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.

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.

Among the many relational threads linking the transnationally dispersed social world of Tenrikyo Europe Center (TEC), located in a Parisian suburb, digital forms of communication and interaction play a constitutive role in extending, sustaining, and occasionally transforming connections. This paper focuses on a single concentrated moment: the 130th anniversary of the Foundress' withdrawal from physical life, an event carrying deep significance for Tenrikyo followers worldwide. Connection to what was occurring in Tenri City (Japan) moved through two interwoven channels, one through the ritual practice of uniting hearts with the Jiba, the sacred point around which the primary ritual occurred, the other through the digital circulation of images and messages, mirroring one another in how they enabled affective and relational ties to traverse geographic distance. The anniversary commemoration is thus one expression of a broader capacity to collapse time and space in ways that keep religious worlds alive across distance.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 intensified a process that began in 2014: the deep entanglement of religion, volunteerism, and military chaplaincy under prolonged wartime conditions. As the conflict persists, the number of volunteers and clergy declines due to exhaustion and casualties, while frontline spiritual and humanitarian needs continue to grow, making religious networks a key infrastructure of wartime mobilization. This paper introduces the concept of «adrenaline spirituality», a form of religious experience shaped by sustained exposure to danger and moral urgency. It argues that prolonged frontline engagement produces a profound and often irreversible transformation of consciousness among volunteers and chaplains. The study proposes a three-stage model: moral mobilization, normative conflict, and the exhaustion–dependency paradox, where burnout coexists with an inability to disengage. This framework contributes to international debates on religion, trauma, and wartime spirituality.

Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial theory of hybridity, the paper proposes the concept of a “virtual-sacred hybridity” to argue that Indian tarot channels on YouTube exemplify a hybridity at multiple levels: a) sacred hybridity where Tarot readers incorporate and synthesize elements from different religions and spiritual traditions, b) linguistic hybridity as seen in Tarot channels that combine different languages and cultural idioms, and c) spatial hybridity where online Tarot functions within a liminal, virtual space between the analog and the transcendental space. Based on case study and content analysis, the paper further contends that the hybridity of online Tarot remains embedded in queerness just as queerness embraces hybridity by challenging heteronormative binaries. The online blending of Tarot and Tantra offers insights into how digital platforms allow space for non-majoritarian, spiritual practices even though content creators remain governed by the market logic of algorithm, revenue production, and consumption

There is a substantial gap when looking for religious research about the micro-blogging social media site Tumblr and its unique communities. This is especially true for supposedly “new age” spiritual practices and beliefs like those associated with witches, mystics, crystal girlies, druids, Wicca, and other related practices. Yet Tumblr’s affordances have empowered Neopaganism to spread on the site and provided a new spiritual home for many users who have been harmed by or feel negatively about mainstream religions. Thus, by studying the nuances of how Neopaganism functions on Tumblr, and how Tumblr’s own affordances empower it to flourish, the papers offers insights into how scholars of religion can gain new information that queers established conceptions of what is or is not “religion” while presenting effective ways for mainstream religions like Christianity to readdress themselves in the future by embracing the nonhierarchical values that vulnerable populations find and appreciate in Neopaganism.

The paper explores ideas of future reclamation of the witch as a feminine symbol of power and uses Florence Welch as a case study of witchcraft as power, activism, and search for a better more just future. Through the exploration of lyrics and imagery in music videos, discussion of Welch’s activism, and embracing of the unconventional, this presentation will argue for Florence Welch as an example of witchcraft unlike the stories of the past. By critically reading Mariam Kaba, Kelly Hayes, other activists on the ground, the paper compares witchcraft as a modern-day movement of collective power. It further addresses the themes of wildness and reclamation of ancient traditions in the movement to embrace a historical witch as inherently powerful and feminine. The paper approaches “the witch” as a queer figure that rejects the heteronormative values of patriarchy and childbearing to instill a sense of independence in a postmodern world.  

The religious use of hallucinogenic mushrooms has been around for centuries, yet upon the “discovery” of the Americas these Indigenous practices were erased from history; but some survived underground where they eventually become incorporated into US mushroom/psychedelic churches. Through the use of textual and literary analysis, the paper examines the history of mushrooms in Mexico by comparing scholars that study sacraments in religious spaces. It further dives into the emergence of two mushroom churches in the US: The Divine Assembly and Psanctuary. The paper then discusses the role of mushrooms in each church and ends with the legal implications of the use of mushrooms in these churches. The paper argues that despite these churches’ attempt to subvert Eurochristianity, their use of mushrooms as sacraments fits in with neoshamanism which is the appropriation of Indigenous rituals and ought to be avoided when queering religion in the future.

Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial theory of hybridity, the paper proposes the concept of a “virtual-sacred hybridity” to argue that Indian tarot channels on YouTube exemplify a hybridity at multiple levels: a) sacred hybridity where Tarot readers incorporate and synthesize elements from different religions and spiritual traditions, b) linguistic hybridity as seen in Tarot channels that combine different languages and cultural idioms, and c) spatial hybridity where online Tarot functions within a liminal, virtual space between the analog and the transcendental space. Based on case study and content analysis, the paper further contends that the hybridity of online Tarot remains embedded in queerness just as queerness embraces hybridity by challenging heteronormative binaries. The online blending of Tarot and Tantra offers insights into how digital platforms allow space for non-majoritarian, spiritual practices even though content creators remain governed by the market logic of algorithm, revenue production, and consumption

There is a substantial gap when looking for religious research about the micro-blogging social media site Tumblr and its unique communities. This is especially true for supposedly “new age” spiritual practices and beliefs like those associated with witches, mystics, crystal girlies, druids, Wicca, and other related practices. Yet Tumblr’s affordances have empowered Neopaganism to spread on the site and provided a new spiritual home for many users who have been harmed by or feel negatively about mainstream religions. Thus, by studying the nuances of how Neopaganism functions on Tumblr, and how Tumblr’s own affordances empower it to flourish, the papers offers insights into how scholars of religion can gain new information that queers established conceptions of what is or is not “religion” while presenting effective ways for mainstream religions like Christianity to readdress themselves in the future by embracing the nonhierarchical values that vulnerable populations find and appreciate in Neopaganism.

The paper explores ideas of future reclamation of the witch as a feminine symbol of power and uses Florence Welch as a case study of witchcraft as power, activism, and search for a better more just future. Through the exploration of lyrics and imagery in music videos, discussion of Welch’s activism, and embracing of the unconventional, this presentation will argue for Florence Welch as an example of witchcraft unlike the stories of the past. By critically reading Mariam Kaba, Kelly Hayes, other activists on the ground, the paper compares witchcraft as a modern-day movement of collective power. It further addresses the themes of wildness and reclamation of ancient traditions in the movement to embrace a historical witch as inherently powerful and feminine. The paper approaches “the witch” as a queer figure that rejects the heteronormative values of patriarchy and childbearing to instill a sense of independence in a postmodern world.  

The religious use of hallucinogenic mushrooms has been around for centuries, yet upon the “discovery” of the Americas these Indigenous practices were erased from history; but some survived underground where they eventually become incorporated into US mushroom/psychedelic churches. Through the use of textual and literary analysis, the paper examines the history of mushrooms in Mexico by comparing scholars that study sacraments in religious spaces. It further dives into the emergence of two mushroom churches in the US: The Divine Assembly and Psanctuary. The paper then discusses the role of mushrooms in each church and ends with the legal implications of the use of mushrooms in these churches. The paper argues that despite these churches’ attempt to subvert Eurochristianity, their use of mushrooms as sacraments fits in with neoshamanism which is the appropriation of Indigenous rituals and ought to be avoided when queering religion in the future.

This paper proposes that healing — whether practiced by shamans, allopathic physicians, curanderos, priests, or therapists—achieves its greatest efficacy when illness is transformed, through metaphor and language into a manageable object placed in relation to an existing world of meaning, shared with others, and part of the culture, such as spirituality and religion. That is, a private to public transfiguration, as Arendt in The Human Condition (1958) and the author (Mendez, 2026) have elaborated. Drawing from anthropologist Michael Jackson’s The Palm at the End of the Mind (2009) and Between One and One Another (2012), my paper argues that language functions not merely as communication but as world-constitution: private fears and questions are turned into direct objects of language, i.e. into culturally shared concepts that allow the person and society to confront disease and exert a measure of control over illness and suffering. 

Modern medicine has often conceived of itself as a project of mastery over bodies, disease, and mortality. While medical humanities has challenged this expansion of technical and institutional authority, the moral and relational dimensions of healing remain difficult to articulate within prevailing clinical frameworks. This paper proposes the Christian theological concept of kenosis, i.e., altruistic self-abnegation, as an ethical framework for redescribing healthcare. Drawing on theological and medical humanities sources, it explores how a 'kenotic' medicine might resist reductive explanations of suffering, emphasize accompaniment over cure-based interventions, and challenge clinicians’ moral authority within the therapeutic relationship. Deployed appropriately, medical kenosis can bolster medical humanities by providing a theological resource for interrogating contemporary crises in healthcare. At the same time, it can recover the relational conditions necessary for healing, reimagining care as being-with and being-for the patient.

This research investigates the "sovereign" role of the heart within Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Islamic spiritual psychology, challenging the prevailing modern cerebrocentric paradigm of mental health. While TCM regards the heart as the seat of Shen (spirit), Islamic tradition identifies the Qalb as the moral and spiritual compass. Despite theological differences, both traditions emphasize the primacy of the heart over the brain in regulating emotions. By integrating these classical epistemologies with contemporary neurocardiology, this study highlights practical techniques such as the TCM five-element strategy and Islamic muhasabah that provide a holistic framework for emotional regulation. Incorporating these heart-centered perspectives into contemporary psychotherapy offers significant clinical benefits, advancing beyond the limitations of the conventional biopsychosocial model toward a more comprehensive "science of the soul".

This paper explores tarot as a technology of desire: a relational practice that reorganizes perception and unsettles linear time. Expanding interpretations of tarot as divination or symbolic projection, I argue that it operates as a participatory device that activates what I call the expanded present—a temporal field in which past, present, and future coexist as dynamic potentials.

Drawing on feminist theories of desire and the “otherwise,” I frame desire not as lack but as generative orientation toward individual and collective becoming. Within contemporary Pagan contexts, tarot does not predict fixed futures; it stages encounters with the “not yet,” making emergent possibilities perceptible. By foregrounding co-presence rather than sequence and participatory consciousness rather than detached rationality, the paper suggests that tarot exemplifies an alternative epistemic and temporal framework—one that reimagines both magical practice and scholarly thought beyond linear secular models.

When survivors of spiritual trauma leave the religious communities that harmed them, where do they go? For many, the answer is somewhere unexpected: Contemporary Western Paganism. This paper follows that journey, asking what it is about Pagan practice — its attunement to the rhythms of the natural world, its insistence that the individual is their own spiritual authority — that resonates so deeply with people rebuilding their spiritual lives after harm. I argue that Pagan healing philosophies offer a rich and largely overlooked framework for understanding recovery from spiritual trauma. To explore this, I listen closely — through trauma-informed qualitative interviews with survivors, and through a longitudinal study of the communities they have built on Reddit. Together, these methods trace both the intimacy of individual healing and the contours of a much larger, quietly growing movement of spiritual reconstruction.