Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

Social scientists have long proposed that funerary rituals foster group cohesion. Our research rigorously tests and refines these long-standing qualitative claims by uncovering the causal mechanisms and quantifiable effects of this universal human behavior. We conducted two preregistered sequential studies following the national funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, exploring the psycho-social pathways to identity fusion and their impact on pro-group commitment among 1,869 British spectators. The initial study, involving 1,632 participants surveyed within two weeks of the funeral, validated predictions that intense sadness during the event correlated with heightened identity fusion and pro-group commitment. The subsequent longitudinal examination, involving 237 participants over 12 months, delved into the causal psycho-social pathways to identity fusion. As expected, the visceral quality of memories exerted a transformative effect on personal identity through processes of personal reflection, ultimately leading to identity fusion via perceived sharedness within the group.This research contributes to accumulating evidence that sharing emotionally intense dysphoric experiences with others, including viewing sacred rituals, leads to incredibly potent social bonding. 

Collective rituals involve coordinating intentions and synchronizing actions to align emotional states and social identities. However, the mechanics of achieving group-level synchrony is yet unclear. We report the results of a naturalistic study in the context of an Islamic congregational prayer that involves synchronous movement. We used wearable devices to capture data on body posture, autonomic responses, and spatial proximity to investigate how postural alignment and shared arousal intertwine during this ritual. The findings reveal a dual process at play: postural alignment appears to be more localized, with worshippers synchronizing their movements with their nearest neighbors, while physiological alignment operates on a broader scale, primarily driven by the central role of the religious leader. Our findings underscore the importance of interpersonal dynamics in collective gatherings and the role of physical co-presence in fostering connections among participants, with implications extending to our understanding of group dynamics across various social settings.

In this paper, I argue that embodied cognition helps to undermine the Humean dualism of facts and values. I draw on two contributions to embodied cognition, the concept of affordances (originally developed by Gibson) and the enactive approach (originally developed by Varela, Thompson and Rosch). Gibson argued that the perceiving animal would typically be engaged in some goal-directed activity, and he speaks in this context of the animal’s perception of “affordances,” i.e., value-laden opportunities in their environment. The enactive approach treats cognition as a dynamic system that arises from the interactions between an animal and its environment. Together, these two concepts open the door to a realist account of values. Insofar as religious practices are regimens for training participants in the perception of affordances, we can underaind them as helping people move from novice to competent to expert at recognizing real good and bad in the world. 

This study investigates predictors and consequences of identity fusion, a profound sense of unity with a group, towards Turkish citizens and Syrian refugees following the catastrophic earthquakes in Türkiye on February 6th, 2023. Surveys were administered in-person to 120 Turkish earthquake survivors in the most heavily impacted areas. Results revealed challenges in establishing relationships between emotional intensity, perceived sharedness, and identity fusion due to extreme emotional intensity during the earthquake. However, mean fusion levels significantly increased with perceived shared suffering, validating predictions. Identity fusion also predicted pro-group commitment, measured by volunteerism pledges of Turkish earthquake survivors. As expected, Turkish earthquake survivors exhibited higher pro-group commitment scores than their Syrian counterparts. The study contributes to understanding the complex dynamics of identity fusion in post-catastrophe contexts.

This paper analyzes CSR theories of SA attribution, and tests them through an online survey from 40 native Filipino speakers who currently reside in the Philippines. Preliminary data suggest that when gods are involved as the subject, they are coded with non-human case markers. We also see differences depending on whether gods are framed in Tagalog or English terms: human case markers are used for English terms for gods (Lord, God, Jesus, etc.) while non-human markers are used for Tagalog terms (Diyos, Panginnon, Hesus, etc.). Such findings support certain of CSR’s theories but also problematize the more universalizing claims around cross-cultural supernatural agent attribution at the heart of certain foundational CSR theories.

Between 30 and 60% of the population have experienced sense of presence in the form of a deceased loved one (Castelnovo et al., 2015; Elsaesser et al., 2021; Streit-Horn, 2011). These experiences (i.e., ghosts, grief or bereavement hallucinations) may generally be called after death experiences (ADEs). In this paper, I will argue that 4E cognition, or the notion that cognition is shaped by dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and physical/social environments, plays a key role in understanding the cognitive underpinnings and behavioral outcomes of ADEs as both universal experiences and those deemed religious or spiritual. Drawing from mixed-methods experimental research in cognitive neuroscience, I posit that sensorimotor manipulations of a bereaved individual may induce experiences of presence more readily than in non-bereaved. Based on clinical data and preliminary findings, I will explore how future research relying on 4E cognition principles may impact the study of religious or spiritual phenomenon.

While in many ways the political power of evangelicals seems stronger than ever, evangelicals are not immune to the trends of decline taking place across American Protestantism. This growing exodus has given rise to a subsection of former evangelicals known by a variety of names: exvangelicals, post-evangelicals, recovering evangelicals, un-fundamentalists, and more. This paper explores the relationship between ex-vangelical deconstruction and religious deconversion. How do former evangelicals understand their process of deconstruction, and how does it relate to deconversion? Does deconstruction itself constitute the process of evangelical deconversion, or is it just one framework to understanding a broader shift in personal identity? By studying former evangelical social media engagement and a set of ethnographic interviews I conducted in 2024, I will consider what ex-vangelical narratives reveal about the relationship between “deconstruction,” deconversion, and the shaping of religious/non-religious identity.

For the last few decades, generations of young evangelicals have found themselves as the subject of countless books, studies, and discussions as older evangelicals attempt to understand what might dissuade them from leaving the church at such alarming rates. At the same time, though they have been at the center of concern, their own voices and contributions have been sidelined to the fringes. This study enters the ongoing conversations among thousands of individuals who have left evangelicalism. Often labeled as “conscientious objectors,” these individuals have not abandoned evangelicalism to adopt another religion wholesale. They continue to congregate, albeit virtually, in seemingly endless conversations. This study engages these conversations to gain a better understanding of the ordinary theology beyond evangelicalism.

When former clergy -- once fully committed but now hesitant to serve or even attend church -- now self-identify as “spiritual but not religious,” does this qualify as an actual deconversion or just ydisillusionment? I have interviewed and done a qualitative analysis of thirty clergy, mostly Mainline Protestant, who have had difficult experiences and have left the ministry. I examine their backgrounds, church experience, and what work they are doing now. I pay special attention to their beliefs since Protestantism emphasizes the cognitive aspect of faith. Such an analysis shows that many former clergy interviewees have migrated over to beliefs very similar to the many non-religious SBNRs I previously interviewed and wrote about. The decline in Mainline Protestantism is clear but it is especially noteworthy when the most dedicated are leaving, changing their beliefs and self-identifying as SBNR. 

This paper thinks critically about the violence of digital archives and computational methods by engaging with the role they play in the erasure and flattening of marginal communities, advocating for a deceleration of digital archives. I place my methodological pitfalls from a computational project against the important theoretical work of archivist Dorothy Berry, art historian Jennifer Roberts, and scholars engaged in a post-colonial study of religion like Saba Mahmood and Tomoko Masuzawa to demonstrate the urgency of deceleration to prevent the further disenfranchisement of marginal communities. Reflecting on a computational project I conducted using Seventh-day Adventist periodicals on religious liberty from 1886 to 1919 to analyze positive rhetoric about the Catholic Church, I describe how my project and its shortcomings serve as a low-stakes example of the power in decelerating digital archives, and I use it to speak to the much higher stakes of digital work that involve marginal communities.

Media related to monks in Thailand provide much material for assembling digital archives. This presentation describes the use of monastic media within Thai popular culture to create two digital archives: 1) pictures of famous monks from temples and practitioners meant to generate faith, and 2) social media images of monks engaged in inappropriate behavior. I describe the process of selecting the photographs for these archives, and my research process, which involves collecting opinions and feelings from lay Buddhist focus group participants. In analyzing the opportunities and challenges of this methodology, I argue that archives derived from popular culture constitutes a way to easily receive comments and feedback from participants, providing a snapshot in time of a religious field, and a way to visually represent a research topic. I also look to future challenges creating a home for a publicly accessible digital archive of Buddhist monastic aesthetics.

This paper examines grief within white Christian discourse about antiblack violence in the United States. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s notion of affective economies, the paper tracks how grief—or an absence of grief—surfaces and conceptualizes “grief reminders” as a pastoral practice of affective conditioning and realignment. I argue that “grief reminders” occur when a faith leader identifies grief as both a necessary response to loss and as a theological and ethical imperative for the proper practice of faith. The paper interrogates how grief reminders work as affective scripts and relate to white Christian understandings of human personhood and grievable life. Methodologically, the analysis of digital artifacts undergirding this paper raises questions about how digital media is implicated in the circulation of religious affect and how religious scholars, and theologians in particular, can engage digital archives in their study of lived religion.

In the late nineteenth century, newspapers around the United States documented the emergence of many “new religious sects.” These movements were so pervasive that newspapers began to compile and joke about them for popular entertainment. Unfortunately, many of these groups have gone unrecorded by scholars due to the lack of archival materials. Using the 1895 “Zalma Angel” as a case study, this paper probes the utility of newspaper databases as a source for studying this trend within popular culture and the limitations built into the creation of these archives. Based in rural Missouri, the fragmentary accounts of the “Zalma Angel” movement varied considerably. From ridicule to limited descriptions, the circulation of details and tone of the reporting outlined normative American religious sensibilities. As a case study, the “Zalma Angel” demonstrates the limits of studying historical popular religion and the role that newspapers played in selectively constructing and obscuring fringe religions.

Ramon Llull is an extraordinary figure both as a Christian apologist and as a collater of the various streams of knowledge that converged in medieval Spain. Predating Marsilio Ficino's *prisca theologia* by a few hundred years, Llull sought to chart the hidden unity amongst the Abrahmic faiths despite their apparent diffusion. This esoteric universalism is a theme of Western esotericism that runs through the present, with both benign and not-so-benign historical outcomes. While pointing out what is noble and in accordance with Christian truth in his Jewish and Muslim interlocuters, Llull advocated for further crusades on the grounds of his "Art". Influenced by intellectual historian Tomoko Masuzawa, this paper is a contribution to the dialogue on Euro-Christian universalism and its aftereffects, for better or worse. 

Drawing on ethnographic research and digital data collection, this paper considers the entanglement between the esoteric philosophies of Rene Guénon, Julius Evola, and Aleksandr Dugin and far-right nationalist ideologues. Utilizing case studies of digital content produced by American converts to Russian Orthodoxy (and its political framings), I tease out how philosophically intolerant, anti-modern conceptions of the body and person—proliferated through memes, podcasts, and video streams—are intimately tied to understandings of traditionalism, racism, and the disciplinary structures of political authority in the 20th century European context. I show that the project of traditionalism espoused on far-right social media is not linked to primordial truths but rather to the 20th century philosophical conceptions of what counts as modern, right, wrong, true, false, salvific, or damning. In doing so, I contend that traditionalism provides the vocabulary to help alleviate far-right anxiety about rapid social change, economic crisis, and shifting political dynamics.

The proposed paper explores the complex relationship between esotericism, violence, and the far-right through the work and life of Savitri Devi Mukherji (1905-1982), also known as Maximani Portas and 'Hitler's priestess.' This critical discourse analysis focuses on her uniquely problematic ideology of violence which combines modern aryanism and radical Hindu nationalism with Malthusian 'deep ecology' and contempt for Christianity and Judaism. In doing so, I aim to highlight and contextualize her formative effect on violent international neo-Nazism and white nationalist politics, continuous from the mid-1960s onward. Through recently published data gathered from the digital *Savitri Devi Archive,* I follow her lasting global impact in spreading this antisemitic revisionist history (Figueira 2002). In addition, I also situate her influence within various contemporary esoteric, New Age, and environmentalist movements, especially through her religious eco-fascism which included devout reverence for Hitler, deified as an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu.

In the 2010s, Twitter rose in popularity as a digital space for theological dialogue, debate, and grandstanding. For feminist Christians, Twitter activism was a vital form of activism with real-world consequences that was motivated by theological ideas about God’s ethical expectations. I argue that social media platforms were spaces in which evangelical women who were marginalized based on their gender and who grew up with an emphasis on evangelism could “inverse evangelize” conservative evangelicals with progressive theologies and progressive politics. By focusing on one well-known Twitter user, Rachel Held Evans, in her posts relating to two famous men, John Piper and Mark Driscoll, I examine the way that feminist women used Twitter posts to push against the logic of patriarchal theology. This paper shows how Evans, a woman who had less institutional power than either Piper or Driscoll, used Twitter to contradict their viewpoints in view of an evangelical and post-evangelical public.

When the “these are for girls only” meme went viral on TikTok in 2021, many Muslim women in North America used the meme to create content that comically addresses the commentary they receive about their Islamic practice and the boundaries they’ve established around it. This paper focuses on the concept of naṣīḥa, understood to be a discursive mode of communal regulation in accordance with constructed ideals, in digital contexts. It examines several TikTok videos in which Muslim women address their audience about who is or is not authorized to offer social commentary on their Islamic practice on the basis of shared experience. I explore these videos as sites of contestation surrounding authority, arguing that these women use their videos to counter hegemonic conceptions of who has the authority to determine proper practice. How might focusing on the concept of naṣīḥa, or social commentary, complicate scholarly understandings of top-down models of Islamic authority? This paper attempts to address this question.

Over the last several years there has been a growing interest in popular culture on the modern-day witch. To contest the erasure of Afro-Indigenous spiritual perspectives, this paper looks at how digital sacredness the Instagram accounts of self-identified brujas of Afro-Caribbean descent. By creating digital sacred spaces that become the basis for their activism, the bruja’s social media presence acts against larger hegemonic structures, such as white supremacy, colonialism/imperialism, racism, and homophobia. By enabling the divine via social media the brujas are able to have a voice in the world that would seek to silence them. Their social platforms allow their voices to be easily amplified (read: go viral) in ways that did not exist before. Ultimately, this paper seeks to begin conversations on how digital media has transformed newer generations to engage with the cosmologies of Afro-Indigenous religiosity.

This paper examines the Roman Catholic sisters known as the Daughters of Saint Paul and their use of social media as part of their mission to use the media to evangelize. Through using modern forms, the Daughters of St. Paul emerge as leaders in Catholic media use. While their content challenges some stereotypes about Catholic nuns, their efforts seem primarily to serve recruitment goals, and their young millennial sisters are leading the efforts in making the nun life appear attractive to prospective future sisters that exist among their following. Through analyzing the Daughters of St. Paul’s use of Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube, this paper explores themes related to technology and religious traditions, technology and communal formation, virtual belonging, and politics and technology. Ultimately, while the Daughters of St. Paul are committed to using “new media,” they do so while preserving traditional aesthetics and messaging for the Catholic Church in America.

Philosophical approaches to Black aesthetics have included how Black human beings make meaning and see value in their everyday lives. The theorization of this cultural and social production has been essential to a philosophy of aesthetics, as shown through the work of Lewis R. Gordon and Paul C. Taylor. These philosophers have provided historical trajectories of Western philosophy and Black expressive culture to define blackness and racialization’s impact on how people show up in this world. Therefore, this paper seeks to come alongside Gordon and Taylor and explore the role of ancestor veneration in the project of Black value and meaning-making within technology. By drawing from womanist reflections on aesthetic interiority, I will examine the diasporic tradition of Southern Hoodoo on social media as a site for understanding how ancestors assist in the inner cultivation, transformation, and construction of individuals and communities.

This paper considers the idea of heterotopia through a small plot of land in Boulder, Colorado. Located in a floodplain, it transformed from a red light district in the 1880s to a site of ramshackle dwellings in the 1910s, then to a city park and public library. This transformation was aided by several catastrophic floods that destroyed brothels and saloons, and it was propelled by moralizing forces. Relying on newspapers, oral histories, city and national archives, and city government reports, this paper will engage in a critical conversation with heterotopia through a space on the outskirts of morality and traditional notions of religion. By examining the interplay between human-driven meaning-making and climate-related events, this microhistory narrates the efforts of social forces to define and control the floodplain but also unveils the environmental challenges, adaptations, and the interplay of sacred spaces in the face of climate-related shifts.

This co-authored paper offers a dialogic analyses of two U.S. American social institutions--early nineteenth century prisons and mid twentieth century sexual closets--at a key moment in their respective historical formation. Building on Michel Foucault's theorization "heterotopias," we analyze these sites as spaces of containment for perverse masculinities, with attention to these material spaces of containment as sedimentations of religious and non-religious imaginations, practices, and institutions. We explore, in particular, how religious imaginaries shape and are shaped by material spaces regarded as “secular.” These secular heterotopias, we argue, were and are materialized through particular Protestant discourses. At the same time, in the dialectic between the imagined and the materialized, they each produce yet another heterotopia--queer and spectral in form-- in which other worlds are imagined, thus queering the hetero of heterotopia. 

In Britain, a revival of Victorian era-style spiritualism is arguably underway. Yet, instead of seances or mediumship demonstrations in domestic homes, theatres, or the Spiritualist Church (as during the ‘golden age of spiritualism’), public houses (‘pubs’) have emerged as the latest collective space for contemporary spirit communication. Drawing on innovative ethnographic research, and engaging with Foucault's concept of heterotopia, we argue that pub psychic nights destabilise social norms and empower marginalised participants, as well as encourage reflection and the potential for real-time social change, especially for working-class women. The broadly accessible and commonplace nature of the British pub helps to scaffold and promote the development of alternative beliefs and practices, beyond more traditional locations for spirituality. Despite critiques, in a context where religious institutional affiliation has dramatically declined, pub psychic nights function with transformative potential and offer new spaces that combine spirituality with social change.

In this paper, I propose that a more theoretically promising understanding of the concept of ‘heterotopia’ is possible only if we attend to its utopian roots. To do this I examine the ambiguous utopia/heterotopia that is the Métis community of Ste Madeleine - a small settlement near where I grew up that was destroyed by the settler government. By re-theorizing ‘heterotopia’ conceptually from utopian studies, and particularly the work of Louis Marin, we arrive at a more theoretically useful concept for analyzing the actual places/spaces that Foucault gestures toward in his original articulation of the concept. 

The “psychedelic renaissance” has forced questions of cosmology to the foreground in allopathic medicine. Where they would have otherwise been treated as incidental, mystical experiences have suddenly become central to treatment. While providers attempt to build effective protocols for the use of chemical agents like psilocybin, foundational medical literature continues to dismiss the Indigenous practitioners from which these agents were expropriated. This paper will look to Mixteca wisewoman Maria Sabina’s traditional practices as a standard, using a ritual-focused framework of relationality to evaluate current protocols for the allopathic use of psilocybin. By comparing traditional Indigenous and allopathic practices, I will argue that skillful engagement with cosmology is prerequisite for effective work with psilocybin. In line with recent calls to respect Indigenous traditions, I will close by suggesting serious amendment for allopathic medicine’s current mode of engagement with plant entheogens and derivatives such as psilocybin.

The salient inquiry offered in the call for papers invites reflection on the constellation of psychedelic medicine/medicalization, culture, and spirituality (as differentiated from religion) and relationship among them. At the heart of this constellation is the relationship between healing and spirituality. In this paper, we will explore four forms of psychedelic holding practices: administrators/distributors, sitters, assisted psychotherapists, and curanderos. Each of these four forms require different skills, qualities of presence, spiritual partnerships and pair with different medicines. As we move forward in our collective awareness and capacity, it is not sufficient to lump all consciousness medicines under the single umbrella of “psychedelics” if we are to be clear on our intention for working with them, the setting in which they are administered, and the skill set required by the practitioner for safe and effective use—whether for spiritual growth or healing of suffering.

In 1957, Gordon Wasson published an article called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” in Life magazine where he described his ecstatic experiences in a healing ceremony led by the indigenous shamaness María Sabina. In doing so, Wasson revealed the millennial secrets of the Mazatec shamanic tradition to the Western world. The article led to foreigners invading Huautla de Jiménez—a poor, small and remote town in the mountains of Oaxaca—in search of God. They disrupted the daily lives of the locals and profaned sacred mushrooms by failing to respect Mazatec customs and rituals. Later in her life, Sabina lamented introducing Wasson to her ancestral practices. This paper introduces the audience to the initiation and magico-religious healing of María Sabina to contextualize her critique of foreigners’ use of sacred mushrooms. It argues that centering Sabina’s voice provides a basis for conversations about reparations for exploitation of indigenous sacred medicines.