Online June Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper argues that decolonizing Episcopal ecclesiology requires reimagining the epistemic posture of privileged churches. Utilizing the method of “receptive ecumenism,” I place The Episcopal Church into dialogue with Elizabeth Gandolfo and Laurel Potter’s Re-membering the Reign of God—a Roman Catholic effort to decolonize ecclesiology by centering the witness of the poor in El Salvador. First, I introduce receptive ecumenism, explaining its decolonial potential and how it directly challenges notions of ecclesial self-sufficiency. Second, I introduce three promising concepts from Gandolfo and Potter for Anglicanism’s decolonial project: the critical retrieval of tradition for decolonial praxis; “adult faith” as a corrective to ecclesial infantilization; and solidarity as a difficult process of conversion for the privileged. In conclusion, I propose three corresponding interventions for Episcopal ecclesiology: retrieving Anglican “comprehensiveness” for decolonial praxis; reimagining confirmation pedagogy around theological agency; and cultivating epistemic practices of solidarity through virtuous unlearning and disciplined listening.

In light of Walter Bruggemann's Prophetic Imagination and the growth of Global Pentecostalism, this paper explores the ecclesiological characteristics and challenges of Pentecostalism. By attending to Bruggemann’s prophetic imagination and its connection to Pentecostalism, this paper offers a proposal of what a prophetically imaginative, creative, and liberative Pentecostalism might entail. As Pentecostalism is a major driving force of Global Christianity, this paper draws not only from the work of Bruggemann, but resources the work of global Pentecostal/Charismatic theologians who have reflected upon the importance of the prophetic imagination for the future of Pentecostalism. This paper argues that Pentecostalism’s pneumatic emphasis, when placed in conjunction with the prophetic imagination, can offer a constructive ecclesiological vision for the future of the church.

How can we reimagine the identity and mission of the church as it participates in a more just future? A new discourse about the significance of diakonia has emerged across the global church. The retrieval of diakonia by the ecumenical church is one of the most promising developments in contemporary ecclesiology. This emerging ecumenical consensus recognizes diakonia as an expression of the church’s prophetic imagination. Diaconal action by its very nature includes the task of unmasking systemic forms of injustice and promoting justice. Diaconal advocacy weds imagination with action, grounding the prophetic in material projects of mutual concern within community. The church is called not only to serve but to advocate. At the end of Western Christendom, the needs of the world for peace, healing, and repair are acute. This paper describes how prophetic diakonia and a theology of diakonia can contribute to a new paradigm for the future church.

Interest in the cultural dimensions of difficult conversations, such as those related to ‘race’ or sexual ethics, can be one way of softening the polarizing energies around these important dimensions of the life of faith. Cultures are processes, not things; contested, not total. Assuming, for example, that immigrant communities of faith do not share a mainline denomination's progressive values, or should be rejected if they do not express them in the “right way,” denies the grace of being in process. Denominations and their communities of faith are continually in process, working toward becoming intercultural as they uphold their traditions and values. This paper employs the framework of the Intercultural Development Continuum, which many theological schools now engage through the Intercultural Development Inventory, to demonstrate how this lens can chart a course through polarizing conversations around sexuality and gender identity, and minimizing conversations around ‘race.’

This paper examines the Koreri movements of the Biak people in Papua as a form of political messianism that imagines indigenous futures. Yet colonial and missionary presented it as a pagan and a “false hope” in which the Biak people lost themselves in an illusory messianic hope. Countering that narrative, this study employs Koreri as an indigenous text and political messianic movement grounded in the Biak contexts and its relational cosmology. Through the lenses of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, George Dei, and Christina Jaimungal's decolonial and indigenous frameworks, this research method offers a critical analysis of the authority of colonial and missionary texts in relation to the oral narratives and interconnectedness cosmology of the Biak people. Hence, the result of this study claims Koreri as an epistemological decolonial movement and resistance, which could therefore be seen as a decolonial attempt to envision and construct possible indigenous futures.

In settler-colonial Taiwan, Christian texts historically functioned within apparatuses of colonial governance to marginalize Indigenous epistemologies. However, for the Sediq people, engaging with the Bible constitutes an ongoing process of decolonial resistance. This paper explores how Sediq mother-tongue biblical translation and reading enact what decolonial theorists term "epistemic disobedience." I argue that reading the Bible in the Sediq language conceptually and materially unsettles the text, transforming it from an imperial tool of linguistic hegemony into a site for reclaiming cultural sovereignty. By analyzing specific Sediq hermeneutics, this paper demonstrates how linguistic reclamation disrupts the dominance of settler languages (like Mandarin) and Western orthodoxies. Ultimately, it illustrates how Indigenous mother-tongue reading operates as a profound political and religious act, reconstructing Indigenous identity and spiritual autonomy within the broader discourse of religion and postcolonialism.

In much postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, Christianity in South Asia appears to arrive on schedule with European empire: missionaries first, colonial governance close behind, violence never far away. This story is powerful, morally compelling, and by now something of a reflex. But it also produces a decolonial common sense in which precolonial Christian communities become difficult, if not impossible, to recognise. This paper turns to the Thomas Christians of South India, an ancient Christian tradition embedded in Syriac liturgical worlds, Indian Ocean networks, and regional political formations long before European rule, in order to ask what this reflex leaves out. By tracing how early modern ecclesiastical intervention, colonial knowledge practices, and contemporary critique together reclassified Christianity as European, the paper suggests that critique itself can end up thinking like an empire. It calls for a decolonial approach alert to the colonial afterlives of its own categories.

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As Theology Without Walls scholars, we are, at least to some extent, experts in dealing with diversity: How do we transcend our own belief system, to get at thoughts and inspiration which are acceptable to people with other belief system. In my view, in this age of polarization, this expertise comes with a responsibility: can we formulate a vision for society that transcends various religions, but also, that transcends various political views. In this paper, I will present a vision on society which transcends both religions and political systems of thought, and which is grounded on a theology and philosophy of diversity. 

Some scholars argue that certain confessional traditions, though open to the “outside,” nevertheless remain bounded by the foundations of their own traditions. Comparative theology, thus, emerges as an alternative approach: one that seeks wisdom from the “outside” while remaining grounded within one’s own confessional commitments. Christian traditions that claim apostolic authority, such as the Catholic Church, are often cited as examples of this posture. While these traditions may be receptive to learning from external sources, they remain firmly rooted in their foundational structures—walled, though passable through doors and windows. However, patristic tradition has strong roots in apophatic theology, and that apophatic theology, by definition, resists such boundaries, since divinity cannot be confined within the limits of human language, intellect, or imagination. It is, therefore, arguably an oxymoron to describe these traditions as absolutely walled when their own theological foundations ultimately dismantle such boundaries. This does not mean that adherents of these traditions cannot remain rooted within them; rather, it suggests that some supposedly fixed walls may be illusory.

This paper offers a trauma-informed, feminist, and postcolonial rereading of John 4 that challenges moralizing interpretations of the Samaritan woman. Historically rendered anonymous and sexually suspect the Samaritan woman has often been read through gendered and racialized lenses that reinscribe shame and obscure structural vulnerability. Introducing the concept of unarmed trauma this study examines how anonymity ethnic othering and interpretive power expose the woman to theological dehumanization without narrative defense. Engaging trauma theory and post colonial hermeneutics the paper argues that shame based readings emerge not from the Johannine text itself but from later interpretive traditions shaped by patriarchal and ethnocentric assumptions. A close reading of John 4 demonstrates that Jesus offers no explicit moral condemnation and positions the encounter as one of revelation rather than correction. Reframing the well as a liminal site of risk and agency this paper reclaims the Samaritan woman as a theological witness whose voice emerges from vulnerability rather than moral failure.

In an era of duress, it is important to explore the ethics and moral-developmental potential of resistance for a chance at combatting and resisting societal moral injury. Less well known than liberation theology, resistance studies, from which ethics of resistance can be derived and implemented, has developed as a budding field in recent years. Resistance studies addresses the life-giving nuance inherent in dialectical thinking and offers a route for more clearly recognizing, upholding, and teaching acts of bravery and critical consciousness where they do and can happen. This paper highlights womanist ethicist Traci West’s ethics of resistance in the context of supporting battered black women and Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s erudite exploration of learning and modeling bravery as cases in point. It concludes with a nod to an investigation into the intentional cultivation of moral courage on a social level as contributing to the theory and practice of resistance ethics. 

Are trans women, in the words of Catherine Keller, “doing an apocalypse?” This paper conducts a (re)reading of Keller’s Apocalypse Now and Then, exploring whether and how her concept of “apocalypse pattern” can both enable and circumscribe the process of transitioning for trans women. Keller discusses the apocalypse pattern’s manifestation in essentialist feminist discourse that maintains a narrow view of womanhood in the anticipation of women’s liberation. She also echoes critiques of anti-essentialist feminist discourse and its own apocalyptic tendency to purge feminism of essentialism. This paper engages Keller’s reading of essentialist and anti-essentialist feminist discourses on gender to argue that their respective apocalyptic tendencies defer or close the possibility of womanhood for trans women. I conclude that Keller’s concept of “counter-apocalypse” proves useful for trans women’s negotiation of the tension between an immanent realization of womanhood and an eschatological horizon of womanhood.

Situated within cultural anthropology, this article speaks to young Muslim women's aspirations of securing government jobs in Patna, India. Drawing on ethnographic research, I demonstrate how women reimagine aspirations as a form of pious practice, cultivating ethical subjectivity in holding kismat (divine will) and mehnat (human labor) in productive tension throughout their aspirational trajectories. Thinking of destiny as something to be made, women focus on hard work as pious labor bracketing conversations around destiny in their tayyari or preparation phase. When examination attempts prove unsuccessful, women distinguish kismat from badkismati (circumstantial ill-fortune), striving to imagine alternative futures that remain open and unknown. By centering aspiration as pious practice, I extend anthropological attention of everyday Islam into the domain of futurity, where futures are simultaneously open and predetermined, and women's ethical subjectivity capable of sustaining hope through prolonged uncertainty while remaining open to divine wisdom.

This paper examines the making and circulation of tāʿziyas in the small towns of Masauli, Biswan, and Mahmudabad in North India to explore how mourning for Imam Husayn becomes embedded in practices of craft, labor, and devotion. While scholarship on Muharram has largely focused on major urban centers such as Lucknow or Hyderabad, this study shifts attention to qasbati contexts where tāʿziyadari is sustained through localized networks of artisans, patrons, and devotees. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and participant observation during Muharram processions, the paper argues that the tāʿziya functions not merely as a symbolic representation of Husayn’s shrine in Karbala but as an intercessory object through which devotees seek closeness to God (Allah).

Annual commemorations of the death of Husayn ibn Ali, Shi’a Muslims’ Third Imam and Muhammad’s grandson, are the world’s largest, transnational, public mourning ritual. Across India, thousands of Shi’a Muslims gather during Muharram to engage in chest beating (ma’atam), processions (juloos), the ambulation of replica medieval battle standards (alams), and more. In particular, juloos and ma’atam practices become sites for technological mediation. Drones, large videocameras, and smartphones enable organizations and individuals to livestream, share, or document the experience to and for absent others – whether out of diasporic distance, safety concerns, or otherwise. Indeed, the digitization of these events are in stark contrast to their otherwise embodied, sensorial, and community foci. How does technological mediation anticipate the future of Shi’a Muslim mourning? Drawing on my 2024-25 fieldwork in Lucknow, Hyderabad, and Kolkata, I argue that mediatization is both practical and expansive, ultimately facilitating a global Shi’a consciousness. 

In 2025, the United Nations Development Program and the World Council of Churches each committed to a decade of climate justice action. For full participation in response to the demands of climate justice in collaboration with faith and secular partners, the faith and practice of Friends need review, renewal, and re-elaboration. The paper will introduce the problem and suggest initial ideas for needed theological development.

The author, minister and prophet Howard Thurman (1899-1981) self-identified as a member of the Wider Quaker Fellowship. Yet the most important part of his pastoral experience transcended Quakers or indeed any religious denomination, in his role in founding the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco.

One important collection of Thurman's letters has not been explored yet; that is his correspondence with Louise Brown, a Quaker minister from the Conservative branch of Friends. This extensive correspondence over many years had a distinct pastoral dimension to them, as Brown struggled with a separation from her husband, a marriage that Thurman helped to heal. This paper will sketch out the course of this correspondence and the import that this has for Thurman's pastoral theology.

This exploration will be set in the context of recent publications on Howard Thurman, and on Quaker pastoral theology.

Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu (1885 - 1959) is not nowadays a well-known figure of the South African anti-Apartheid struggle, but in the first half of the C20th he was an important voice of the dispossessed;  a strong critic of colonial and segregationalist policies. He was active as a Quaker and also as a Methodist lay-preacher, but was very critical of the role of missionaries in a colonial culture. 

Jabavu travelled widely, in Britain, the USA and Africa, and engaged with proponents of liberation and civil rights, including Bayard Rustin. He also travelled to India to learn more about Gandhian non-violent resistance, later a tool of the South African struggle. 

This paper focusses on Jabavu’s participation in two international conferences: the International Missionary Conference in Jerusalem in 1928, and the World Gathering of Friends in 1937, and discusses his contribution as an early exponent of liberation theology, and also to the literature of decolonisation.