Online June Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper examines the central role of motherhood in shaping religious ritual and collective memory through the story of the biblical figure Hagar . According to Islamic tradition, Hajera ran desperately between the mountains of Safa and Marwa searching for water to save her infant child. Her act of maternal survival later became institutionalized in the ritual of Sa’i, performed by millions of Muslims during the pilgrimage of Hajj. Through this ritual, a mother’s struggle becomes sacred practice and communal memory. Pilgrims—both men and women—reenact Hajera’s running, embodying the act through which she sought to secure the future generation. Yet while their bodies repeat her movement, ritual prayers often invoke Abraham rather than Hajera. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the borderlands, this paper argues that Hajera’s story reveals how maternal agency, survival, and displacement become foundational to religious ritual even when women’s voices remain partially absent from formal religious memory.

Within many conservative Christian communities, motherhood is framed not only as a familial role but as a vocation tied to the transmission of religious identity and moral order across generations. This paper examines how maternal labor functions as a form of domestic pedagogy by focusing on everyday practices through which religious enculturation occurs within the home. Drawing on scholarship in lived religion and material religion, the study analyzes how domestic practices—including homeschooling, food preparation, household discipline, clothing norms, and family prayer routines—organize the home as a pedagogical environment in which children learn religious identity and moral authority. Homemaking discourse and social media maternal networks further circulate models of Christian domestic life across digital spaces. By examining the material and pedagogical dimensions of these practices, the paper argues that maternal labor within the Christian home plays a central role in shaping the religious futures cultivated within conservative Christian communities. 

Jesus, the Thirsty Mother: Jesus’ Desire as a “Good-Enough Mother” to Nourish his Children While Simultaneously Thirsting for Them  

This paper explores the paradox of Jesus, the thirsty mother in the Eucharist.  

Julian of Norwich’s writings highlight the under-explored theme of divine, thirsty motherhood. The maternal Jesus wishes to nourish his/her children through the materiality of the Eucharist, while experiencing continuous thirst for them. To illumine this paradox, I draw on strands of medieval mystical literature, psychoanalysis and material practice. I bring together Julian’s writings with D.W. Winnicott’s “good-enough mother”, insights from the Brabant/Liege Vitae, and recent work by Hannah Lucas, to offer a fresh perspective on Jesus’ motherly role in the Eucharist. My paper benefits from the new awareness of Eucharistic loss gained during the COVID-19 pandemic, and investigates Julian’s understanding of a hope-filled, future fulfilment of Jesus’ thirsty desire and of his/her children’s longing for their divine mother.

This paper examines the life, death, and evolving cultural afterlife of “Aunt” Julia Brown, a Louisiana midwife, healer, and formerly enslaved woman whose memory has become central to one of the region’s most enduring Voodoo legends. Drawing on archival records, oral histories, and local folklore, the study reconstructs Brown’s historical presence in the St. John the Baptist Parish community while tracing how her death in 1915 became linked to narratives of supernatural power and a devastating hurricane. The paper explores the transformation of Brown from a community caregiver into a touristic symbol of “Voodoo” haunting, revealing how racialized and gendered mythmaking shapes public memory of Black religious women. By analyzing her legend’s circulation in ghost tours, online storytelling, and paranormal media, this research highlights the tension between historical recovery and commercialized folklore, and considers how Brown’s story illuminates broader patterns in African American religious history, memory, and cultural commodification.

This paper explores how African diasporic futurist artists, such as Geraldo Oliveira and Alexis Chivir-Ter Tsegba, are using AI and generative technologies to transform colonial archives. In their work, bodies are isolated from ethnographic photographs, algorithmically recombined, and embedded within cosmic, speculative landscapes. These technological interventions disrupt linear, documentary notions of time, making the archive a living field where past, present, and future co-constitute one another. Moreover, by centering African ritual temporalities—rooted in event-driven, cyclical, and relational understandings of time—their art mirrors the recursive logic of algorithmic systems. In doing so, their work critiques colonial frameworks that imposed linear, hierarchical temporalities and reveals how African conceptions of time provide a vital lens for reconfiguring archives and digital systems, fostering a more expansive, interconnected, and relational experience of temporality.

This paper paper uses ideas from Orlando Pattersons theory of death and from people who study the caste system to say that the caste system is a way to slowly take away a persons humanity. This affects who people are how communities work and how people belong to a religion. The paper explores "The Buddha and His Dhamma" and tries to map how Ambedkars Buddhism is a big change in how we think about things. It redefines the teachings of Buddhism as a way to make society more democratic and to get practical applicable principles for making a casteless society. The paper also looks at how the caste system affects communities, in other countries and how it intersects with racism and migration. The caste system is not an Indian problem it is a problem that affects Buddhist communities all over the world.

This paper broadly examines how Anticaste thought and Anticolonial thought remained separate domains of political thought in the context of India and, more broadly, South Asia. These two sets of thoughts did not converge over the long history of British Colonialism in India, primarily because they were unable to develop radical/collective thinking in the domain of secularization. 
In scholarship on postcolonial South Asia, the discussion of secularization often focuses on interreligious thinking. The politics of knowledge and historical domination allow the expert on religion to have expertise on the case. Still, the expert on caste is not considered an expert on religion. It is a situation of both caste and castelessness in determining the fluidity of movement between them. It is not the castelessness but caste that seems to be paving the path from society to politics, particularly during the anticolonial struggle in India.    

History has been a contested domain for knowledge and claims regarding diverse interpretations of the past. Who governed whom, whose contributions were recognized, and who’s not? Indian History has been viewed from a positivist lens as ascertain and universal. However, Ambedkar critiques the Brahmanical positivist interpretation of Indian history and provided alternative methods to engage with the social history of caste. He highlighted the epistemological violence done by Brahminical scholars who used “politics of appropriation” to mis-represent the Dalit-Bahujan resistance. In similar capacity, Kaivarta revolt against the Pala King Mahipala ll and Rampala ll (Buddhist regime) in Bengal is testament to this paradoxical relation between the caste, Buddhism and political appropriation by Brahminism. By using Ambedkar’s historical method, critical caste studies framework and archival resources, this paper aims to understand the political-economy of socio-political mobility of Nishad caste in the context of Pala regimes' policy of non-violence and heavy taxation.

This paper paper uses ideas from Orlando Pattersons theory of death and from people who study the caste system to say that the caste system is a way to slowly take away a persons humanity. This affects who people are how communities work and how people belong to a religion. The paper explores "The Buddha and His Dhamma" and tries to map how Ambedkars Buddhism is a big change in how we think about things. It redefines the teachings of Buddhism as a way to make society more democratic and to get practical applicable principles for making a casteless society. The paper also looks at how the caste system affects communities, in other countries and how it intersects with racism and migration. The caste system is not an Indian problem it is a problem that affects Buddhist communities all over the world.

This paper broadly examines how Anticaste thought and Anticolonial thought remained separate domains of political thought in the context of India and, more broadly, South Asia. These two sets of thoughts did not converge over the long history of British Colonialism in India, primarily because they were unable to develop radical/collective thinking in the domain of secularization. 
In scholarship on postcolonial South Asia, the discussion of secularization often focuses on interreligious thinking. The politics of knowledge and historical domination allow the expert on religion to have expertise on the case. Still, the expert on caste is not considered an expert on religion. It is a situation of both caste and castelessness in determining the fluidity of movement between them. It is not the castelessness but caste that seems to be paving the path from society to politics, particularly during the anticolonial struggle in India.    

History has been a contested domain for knowledge and claims regarding diverse interpretations of the past. Who governed whom, whose contributions were recognized, and who’s not? Indian History has been viewed from a positivist lens as ascertain and universal. However, Ambedkar critiques the Brahmanical positivist interpretation of Indian history and provided alternative methods to engage with the social history of caste. He highlighted the epistemological violence done by Brahminical scholars who used “politics of appropriation” to mis-represent the Dalit-Bahujan resistance. In similar capacity, Kaivarta revolt against the Pala King Mahipala ll and Rampala ll (Buddhist regime) in Bengal is testament to this paradoxical relation between the caste, Buddhism and political appropriation by Brahminism. By using Ambedkar’s historical method, critical caste studies framework and archival resources, this paper aims to understand the political-economy of socio-political mobility of Nishad caste in the context of Pala regimes' policy of non-violence and heavy taxation.

The dialogue between ethnography and theology has created fruitful ground to consider both the particular theological framings of people’s lives, and the ways that people’s politics, socialities, and relationships build theological worlds and ecclesial institutions. To continue expanding the boundaries of these conversations generally, and apply them to Orthodox Christianity more specifically, academics should take stock of the epistemological assumptions that each discipline smuggles into their analysis. This paper argues that the dominant ethnographic gaze of our contemporary moment – a gaze which often takes a deliberately and admirably engaged stance against inequalities – runs the risk of equating all inequality with injustice and thus misses the theological and liberatory nuances of Orthodox Christian hierarchy. The author suggests that to escape this reductive analysis, the integration of anthropological principles into Orthodox ecclesiologies must veer away from a discourse of reproach and towards a creative reinterpretation of the possibilities of non-egalitarian church structures. 

The puzzle of the relation between theology and culture is one of the defining theological problems of modernity, which has been transformed in recent decades through serious engagement with sociological and anthropological modes of inquiry. This paper takes up one trajectory of such engagement—that of Protestant theologians’ turn to ethnographic methods over the last thirty years—and places it into conversation with the needs of contemporary Orthodox ecclesiology. Does Orthodox Christianity have an internal framework within which such a deployment of ethnographic methods can produce valid theological insights? The fruitfulness of “lived theology” in an Orthodox key will be demonstrated through examples from recent ethnographic research in Cyprus, where hagiographical media provide means of self-understanding, narrative interpretation of the chaos of the world, and religiously coded resistance to exploitation and domination.

This paper examines how ethnographic identity shapes and challenges Orthodox ecclesiology in diaspora parish contexts. While Orthodox communities outside traditionally Orthodox countries often function as sites of cultural preservation and collective memory, such ethnographic cohesion can both sustain belonging and obscure the Church’s catholic and ecumenical vocation. Drawing on five years of pastoral service in multicultural parishes in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the study integrates theological reflection with qualitative, practice-based observation to treat the parish as a locus of lived theology. In dialogue with historical and contemporary Orthodox ecclesiology, it analyzes the practical difficulties, risks, and possibilities that emerge when diverse languages and cultures converge within one community. The paper argues that empirical attention to ecclesial practices can illuminate how multicultural parishes, rather than compromising tradition, may become privileged spaces for manifesting the Church’s unity and missionary character.
 

The paper proposes an ethnographic-theological approach to Orthodox ecclesiology, grounded in the Greek-speaking Orthodox presence in Belgium as a focused diaspora case study. Rather than treating ecclesiology solely as doctrinal articulation, it examines how ecclesial identity is embodied, negotiated, and interpreted within migratory, multilingual, and digitally mediated parish contexts.

Drawing on qualitative observation and “thick description” of liturgical practice, catechesis, parish leadership, and communal interaction, the study explores how migration reshapes perceptions of authority, how intergenerational dynamics affect the reception of tradition, and how digital mediation reconfigures participation and belonging.

Engaging debates in ethnographic theology, the paper argues that empirical attentiveness does not replace normative ecclesiology but complicates abstract accounts of it. By holding together descriptive inquiry and theological claims about communion, the study highlights both the generative potential and epistemological risks of the ethnographic turn in contemporary Orthodox ecclesiology.

What does it take for a vernacular Christianity to remain relevant into the 21st century? What is at stake when local religious practices and materialities, seen as vital manifestations of cultural memory, undergo “heritagization” and commodification for the cultural tourism circuit? This paper is based on long-term ethnographic research. I examine vernacular Catholicism and tensions surrounding religious futures in and around Chimayó, a Hispano community in northern New Mexico. This region is awash in the materialities of vernacular Catholicism – carved saints, colonial-era altar screens, ex-votos, and roadside shrines. Material religion is engaged as an anchor for Nuevomexicano identity and supports a flagging economy, yet local people also contest its commodification for cultural outsiders. I argue that the navigation of the line between embracing and resisting heritagization can produce ambivalence but also potentiates a nuanced, active engagement of vernacular religion as a culturally-grounded resource for contemporary and future generations.

This paper examines how Korean immigrant lay believers in diaspora Presbyterian churches destabilize and reinterpret core Christian concepts through dialogical Bible study. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a congregational Bible study group in the United States, it analyzes how participants negotiate the meanings of theological language in relation to their everyday contexts and practical needs. Concepts such as God, blessing, the gospel, faith, sin, and obedience are collectively reworked through dialogue. I describe this process as “dialogical blessing,” in which religious meanings emerge through communal interaction. The study highlights how linguistic practices reshape authority, identity, and belonging in contemporary diaspora Christian communities.

The Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition has long been associated with emphases on conservatism of its liturgical forms, and musical settings are typically no exception. However, the recent growth of Orthodox Christianity in the United States, particularly from converts of Evangelical backgrounds, has begun to challenge the primacy of Orthodox Christian music’s predominantly Russian and Greek origins. This paper will examine recent developments in Orthodox Christian liturgical music in the United States, particularly the emergence of what is sometimes referred to as an “Appalachian” or “American” Orthodox style that melds the textual and liturgical roots of with American folk music by analyzing the role of textual primacy (Seeger 1986) in three English-language hymns that typify various stages of an emergent American Orthodox musical genre. Ultimately, the musical identity that is produced maintains Orthodox Christianity’s distinctiveness from other Christian musical traditions while also satisfying nostalgic desires for authenticity in religious music.

The global resurgence of religious nationalism is increasingly shaped by digital communication environments that transform how collective identities are produced and mobilized. This paper examines the emergence of digital sacred communities—online networks where religious symbols, narratives, and political grievances converge to construct new forms of national belonging. Drawing on insights from political science and Islamic legal thought, the study explores how digital media platforms amplify emotionally charged narratives that redefine religion as a marker of national identity. While classical Islamic legal discourse conceptualized political community primarily through the universalistic framework of the ummah, contemporary digital environments enable decentralized interpretations that merge religious symbolism with modern nationalist ideologies. This transformation challenges traditional structures of religious authority while generating new forms of political mobilization. By analyzing the interaction between technological mediation and Islamic normative concepts such as maṣlaḥa and fitna, the study contributes to interdisciplinary debates on religion, violence, and the future of religious nationalism.

This paper analyzes the dynamics of identity development and civic participation among second-generation Muslims in the United States, and how these processes enhance the resilience and sustainability of the Muslim community within a multicultural context. This study employs segmented assimilation theory as its primary analytical framework, emphasizing the negotiation of hybrid identities that merge Islamic heritage with American norms in the context of sociopolitical challenges, including post-9/11 Islamophobia, the 2017 "Muslim Ban" policy, and the persistent Gaza conflict.

This study employs a qualitative methodology, utilizing literature review and content analysis to address the primary inquiry: How can the civic engagement of second-generation Muslim Americans enhance the well-being (resilience and development) of the Muslim community in the United States? The results show that civic engagement is an important way for second-generation Muslims to adapt. It helps them assert their identity, fight discrimination, and change policy. 

Christian nationalism has become an influential force in American political and religious life, shaping debates about national identity, culture, and belonging. While scholarship has examined the narratives and rhetoric animating these movements, less attention has been given to the digital environments through which such narratives circulate and acquire social force. Drawing on insights from the sociology of algorithms, this paper examines how algorithmic media platforms participate in the circulation of Christian nationalist discourse in the United States. Social media infrastructures do not simply distribute nationalist ideas; they shape the conditions under which claims of cultural decline, religious marginalization, and civilizational threat become visible and emotionally persuasive. Through podcasts, livestream ministries, and short-form platform media, users encounter frameworks portraying the nation as morally endangered. The paper argues that algorithmic media platforms have become key infrastructures through which Christian nationalist identity circulates and mobilizes.

Religious nationalism is often presented as a modern political phenomenon, yet many of its elements are derived from older theological frameworks that fused religion, sovereignty, and territorial domination. This paper argues that the Doctrine of Christian Discovery provides a crucial historical template for understanding contemporary religious nationalist movements, particularly white Christian nationalism in the United States. Originating in fifteenth-century papal bulls that authorized Christian rulers to seize non-Christian lands, the doctrine sanctified enslavement, exploitation, and extraction. These theological assumptions later became embedded in legal systems and national mythologies, shaping modern ideas of sovereignty and sacred territory. By comparing the historic logic of Christian dominion with contemporary religious nationalist narratives, this paper shows how grievances about lost cultural authority, racialized identity, and divine mandate continue to animate movements that fuse religion with national destiny. Understanding these continuities clarifies how religious nationalism mobilizes sacred history to justify exclusion, violence, and territorial control.