structures of silencing, including self-censorship and a culture of silence. Women’s absence in public speech is interpreted not as tradition, but as the outcome of interlocking systems that regulate authority, leadership, and communal decision-making, constraining spiritual, social, and political agency.

Drawing on intersectional feminist theory, the study situates male-dominated ritual speech in dialogue with the lived experiences of Malagasy women. Methodologically, it employs a qualitative and decolonizing approach, centering women’s voices as legitimate sites of knowledge and critical reflection.

By highlighting collective interpretation, leadership formation, and mutuality, the paper explores pathways through which women reclaim voice, agency, and authority, contributing to gender-just communal and spiritual futures, where women participate fully as agents of change and co-creators of shared decision-making.

Is diakonia a “women’s ministry”? And if so, how and when is that helpful, limiting, or problematic? This paper examines the historical and present relationships between gender and diakonia within Christian history and practice. As gender is constructed and shifting, so is Diakonia [diaconal ministry, deacons, deaconesses, and the diaconate]. It matters how and when we tell stories of women in ministry and in diakonia; the words we choose to justify, rationalize, describe, relate, and humanize such ministries. Practices of diakonia have been shaped by gender and likewise have shaped concepts of gender itself within Christian communities. Framed as gender-defined, gender-restrictive, gender-“blind”/-less, and gender-conscious, this paper identifies the historical gifts and limitations of coupling diakonia and gender. Understanding these can offer wisdom as we discern how to conceptualize and articulate the relationship between modern expressions of diakonia and gender in the 21st century, in North America and globally.

“The boke is not yet performed.” Fourteenth-century anchorite Julian of Norwich ends her Long Text with this admission. By the standards of modern academic religious discourse, this admission might be read as evidence for failure. And yet, Denys Turner’s 2011 reading of Julian takes up this admission as key to Julian’s theological systematicity, albeit a systematicity expanded to mean the alignment of form with content. In this paper, I read Julian’s Long Text alongside those of her modern readers, like Turner, whose refusal to mine this text for its argument serves as a crucial example of the stakes of reading for what a text does, or performs, as it unfolds before its reader. I argue for renewed readerly attention to textual form as a constitutive of the text and trace a lineage of women's theological writing that uses  form as an intervention into normative conceptions of knowledge as argument. 

This presentation takes a new materialist approach to exploring the particularities of matter that entwine around the task of online theological education across regional contexts. Crucially, it appropriates Tara Page's new materialist pedagogy of placemaking for digitally networked theological education–in dialogue with writings on theological formation by Charles Foster, Willie James Jennings, and Katherine Turpin, Etienne Wenger's social theory of learning in practice, and indigenous insights on Land-based pedagogy from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robin Wall Kimmerer. It argues for the construction of curriculum with the differential practical mattering of learners in the online environment as its starting place, inviting students to pay increasing attention to their peculiarities of place and practices of placemaking.

This paper makes two main interventions. First, I will elaborate a new method for theological reflection rooted in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Marxist geography: what I am calling queer abolition geography. Second, to demonstrate the affordances of this geographical method of theological reflection, I will present a case study from my work as a spiritual care provider at a community hospital in San Francisco: hospital chaplaincy as queer abolition geography. 

This query begins with Vine Deloria Jr.’s text, For This Land, delineating an indigenous sense of “belonging-to-the-land” quite different from colonial approaches presuming ownership and mere aesthetic appreciation.  This difference involves not only generations of reflection provoked by a given topography of dwelling, carried forward in myth and ritual, but also sudden moments of “revelation” when a piece of the land by means of uncanny dread, communicates itself off-limits to humans, reserved-to-itself.  Tracing such an earth-respecting “haunting” of landscape in relation to various cultures’ notions of “hungry ghosts” of community members untimely dispatched, re-visiting the living with disruption, Zimbabwean understanding of even clear-cut trees as capable of such ghosting, we will focus on Irish experiences of “hungry grass” arising from the 19th century Potato Famine and Oweynagat Cave’s 4,000-year-old Samhain tradition of ghostly “Halloween” appearances, alongside consideration of Jesus’ Mt. Hermon (verboten) encounter with haunting ancestry (Mark 9).

In the early 2000s, a number of Christian women participated in the tradition of Christian life writing through a newly accessible technology. Christian women bloggers, like Glennon Doyle, Ann Voskamp, Jackie Hill Perry, and Melanie Shankle have been insufficiently considered by scholars and their own communities as Christian thought leaders. Drawn from my dissertation project examining twenty-first century women bloggers-turned-authors as theorists of the self, this paper interrogates these women’s shared investment in the craft of writing. Together, they imagine writing not as a practice of formation but as a practice of attention. They understand writing to be a technology of the self, but given their belief in a true, unchanging self, writing can only reveal, not transform. Drawing from other theorists of writing and my memoirists own reflection, I argue that writing is transformative and formative. Nevertheless, to acknowledge this would require my memoirists to accept a dynamic self.