In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

In the 1970s, faculty in the Art Department at Wheaton College (IL) engaged in a decade-long debate over the appropriateness of displaying artwork that featured the nude body in public campus exhibitions. Two studio art professors, Alva Steffler and Miriam Hunter, drove the discussion. Steffler felt Christians should embrace Biblical eroticism and explored this theme through his own abstract sculptures. Hunter, morally conservative and fearful of secularism’s threats to Christendom’s future, “literalized” artworks with nudity by denying multi-valent meaning and insisting on purely anatomical interpretations. I argue that this debate, which extended beyond the art department and engaged the broader campus community, reveals a fundamental tension between the nature of American evangelicalism and the visual arts: evangelicals crave certainty, but visual art inherently resists definitive meaning.  

This work of this paper is to examine how Evangelical media visualizes the landscape of heaven and what these depictions reveal about theological and cultural aspirations. In doing so, it argues that Evangelical depictions of the heavenly topographies consistently present deeply anthropocentric theologies in which heavenly land remains ordered under human-oriented dominion. The paper turns to three primary examples, a Trinity Broadcast Network “Praise the Lord!” soundstage, the film Heaven Is for Real, and the film The Shack. The study analyzes how lawns, parks, and wilderness are imagined in each of these digital "heavenscapes." These landscapes encode distinct ideals: prosperity and privatized wealth, child-centered safety and family values, and controlled pastoral freedom. Together, they reveal an anthropocentric Evangelical dominionist theology, one which impacts more than the beyond, but touches the here, now, and immediate future.

The evangelistic drama Heaven’s Gates & Hell’s Flames (HGHF) promises audiences a glimpse of “what happens one second after you take your last breath.” I argue that HGHF capitalizes on audiences’ simultaneous fears and hopes for their afterlife future by cultivating affective experiences to instill a distinct soteriological message and teach appropriate moral behavior. Originating as a camp ministry in the late 1970s and now performed globally through Reality Outreach Ministries, HGHF dramatizes scenes of sudden death and final judgment in which characters are welcomed into heaven or dragged into hell. By rapidly switching between the two extreme affective registers of hope and fear, HGHF allows audiences to vicariously experience both their anticipation and anxiety for the afterlife. Drawing on my ethnographic research at rehearsals, prayer meetings, and performances, I show how these imagined futures are embodied and repeatedly reenacted, shaping evangelical understandings of salvation, morality, and behavior in everyday life.

A reading of biblical passages like Rev 7:9-17 as a checklist of what must happen to bring about the apocalypse is an ethical hermeneutic that some scholars call consequentialism—the ends justify the means, in this case, the means of using AI to reach "the nations." AI alignment with human good is systemically, developmentally, and theoretically problematic and yet AI proves incredibly influential in an age in which information flow is power. There is no good news of Christian witness when our ethic is simply to reach as many people as possible with information despite the harm of our methods. Such consequentialism aligns evangelical Christians with a culture of power and the politics of Babylon. Creative imaginings of better alignment for evangelical readers may by sustained by post-conservative theological interpretations of apocalyptic scripture.

This paper interrogates the moral meanings of enduring historical crises for agents caught in their wake. It begins with Christina Sharpe’s insight that the evil of chattel slavery adheres recalcitrantly to contemporary agents; it continues to affect us and risks depleting our moral capacities. I consider three alternative conceptions of this affective grip of purportedly irreparable evils (Bordieuan habitus, Deleuzian affect, and neo-phenomenological atmospheres) before outlining a constructive account of atmospheric adhesion. This reveals the paradoxical predicament of creatures seized by an infinite demand to repair evils that exceed our capacities to respond adequately. But it also indicates the more primordial, pathic dimension to agency that Bernhard Waldenfels’s “responsive ethics” attempts to articulate. I argue that recent theological formulations of this lived-bodily pathos present a picture of moral agency that remains intact with even a clear-eyed view of the gratuitous threats of agential depletion posed by irreparable evils.

This paper will explore the concept of “good boundaries,” particularly as they relate to ethical responses to the ongoing homelessness crisis in the United States. This paper will consider how blanket understandings of good boundaries as virtuous can shape interactions between housed and unhoused people in unhelpful ways that ignore the complexity of people’s circumstances and further perpetuate economic segregation. Drawing from sources in Christian ethics as well as ongoing ethnographic research in a Christian church that prioritizes fostering community inclusive of its unhoused neighbors, this paper will explore how relationships across class differences nurture our ability to imagine more mutually beneficial ways of living well together. This paper will consider the limits and possibilities in a particular community’s practices of relationally discerned and ever-evolving boundaries, offering insight with broader implications for how ethical discernment within communities can help us to envision our collective well-being in the face of crises.

This paper turns to Thomas Aquinas’s moral anthropology and theory of emotion to explore the felt lack of agency associated with feelings of despair. I argue that a distinction between a felt lack of moral agency and a diminished agency to put one’s moral values into action enables us to consider how quotidian activities, such as reading or watching news media, might cause two different yet related forms of moral injury. I begin by developing a working definition of moral injury with reference Joseph Wiinikka-Lyndon’s (2021) Murdochian account. I then use the ethical theory of Thomas Aquinas to offer a distinction between moral feeling and moral agency. I contend that this distinction aligns with forms of moral injury which I refer to as “moral injury-as-feeling” and “moral injury-as-diminished agency.” This distinction draws attention to the importance of daily practices to prevent feelings of despair from developing into habits of despair. 

Ecological crises now displace growing numbers of individuals and communities. Many seek refuge in societies that greet them with ambivalence or hostility. Public discourse frequently minimizes their suffering. This paper examines how constant crisis overwhelms individual and institutional moral capacity, producing a widespread sense of diminished agency among both displaced populations and those who encounter them. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s concept of “matter out of place,” I show how dominant narratives render displaced suffering morally illegible, deepening the trauma of exclusion. I analyze mutual aid food-sharing initiatives as counter-rituals that respond to exhaustion by creating spaces for collective action. These gatherings reject bureaucratic state aid and cultivate a horizontal ethos of kinship. By transforming public spaces into temporary commons, shared meals restore the capacity to respond through tangible forms of solidarity in the present.

In the Hebrew Bible, depictions of famine, flood, and the destruction of civilizations are haunted by the presence of ravens. As Jewish and Christian interpreters read these texts, they found the birds who showed up at these sites of death “good to think with.” They considered ravens as they contemplated the pressures of food scarcity in the story of Elijah or the deaths that follow rising waters in the story of Noah. These ravens were neither simple victims nor passive witnesses to these catastrophic events; instead, like the human characters in these stories, they often played active roles in the devastation. This paper examines places in the history of biblical interpretation in which readers thought with ravens as they read these scenes of ecological destruction or precarity, sometimes seeing ravens as a threat to their own survival and other times as a mirror to the devastating impacts of their own hungers and predations.

Are the sources of modern Jewish thought capable of theorizing a planetary politics? This paper suggests a non-anthropocentric Jewish ecotheology by conceptualizing sacrifice as interspecies transformation. An interpretive tradition developed by medieval and modern Jewish thinkers understands biblical sacrifice as a sacrament symbolizing apotheosis. Unexpectedly, human union with the Divine opens up interspecies possibility. Thinking beyond the human becomes possible because apotheosis is contingent upon the human offerant’s identification with the sacrificial animal. What is the nature of this “identification”? In what ways are human and more-than-human life bound together by their shared materiality? And what is the fate of this materiality? This paper populates an interspecies sacrificial imagination that reworks human-critter relations to reimagine the nature of perfection.  

Behind every horror of genocide, war, or other similar acts of shocking violence are the mental and social frameworks that justify such actions. Among the most potent of these justifications is the language and logic of dehumanization. This paper incorporates social psychological research over the last decade which has demonstrated strong links between perceived Human-Animal division and dehumanizing beliefs towards human out-groups. Critically, this research finds that education about animal-human similarities reduces belief in a strong Human-Animal divide, while also providing the knock-on effect of reducing out-group dehumanization. These insights introduce a key litmus test for theologians: to what degree does the theology under question reinforce rigid (and hierarchical) categorizations between human and animal? This paper concludes by applying this test to common interpretations of the imago Dei, suggesting that even well-intentioned anthropocentric definitions may mistakenly cause harm to all animals, including Homo sapiens.

The politics of our moment lurch toward future(s) of climate disruption, mass extinction, global warfare, and social collapse with louder and louder denunciations, proclamations, and aggrandizements—nihilistic forms of nostalgia. If we recognize, building on Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, that the apocalyptic roar of “anthropos” rushing headlong toward collapse has long been a voice that relies on un-earthing and burying of “unhuman” others (in both a racialized and speciated sense), perhaps the time has come to imagine a posthuman offramp that places trust in meaningful silences.

In contemporary Bangkok, flowers are instrumental to religious life. Buddhists daily offer fresh garlands to temples to accrue merit and to ask deities for blessings. But over the past fifty years, the craftspeople who make these garlands have been forcibly removed from the city, deemed an aesthetic “blight” to the modern landscape. What is the future of these workers in a city that at once needs them and discards them? I answer this question by analyzing an eight-tiered fresh flower chandelier created by my interlocutor, a queer flower artist, which premiered at Singapore’s international art fair in 2025. Lowering the chandelier to the ground, the garlands on the bottom broke to provide a soft bed for more expensive garlands; lower-class workers are breaking under the weight of class inequality. The future is not hopeless. Through developing expansive and intimate relationships with flowers, Bangkokians can cultivate stronger floral and human solidarities.

This paper examines how Hikaru Okuizumi’s novella The Night to Kill a Snake (1992) destabilizes religiously mediated futures—often sustained by cohesive narrative structures—by proliferating religious imagery to the point where narrativity itself collapses. Through free association, the text disperses snake metaphors drawn from Shinto myth, Genesis, Greek legend, and Japanese imperial symbolism without allowing them to converge into symbolic resolution. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s account of modern literature as repetitive language without securing memory, this paper argues that the novella’s proliferating religious imagery exposes the fragility underlying both religious futurity and interpretive desire. As images multiply, the protagonist’s imagined future unravels, and the reader’s interpretive expectations are similarly frustrated. Literary art here neither redeems nor resolves; instead, it reveals futurity as radically open, suspended within the unsettling repetition of religious language itself.

This paper studies visions of the future, apocalyptic imagination and discourses on climate change in Hindu theistic traditions as revealed in the Vaishnava Puranas (4-18 c.CE). Hindu imagination sees time as cyclic, and not linear, and understands the cyclic creation and dissolution of the universe as a repetitive and normal process that is good, desired and necessary. In the Vaishnava tradition, Vishnu and his avataras, or bodily descents, in which he incarnates in various anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic forms, comes down to earth in order to save humankind from natural calamities and disasters, such as floods, draughts, etc. Similarly, the proliferation of contemporary discourses on the future, climate change, are often immersed in Hindu mythology and religious culture, and cannot be ignored when discussing the issues of apocalyptic imagination and climate change in Hindu traditions. Thus, my talk seeks to explore the complex links between visions of the future, apocalyptic imagination, the mythologizing of the divine, and the mythologizing of contemporary cultural and religious discourses on climate change. 

Tea is historically entangled with Chinese Buddhism, as networks of monasteries in medieval China were predominantly growers and distributors of tea. Beyond production, Buddhist communities over the years were responsible for the ritualization of tea, contributing to a thriving culture of tea in East Asia. In contemporary Taiwan, Buddhist communities are involved in the production, circulation, ritualization, and consumption of tea. Tea is harnessed for modern forms of practice, community building, and the financial sustainability of Buddhist groups. Approaches to the place of tea and its relationship with Buddhist identities and cultivation vary in ethical, philosophical, and practical aspects. This paper examines the place of tea within the context of environmental approaches to its production, consumption, and incorporation in modern rituals. The study is based on ethnographic data, examining large-scale Buddhist monasteries and smaller-scale Buddhist grassroots communities, from the perspectives of practical, material, and social effects on Buddhist life worlds.

Looking at a case study in Sagaing, Myanmar, a main monastic hub, this paper explores how gendered structures of merit and monastic discipline often place Myanmar Buddhist nuns (thilashin) at a disadvantage when receiving food. At the same time, the ability to “make their own rules” and flexibility in practice may strategically help them in navigating these material constraints. Culinary knowledge formed in the villages together with thilashin food practices not only help in the formation of these female renunciants but also cement reciprocal relationships and responsibilities between monks and nuns as well as between monastics and the laity. These practices are essential for maintaining the sāsana, which are often dismissed as being insignificant as domestic duties.

At Cherry Blossom Zen Monastery, Vietnamese American families gather every Sunday to perform funeral rites for their dead. There, resident nuns help them navigate the perilous crossings that connect life and death. Together they chant sutras, light incense, and, most importantly, offer food to help the consciousness of the deceased move from their previous existence on to the next. Mahayana Vietnamese Buddhism teaches that, when a person passes away, their consciousness wanders for forty-nine days before being reincarnated into a new body. In this period of liminal existence, the deceased, distressed, confused, and sometimes angry, needs guidance. Living family members, also afflicted by the broad spectrum of emotions and potentially unwholesome states that accompany grief, need attention too. In this paper, I present ethnographic data to show that food serves crucial functions in enabling and conditioning the crossings that shape the experience of death at Cherry Blossom temple.

When nourishment turns to rot, what happens to Buddhist offerings to the dead? By focusing on nōkotsudō, indoor ossuary facilities that house cremated remains, this paper examines food offerings in contemporary Japanese Buddhist deathcare practice. In this context, food waste emerges not simply a matter of excess or neglect but a distinctly Buddhist problem of care. Offerings are embedded in logics of abundance in which nourishment sustains ongoing relations between living and dead. Yet these practices unfold within temple ritual economies that must manage perishable goods within institutional infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic research in rural Japan, I show that waste emerges when multiple temporal regimes embedded in Buddhist deathcare practice, such as ritual cycles, microbial decay, bureaucratic regulation, and disaster preparedness, fall out of alignment. I describe this friction as temporal dissonance, revealing how temples become sites where abundance, decay, and ancestral care must be continually negotiated.

Tea is historically entangled with Chinese Buddhism, as networks of monasteries in medieval China were predominantly growers and distributors of tea. Beyond production, Buddhist communities over the years were responsible for the ritualization of tea, contributing to a thriving culture of tea in East Asia. In contemporary Taiwan, Buddhist communities are involved in the production, circulation, ritualization, and consumption of tea. Tea is harnessed for modern forms of practice, community building, and the financial sustainability of Buddhist groups. Approaches to the place of tea and its relationship with Buddhist identities and cultivation vary in ethical, philosophical, and practical aspects. This paper examines the place of tea within the context of environmental approaches to its production, consumption, and incorporation in modern rituals. The study is based on ethnographic data, examining large-scale Buddhist monasteries and smaller-scale Buddhist grassroots communities, from the perspectives of practical, material, and social effects on Buddhist life worlds.

Looking at a case study in Sagaing, Myanmar, a main monastic hub, this paper explores how gendered structures of merit and monastic discipline often place Myanmar Buddhist nuns (thilashin) at a disadvantage when receiving food. At the same time, the ability to “make their own rules” and flexibility in practice may strategically help them in navigating these material constraints. Culinary knowledge formed in the villages together with thilashin food practices not only help in the formation of these female renunciants but also cement reciprocal relationships and responsibilities between monks and nuns as well as between monastics and the laity. These practices are essential for maintaining the sāsana, which are often dismissed as being insignificant as domestic duties.

At Cherry Blossom Zen Monastery, Vietnamese American families gather every Sunday to perform funeral rites for their dead. There, resident nuns help them navigate the perilous crossings that connect life and death. Together they chant sutras, light incense, and, most importantly, offer food to help the consciousness of the deceased move from their previous existence on to the next. Mahayana Vietnamese Buddhism teaches that, when a person passes away, their consciousness wanders for forty-nine days before being reincarnated into a new body. In this period of liminal existence, the deceased, distressed, confused, and sometimes angry, needs guidance. Living family members, also afflicted by the broad spectrum of emotions and potentially unwholesome states that accompany grief, need attention too. In this paper, I present ethnographic data to show that food serves crucial functions in enabling and conditioning the crossings that shape the experience of death at Cherry Blossom temple.

When nourishment turns to rot, what happens to Buddhist offerings to the dead? By focusing on nōkotsudō, indoor ossuary facilities that house cremated remains, this paper examines food offerings in contemporary Japanese Buddhist deathcare practice. In this context, food waste emerges not simply a matter of excess or neglect but a distinctly Buddhist problem of care. Offerings are embedded in logics of abundance in which nourishment sustains ongoing relations between living and dead. Yet these practices unfold within temple ritual economies that must manage perishable goods within institutional infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic research in rural Japan, I show that waste emerges when multiple temporal regimes embedded in Buddhist deathcare practice, such as ritual cycles, microbial decay, bureaucratic regulation, and disaster preparedness, fall out of alignment. I describe this friction as temporal dissonance, revealing how temples become sites where abundance, decay, and ancestral care must be continually negotiated.