Online June Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper seeks to identify the origins of the term “new religious movement.” It addresses various previously proposed theories of its origins, like the works of H. Neill McFarland, Harold W. Turner, and Jacob Needleman. It concludes that H. Neill McFarland’s early use of the term in 1967 as a portmanteau of terms “new religion” and “religious movement” is the definitive earliest use of the modern term “new religious movement.” This paper also shows the pitfalls of other theories of the term’s origins. Additionally, it comments on the reinvention of the term as a “neutral” term (compared to “cult”) in order to fight for religious freedom and free expression of religion for religious minorities. More recent uses of the term, like in describing the present religious landscape of Iran and the religious aspects of the QAnon conspiracy, are explored as well.

No social group is exempt from inflammatory online rhetoric, but minority religious groups are increasingly vulnerable to stereotyping and “othering.” This presentation reports key findings from a systematic qualitative analysis of YouTube transcripts from leading content creators and news organizations about Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The growing tension between influencer-style content and more traditional news reporting on YouTube will be discussed with a focus on Japan and Britain. Former members with anti-Witness narratives were found to dominate the discourse in these countries. Cultural aspects and current political climate were identified as factors influencing content. “Control” was a common theme in democratic, individualistic countries like Britain. The theme of “family” was common in Japan, reflecting issues of second-generation Japanese, anti-cult activists, and some government officials to restrict minority religions, including Jehovah’s Witnesses. Discussion will include how these representations are crafted out of new digital spaces and have broader societal and legal implications.

This presentation analyzes the 2010s emergence of “Tibeto-Vietnamese Vajrayana” (TVV), an umbrella term for adaptive Tibetan Buddhist new religiosities in Vietnam. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2018-26, it examines how TVV navigates tension with state regulatory frameworks and mainstream Buddhist institutions. Under Vietnam’s late socialist legal framework, Tibetan Buddhism is often framed as a foreign new religiosity that must be indigenized or incorporated into national heritage because it operates outside the state sanctioned Vietnam Buddhist Sangha. This has led to state monitoring, legal investigation, and police intervention, exemplified by the alleged extrajudicial state killing of Hungkar Rinpoche in Vietnam in 2024. Other recent cases involving alleged spiritual manipulation, financial misconduct, and religious licensing abuse have drawn intense media coverage and intensified scrutiny of some TVV groups. These dynamics shape TVV as an emerging field of new religiosity. This presentation draws from an article accepted for publication in Asian Ethnology (2026).

This paper advances the argument that a College of Education is not merely an alternative institutional location for teaching about cults and new religious movements, but a pedagogically and politically necessary site for rethinking how contested religious knowledge is produced, negotiated, and taught in contemporary universities. While Religious Studies, History, and related disciplines have generated extensive scholarship on new religious movements, largely focused on classification, historical development, and sociological explanation, they have paid comparatively little attention to the pedagogical and relational challenges that arise when these movements are taught within increasingly polarized and publicly scrutinized educational environments. As teaching religion at the post-secondary level has become more visibly politicized, the central challenge is no longer only how new religious movements should be defined or analysed, but how they should be taught, by whom, and for what educational purposes. A College of Education provides a distinct institutional and intellectual context in which these questions can be addressed directly, because education as a field is fundamentally oriented toward curriculum design, learner experience, professional responsibility, and the social consequences of teaching practices.

This paper reports on a community-based research project in a large diocese in NSW Australia where researchers have been collaborating with survivor support groups to understand the impacts of harm that child sexual abuse in Catholic and Anglican churches caused. 

One focus of this work is examining the way in which harm against children is gendered. Another focus is the collaborative methodology that the project utilised. This paper will bring these two elements together and explore the methodological approach and its efficacy in determining and meeting the ongoing challenge of addressing childhood institutional trauma and its impacts on women survivors.

The key principles of the collaborative research model are based on the importance of the provision of support services, the call to justice from Church leaders and the building of knowledge. The project collectively functioned to democratize knowledge production and recognise lived expertise as an important form of hermeneutical justice. 

Renowned writer of the 1990s Korea, Gong Jiyoung is also famously known for her feminist novels. Go Alone Like a Rhino’s Horn published in 1993 is acknowledged as a novel that popularized feminism, making it a social phenomenon beyond a movement of progressive activists and intellectuals. Then in 1997, Gong wrote Good Woman to provide a fuller vision of a feminist future, in which a couple of women form a family like community in opposition to the heteronormative patriarchal family. The progressiveness of this vision was not fully acknowledged at the time, but recently Gong’s feminist novels have been reevaluated in a positive light, reading them as informative in queering Korean families. This paper takes this discussion further to explore the underlining Confucian understanding of selfhood in Gong’s vision, and how her literary imagination can contribute to the ongoing discussions on reinterpreting Confucianism to be more just and inclusive. 

Can women be recognized as biblical interpreters or theologians in the history of Christian thought? This paper examines the biblical interpretation of Mary Fletcher (née Bosanquet, 1739–1815), an early Methodist leader whose devotional writings and manuscripts reflect sustained engagement with Scripture within the pastoral life of eighteenth-century Methodism. Although Fletcher is often remembered for her piety and leadership—and occasionally for defending women’s preaching in her correspondence with John Wesley—her work as a reader and interpreter of Scripture has received comparatively little scholarly attention. Drawing on manuscript materials preserved in the Fletcher–Tooth Collection at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, this paper considers several examples of Fletcher’s engagement with biblical texts in devotional and pastoral contexts. Her reflections and Watchwords illustrate ways Scripture was interpreted in relation to the spiritual formation of Methodist communities and suggest how recovering such materials may inform ongoing conversations about the place of lay and women’s voices in the history and future study of biblical interpretation.

This presentation argues that international intervention programs often overlook locally produced knowledge about menstruation and diminish the importance of women’s practices, agency, value systems, relationships, and of specific religious forms and participation. I examine dominant global approaches to menstrual health in the Global South through ethnographic research with approximately 75 Hindu women in India and a comparative sample of about 40 Hindu women in Bajura, Nepal (2024–2025). By adopting a critical approach towards literature, methods and theories from within a religious studies lens, and foregrounding ethnographic evidence, the study highlights parallel forms of agencies within religious menstrual practices.

This paper shows how early nineteenth-century theological affirmations of hell sutured ideals of U.S. republican democratic governance to ideas about prisons and punishment. Influential New Divinity theologians rhetorically integrated hell and prisons into their idealizations of the United States as a Christian democratic nation. Responding to Universalist arguments against the idea of hell, traditional proponents of hell argued for the necessity of hell in God’s moral governance; to do so, they made analogies to imprisonment in human moral governance. The paper analyzes sermons by Lyman Beecher and Moses Stuart that present prisons and hell as fundamental to human and divine governance. Both prisons and hell are said to keep rebels and unwanted passions in check and produce public and cosmic safety. Fear of wickedness and criminality is rhetorically assuaged by images of sublime safety. In response, Universalists imagined other ways of creating public goods and dealing with social harm. 

This paper examines the transatlantic correspondence between ex-Jesuits John Carroll, first American Catholic bishop, and Charles Plowden, Stonyhurst rector and English Provincial, from Thomas Jodziewicz’s recent critical edition. After the Suppression of the Society of Jesus and American Independence, they articulate a realist theology of intra-Catholic toleration: Rome, via the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, must tolerate “institutional Jesuit Catholicism” (ex-Jesuit properties, missions, schools, and clergy) in the nascent United States to avert spiritual ruin. They framed the Suppression, under Pope Clement XIV (Ganganelli) and perpetuated by perceived CPF corruption, as intra-Catholic intolerance threatening apostasy and decline. Carroll emerges as a nationalist clergy mobilizer, embracing republican pluralism to envision Catholicism as contributing to the new nation’s religious fabric. This minority-Catholic perspective illuminates religious freedom, institutional integrity, and future-oriented visions at the Revolutionary founding, aligning with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the presidential theme “FUTURE/S.”