In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Star Trek has shaped modern fandom in numerous ways that have had profound impacts on popular culture. I argue that fandom in general is best understood as a type of spirituality, a type of communal experience that provides key tools to the project of life integration. The Star Trek fandom in particular demonstrates this as the optimistic vision of Star Trek provides the necessary conditions for a fandom to thrive in the first place. This inclusive and diverse vision has shaped modern fandom as a whole, enabling it to be places of intense community and shared imagination. This is spirituality precisely because fandom is so central to the lives of millions, and Star Trek has influenced this like few other franchises.

Speculative fiction has often been a place where questions of morality, theodicy, and ethics are wrestled with. While Star Trek has often portrayed a post-Christian (and perhaps even post-religion) universe, several of its characters, particularly its captains, have played the role of chaplain or spiritual director, guide, and mentor. Star Trek’s Discovery and Strange New Worlds have given us the opportunity to see Christianity remixed. Captain Christopher Pike, whose father taught both science and comparative religions, provides a glimpse into the tension between science and faith. Although not explicitly a priest or minister, Pike fulfills that role to his crew (and to some of his fans), to the point that one fanfic author reinterprets him as a Jesuit priest from the Vatican Science Observatory. This paper explore how Star Trek captains, particularly the most recent incarnation of Christopher Pike, provides fandom with ethical guides and fictional spiritual directors.

This paper argues that the Trill are more than a science-fiction metaphor for transness; they offer a theological framework for Jewish reflection on embodiment, memory, and communal responsibility. In Star Trek, a joined Trill is a composite self in which host and symbiont become interdependent, carry memories of previous lives, and ritually bring past selves into the present. Read this way, the Trill function as a contemporary midrash, opening Jewish questions about identity, continuity, and transformation. Drawing on queer and trans Jewish scholarship, this paper explores how halakha can be read through the Trill. The roles of host and symbiont, along with Trill social and religious norms, challenge assumptions that personhood is singular, stable, and biologically fixed. The Trill help articulate a Jewish queer/trans theology in which covenant is grounded in relational continuity, sacred becoming, and belonging, so that transition may be understood as tamim tihyeh, becoming whole with the Divine.

This paper examines parallels between early American critiques of the printing press with contemporary critiques and problems with particular uses of AI. By the eighteenth-century, members of Native American communities, the Jewish diaspora, and German migrant groups were becoming wary of the ways the Anglo-American Protestants treated the technology and its productions as producing speech that would be treated as timeless, permanent, and having universal scope. At the heart of their concerns, however, was the way the technology was promoted by booksellers, printers, missionaries, etc... to do exactly that, but in a manner that only really benefitted Anglo-American Protestants. This paper compares these critiques to some AI use-cases in contemporary discourse, and the ways that eighteenth-century critiques of print technology very much parallel our own concerns about the rampant marketing of the technology and the goals of those most invested in its proliferation across all parts of society.

Internet-based communication technologies are changing the role of religious and scientific discourse in the world today. Scholars have noted that a “post truth” environment is insufficient to explain how the internet is leading to the rise of awaking movements like QAnon and other form of conspirituality that, though scientifically falsifiable, can sustain their systems of meaning against valid critique because of communication on the internet. The “New Clarity” has been proposed as an alternative conceptual schema for describing how the internet allows for the forming of communities online that explain away criticisms in a real-time, cybernetic feedback loop of crowdsourced identity formation in epistemic silos. Using systems theory to inform a philosophy of science and religion, this paper will show how both science and religion develop in relation to communication complexity to resolve forms of uncertainty in physical, social, and virtual environments according to different modes of explanation. 

This paper discusses the role of religious narratives and metaphors in structuring debates at the intersection of technology and ecology by relating opposed positions on artificial intelligence’s role in the climate crisis to contrasting frames of technical mastery of the world within the nascent environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the works of the architect and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, Jr, and the historian Lynn White, Jr, the paper draws attention to a structural parallels between contemporary and historical imaginaries of the techno-ecological future. On the one hand, utopian narratives provide comprehensive environmental solutions by constructing a transcendent technological “god’s-eye” view that allows for global ecological interventions. On the other hand, critical narratives situate human agency within abstract ideal frameworks and underscore the necessity of profound epistemic and ethical shifts to avoid ecological and social catastrophe.

When scholars of religion ask how the science/religion dynamic changes as technology changes, they typically look toward AI, virtual reality, and the metaverse. This paper argues that the future they are trying to theorize is not coming but has already arrived, and it arrived first in Black digital religious communities. Drawing on original qualitative research on two online Black faith communities, this paper proposes two new categories—the Digital Hybrid Black Church (DHBC) and the Virtual Networked Black Church (VNBC)—as emergent religious space formations that challenge longstanding assumptions about what constitutes a liberating religious community, a sacred healing space, and the institutional church. Together, these concepts reframe the science/religion question not as a question about what technology will do to religion in the future, but as a question about how Black communities operating at the margins of both religious and technological power are already doing with technology now.

Biological reproduction is central to white evangelical futurity. This paper analyzes the enfleshed labor of childbirth as core to the ends of the evangelical far-right, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. I argue that the birthing body functions as the site that upholds white evangelical visions of salvation in a way that frames the act of childbearing as a form of redemptive suffering toward the end of furthering Christian theopolitical power. I contend that this soteriology of reproduction is furthered by the figure of the child being constructed as the subject that ultimately enacts redemption by securing the future of white evangelicalism. I conclude by turning toward an abortive ethic as a potential resource for disrupting the interlocking of reproductive labor with the expansion of Christian hegemony. 

Debates about the future of the family often focus on whether the traditional biological family should be defended, reformed, or abolished. Yet the vital role of “chosen family” in queer communities suggests that a more pressing question is how intergenerational relationships are sustained without biological kinship at all. This paper revisits the virtue of filial piety as a framework for addressing that question. Drawing on Confucian virtue ethics, queer studies, and Christian reflection on adoption, I argue that filial piety can be configured as an ethical orientation toward predecessors and elders within communities of shared life. On this account, filial piety names not obedience to biological parents but a cluster of dispositions: gratitude for formative care, fidelity to communities of survival, attention to communal memory, and responsibility for elders. Read in this way, queer kinship practices illuminate how filial piety might guide new forms of family beyond biological descent.

The purity movement, a phenomenon of the late twentieth century which heightened Christian norms restricting most forms of sexual desire, has influenced family structures within and beyond the Evangelical culture from which it sprang. Narrative accounts from people raised in the purity movement have publicly critiqued its claims, pointing to negative psychological, social, and biological health outcomes. These accounts make the case against purity on utilitarian grounds; separation of unwed mothers from their children, unsatisfactory sexual relationships within marriage, and physical pain are evidence against the validity of the purity framework. While these impacts are important and worthy of moral consideration, this paper argues that a utilitarian approach is insufficient to counter a theo-ethical framework that prioritizes conformity with God’s design over this-worldly flourishing. Persuasive critique of the purity movement will need to employ theological language, such as idolatry.

This essay considers Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism (2020) as an autotheoretical performance of apophatic faith in a futurity beyond “the end of the World.” While Afropessimism is often implicitly or explicitly conflated with (Black) nihilism as a quietist form of resignation, I argue that its “refusal of prescription” should be read as an apophatic catalyst for tarrying with problems that do not have “solutions.” Echoing Frantz Fanon’s recitation of Aimé Césaire, Afropessimism rhetorically poses the question of where one should “begin” and responds with “the end of the World, of course.” Here, I argue that “beginning” and “ending” contract in(to) the messianic time of the Now, yielding an orientation to the afterlife of slavery and an accompanying eschatology—sans teleology—of interminable abolition. This abolitionist drive concerns not (simply) any given institution or apparatus within the World but rather the Black(est) desire for gratuitous freedom from the Human and the World as such.

This paper employs analytical lenses from theater studies to evaluate the activities of new religions that use ostensibly secular theatrical performance to convey religious messages about the path to a better future. I focus on two examples, one historical and the other current: Moral Re-Armament (MRA), and Shen Yun. Both groups have attempted to use theater as a religious ritual that inspires spiritual awakening among theater-goers, though the specifics of their intended outcomes differ. To explore the tension between what a religious group intends and what they might actually be able to achieve, I juxtapose theater studies scholarship about performance activism and theaters of social change that can be applied to these examples in productive ways.

From tropes and stereotypes that originated during slavery, such as the mammy and jezebel, to policies and legislation that threaten our reproductive choices today, Black women have faced efforts to control their bodies and sexualities. Amid these efforts, dance becomes a sacred space of healing, freedom, and resistance for Black Christian women. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research and Black feminist and womanist scholarship to imagine Black Christian futures through dance that take us beyond the Black Church. I begin with liturgical dance as practiced in Black churches then move to pole dance as practiced at pole dance and fitness studios. In attending to generational differences in Black women who participate in liturgical dance and pole dance, I invite further reflection on how future generations can encounter the Spirit, find the divine within, and cultivate networks of care and support outside of traditional religious spaces and institutions.

This paper is an intellectual history of the self-published journals of the avant-garde jazz musician and spiritual guru Alice Coltrane, also known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda. In these meditations, she received messages from realms beyond (turīya) and displayed them in sound and word. The journals also reveal an autodidact capable in Sanskrit and Hindi and an informed reader engaging with specific religious texts. In this talk, I am interested in Coltrane as Turiyasangitananda – that is, as a self-ordained monastic leader and an independent artist, thinking creatively at the nexus of metaphysical religion, modern Indian spirituality, and the Black radical tradition. Through a close reading of her book Divine Revelations (1995) and other ephemera from her Sai Anantam Ashram, I provide detail into the South Asian forms of knowledge that Turiyasangitananda molded into her “freedom dreams.”

As a South Asianist by training teaching in an African American & African Diaspora Studies Program, my daily task is to advance interdisciplinary conversations in Black Studies and South Asian Studies. I center my research methodologies on the African Diaspora in South Asia within the ideological frameworks animating the field of Black Studies. This presentation highlights the key questions, theoretical framework, methods, archives, and findings of ethnographic field research on the Sidi (African-Indian) Sufi devotional tradition, conducted in the state of Gujarat and the city of Mumbai in western India from 2017-2019. The presentation demonstrates the importance of multilinguistic, multi-sited, and collaborative, multidisciplinary research on the African Diaspora in South Asia (and in Indian Ocean worlds more broadly) to the tandem development of the fields of Black Studies and South Asian Studies.

The year 1838 signifies double histories in the Caribbean—the emancipation of enslaved Black workers and the arrival of the first group of South Asian indentured laborers. After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, South Asians were shipped to plantations across the Caribbean as indentured workers. They labored alongside emancipated Afro-Caribbean workers in segregated canefields. In this paper, I analyze the entangled histories of emancipation, indenture, and religion from the Caribbean plantation archives. First, I examine how the category “religion” was used to compare and categorize Black and South Asian workers. Then, I turn my attention to fugitives—workers who ran away from the plantations. Fugitive archives, I argue, persist as shadow records of the plantation. They forge errant routes, detours, and new directions for Black and South Asian Studies. Afro- and Indo-Caribbean religions underwent fugitive metamorphoses on the paths scribbled along the margins of the plantation archives.

By means of two case studies, Charles Bartholomew and Jovedah de Rajah, one from the Caribbean and one from the US, this paper will examine the ways in which peoples of African descent in the Americas have mobilized Hindu identifications and Hindu identified rituals, in these cases spiritism and hypnotism, to construct diaspora-like cultures or virtual diasporas, cultures sometimes practiced jointly with peoples of South Asian descent. Thinking beyond African American appropriations South Asian identities, these are examples of what I will call Hindu diasporicate cultures—which use constructions of others’ homelands to make a home in the here/now. Thinking with Tina Chen’s ideas on imposture and impersonation regarding Asian American negotiations of racial regimes in the Americas, I will argue that we eschew binaries of real/fake or authentic/inauthentic to understand the ways in which African Americans’ mobilizing of Hindu identifications engaged in a politics of the imposture of religion.

This theoretical paper explores AI-guided spiritual practice as a site where Black theological time and Black interiority are reimagined as a galactic terrain. Drawing on Black theology, womanist thought, and Black studies, it argues that an AI spiritual practices app does more than “optimize” reflection; it becomes a starship interface through which Black subjects navigate inner space as cosmic space. Against histories that have confined, surveilled, and extracted Black time, the paper frames Black interior life as a boundless, unmasterable cosmos—replete with dark matter, wormholes, and fugitive constellations of memory, grief, and joy. Algorithmic personalization, pattern recognition, and conversational guidance are read ambivalently: as attempts to chart and domesticate this interior galaxy, and as tools that can be hacked to map new routes of escape, communion, and rest. Ultimately, the paper asks how Black theological visions of liberation might engage AI to honor Black interiority as irreducibly divine.

Capitalist time logics emergent in “run-of-show” worship formats deform congregants away from God's unrestrained inhabitation. The praise break, conversely, as a dynamic sonic grammar operating through plural temporalities, breaks these time logics. Drawing on Moten's account of Black aesthetic practice's capacity to exceed dominant epistemologies, the paper argues that the run-of-show format operates within the logic of re-lease while the praise break enacts release. Re-reading the telos of Paul’s theology of worship in 1st Corinthians as love against ‘decency and order’, this paper suggests that the praise break re-instantiates the creative conditions of genesis in a world that forecloses Black bodies into capitalist time. From the ring shout to the praise house, the praise break emerges from communities enduring together, maintaining fidelity to a God who has maintained fidelity to them across antiblack time. Here the community clears and God quickens – in the break, in the black, in the beginning.

Priests before the Divine Assembly: Zechariah 3 and Ancient Near Eastern Traditions

The vision of Joshua the high priest in Zechariah 3 presents a striking scene in which the priest stands before a heavenly assembly, accusations are raised, impurity is removed, and priestly authority is restored. While this passage is often interpreted primarily within the historical context of the postexilic restoration of the Jerusalem temple, its imagery also resonates with broader patterns found in Ancient Near Eastern religious literature. This paper examines how traditions of divine assembly deliberation, heavenly adjudication, and ritual purification help illuminate the symbolic setting of the vision. In this light, Zechariah 3 portrays the restoration of the Jerusalem high priesthood as an event affirmed in the divine realm, linking earthly priestly authority with heavenly authorization.

182 years after the founding of the Bahá’í Faith, Bahá’í communities in some countries are ceasing to be imperceptible minorities and becoming numerically significant segments of their populations. As they grow, practices of collective worship are changing, in part through the emergence of local houses of worship. This paper places the decisions Bahá’í communities are now making regarding collective worship in the context of scholarship on the transition from house meetings to a formal liturgy in second century Christianity and the formalization of collective prayer with the spread of Islam. 

This paper explores the eschatological significance of Black identity by construing Blackness as fugitive performance. It aims to establish the Black body as a site and symbol of Christian hope without abstracting or distancing it from the experiences of subjection that shape its historical reality. Accordingly, it considers the ambivalence and multidimensionality of Blackness as a choreography of freedom within captivity, a lived performance in which the shape of Black life is seen to simultaneously reflect, resist, and transcend the constraints and definitions imposed upon it by antiblack violence. Through a theo-choreographic interpretation of Harriet Jacobs’ garret experience, it proposes that Black bodies are constituted in, as, and through fugitive performance and identifies this performance as the instantiation of Black hope. Such hope anticipates the redemption, transformation, and glorification of Blackness and gestures toward a notion of eschatological identity that suffuses and transcends the limitations of oppressed existence.

In this paper I argue that progressivist and realist Augustinians mischaracterize Augustine’s theology of hope in ways that diminish its significance for contemporary Christianity. Progressivist Augustinians attribute Christian hope’s realization to God’s empowerment of creation’s historical advance, compromising its credibility amidst profound environmental and technological pessimism. Realist Augustinians avoid this vulnerability by ascribing Christian hope’s realization to God’s supra-historical consummation of creation, yet they construe this hope primarily as consolation for inevitable moral failure and so strip the Christian life of its teleology. Augustine, however, presents hope as structured by two anticipations: God’s unilateral consummation of creation and humanity’s participation in that consummation. Moreover, since such participation is constituted by love, this second anticipation orders hope to love. Augustine’s account thereby restores a teleological relationship among the theological virtues that sustains hope amid historical pessimism with the realists while summoning people to do what good they can with the progressivists.