In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper argues that Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane trouble dominant narratives of Black religion, music, sexuality, and Afro‑futurism by centering a Black, womanist‑inflected spiritual imagination that exceeds church and nation. Positioned at the intersection of Afro‑futurism and spiritual jazz, it shows how their sonic and "fashion‑forward" experiments recast Black sacred sound as a laboratory for Black futures in the mid‑ to late‑twentieth century. Drawing on historical and interdisciplinary archival methods—including recordings, liner notes, film, interviews, Arkestra ephemera, and materials from Coltrane’s ashram—alongside Black religious thought, womanist theology, and Afrofuturism studies, the paper traces how experimental music, Black religious curiosity, and transnational spiritual currents reshape U.S. Black religious formations from the 1950s to the 1980s. Interpreting Sun Ra’s cosmology and Alice Coltrane’s devotional jazz and sanctified harmonies, it proposes a multimedia presentation that demonstrates sound, image, and performance as a theological method and highlights Black women’s spiritual labor and queer‑adjacent aesthetics.

This paper explores the religious biography and musical career of acclaimed R&B singer and sex symbol Teddy Pendergrass as a means for articulating how the entanglement of black musical and religious performances gives shape to a mutual pursuit of feeling, affect, intimacy, and ecstasy. By way of his 1978 “For Women Only” concert series, I argue that Pendergrass enacts a contemporary reiteration of the black religious choreography indexed by W.E.B. Du Bois’ paradigmatic framing of the preacher, the music, and the frenzy. Through the synthesis of the spiritual and performative pedagogies of black Pentecostal experience and the sonic orchestration shaped by Philadelphia International Records, Pendergrass generates a material and ritual encounter that is at once sexual and spiritual. In this way, his performative repertoire can be interpreted as a vital repository and archive for the intersecting genealogies of black religious and musical invention. 

When Prince converted to the Jehovah's Witnesses in 2001 and released The Rainbow Children, he did not retreat from the radical erotic vision that defined his earlier career — he deepened it. I argue that The Rainbow Children is a sustained act of spiritual self-authorship in which religious devotion and sexual possibility are not in tension but are mutually constitutive. Drawing on J. Kameron Carter's theorization of the archē of colonial modernity, Ashon T. Crawley's concepts of the choreosonic and enfleshment, and Jayna Brown's framework of Black speculative vision, I center the track "Mellow" to demonstrate how Prince's erotic lyricism and sonic practice perform what I call a "religioerotics of the crossroads": a mode of Black sacred life that refuses the separation of the carnal from the holy, centers Black feminine pleasure as spiritual ground, and reaches toward an Afro-futurist elsewhere beyond the terms of the present world. Prince's conversion was not the end of his radicalism. It was its most profound expression.

"Please Don't Stop The Music" analyzes the rise and eventual ostracism of Anthony Charles Williams II, also known as Tonex, who disrupted heteronormative gender and sexual politics through his musical artistry, clothing, and embodiment as a black male gospel artist in the early 21st century. In response to the Afro-American Religious History Unit's 2026 theme of "Black Religion, Music, Sexuality, and Afro-Futurism," this paper raises gospel music as a site of both religious constraint and quare liberatory potential. Covering the years between 2000 and 2011, this work offers a historical account of a career that constitutes a watershed moment for contemporary Afro-Protestantism, one discussed largely in popular cultural terms amongst Black Pentecostals and that lends itself to the academic study of Black Religion.

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.