Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

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What does it mean to teach theology and religion in death-dealing, dehumanizing contexts – i.e. prison? Reflecting upon years of experiences with teaching in carceral spaces, the panelists will explore the ways that a particular context helps reimagine the purpose of education and the role of teachers and learners. Given hooks and Freire’s imaginative stance that teaching must be transgressive, what does it take to bring emancipatory education to people who are in the correction system? This panel will engage the recently released books of Sarah F. Farmer’s Restorative Hope: Creating Space for Connection in Women’s Prisons and Rachelle Green’s Learning to Live: Prison, Pedagogy, and Theological Education discussing the ways teaching in prison raises new questions for educators of theology and religion. Theological education, and those practicing liberative pedagogy, must be willing grapple with these 21st century questions. 

Join the Publications Committee to network with our Oxford University Press book series editors.

In this third year of the seminar, the focus is on missiological currents within the Anglican Communion and how these have contributed to complex identity formations and "operative ecclesiologies" in diverse Anglican contexts. A first session on the theme, immediately preceding this one, is described separately. This session will feature three scholars with recent publications relevant to this theme who will converse with one another and with seminar participants and attendees about the missiological implications of their work. These are: Gary Dorrien, author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism (Baylor UP, 2024), Kwok Pui Lan, author of The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective (Seabury, 2023), and Jennifer C. Snow, author of Mission, Race, and Empire: The Episcopal Church in Global Context (Oxford UP, 2023). This session will also include a business meeting for planning Year 4 of the seminar.

Dr. Jon Ivan Gill has put together a text engaging with a true nuanced area of Hip Hop, culture, and religion. Based on the categories of mainstream philosophy of religion, we must ask the question if said categories are adequate to describe the conceptual frameworks of traditions not philosophically dependent on Western theistic understandings, such as religious traditions and philosophies of life emerging from the continent of Africa and appearing in the United States, the Caribbean, North, Central, and South America, and Europe. This session will have respondents engage the work of Dr. Gill and his latest text.

This roundtable conversation about Architecture, Theology, and Ethics: Making Architectural Design More Just by Elise M. Edwards (Lexington Books, 2024) discusses emerging scholarship on spatial constructions of religion and the production and use of everyday spaces through architectural design practices. Grounded in liberationist, feminist, and womanist thought, Architecture, Theology, and Ethics makes a compelling case for architecture’s relevance to Christian ethics, aesthetics, and theology. Edwards argues that architectural design can be a form of prophetic action that everyday people undertake when making choices that shape the spaces they inhabit. The roundtable brings together four readers of the book to reflect on its significance for Black life and culture, theological ethics, religious architecture, urban infrastructure and redevelopment, and gentrification, followed by a response from the author. This interdisciplinary conversation reflects the book’s approach as well as current trends in religion and cities scholarship and community-engaged work.

The Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. Unit, in conjunction with the Womanist Approaches to the Study of Religion Unit, is excited to host this roundtable on AnneMarie Mingo's 2024 University of Illinois Press publication, Have you Got Good Religion? Black Women's Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. From the Publisher: "What compels a person to risk her life to change deeply rooted systems of injustice in ways that may not benefit her? The thousands of Black Churchwomen who took part in civil rights protests drew on faith, courage, and moral imagination to acquire the lived experiences at the heart of the answers to that question. AnneMarie Mingo brings these forgotten witnesses into the historical narrative to explore the moral and ethical world of a generation of Black Churchwomen and the extraordinary liberation theology they created." In this session, our panelists will engage and think with Mingo in relation to the arguments of the text. AnneMarie Mingo will offer a response. Co-sponsored with Womanist Approaches to the Study of Religon Unit.

In Falling in Love with Nature: The Values of Latinx Catholic Environmentalism, Amanda Baugh tells the story of American environmentalism through a focus on Spanish-speaking Catholics, and in doing so uncovers a range of environmental actors who have been hidden in plain sight. She offers the concept of la tierra environmentalism to describe an embodied ethic of living lightly on the earth that is rooted in a sense of love and respect for God, fellow humans, and all of God’s creation. Its primary locus is in the home, but its concerns radiate outward and include awareness of human struggles and global ecological issues. This session brings together scholars from Catholic studies, the study of Latinx religions, and other fields, to discuss Baugh’s work in the context of broader themes in the study of Catholicism, environmental ethics, Latinx religions, and religion in public life. The session will include a response from the author, and time for audience engagement.

This Author-Meets-Critics session is a roundtable on Carlos Ulises Decena's Circuits of the Sacred: A Black Latinx Faggotology (Duke, 2023).