Friday, October 31 (at the John Evans Center)

4-5pm: Check-In

5:30-6:30pm: Keynote Speaker: Marilyn McCord Adams

6:30pm: Reception

7:30pm: Visiting graduate student dinner

 

Saturday, November 1 (all panels at the Hagstrum Room, University Hall 201)

8:30am: Breakfast/coffee

9-11am: Sacred Wildernesses Panel

• Abel Gomez, University of Missouri, Columbia, “Offerings to the Kindreds: Druids, Ritual, and Nature”
• Allison Huggins, Yale Divinity School, “John Muir: Theologian of the Wilderness”
• Elana Jefferson, Emory University, “‘The Leaves that Our Ancestors Put Together Will Never Be Undone’: Towards a Reevaluation of Natural Religion”
• James F. Pierce, University of Virginia, “Wilderness as chora: Environmental Ethos in the Śākta Reappraisal of Sāṃkhya”

11-11:30am: Break

11:30am-1:30pm: Where Religion Takes Place Panel

• Nikki Cox, California State University Northridge, “Tangible Communitas: A Folkloric Investigation of Community at the Los Angeles Wisdom Tree”
• Andrew Sinclair Hudson, University of Pennsylvania, “Brush Arbors: Pentecostal Space, Place, and Time”
• Emily Wright, Tulane University, “‘My Mother Prayed in the Wilderness’ and ‘Away Down Yonder by the River’s Banks’: Slave Women and Sacred Space in Antebellum Mississippi”

1:30pm-3pm: Lunch Break

3-5pm: Food, Purity, and the Body Panel

• Jaimie Gunderson, University of Texas at Austin, “Ingesting God / Ingesting Sameness: Manichaean Food Practices and the Modern Self”
• Isobel Johnston, Arizona State University, “Jewish Purity Laws as a Template for Environmental Consciousness”
• Brenna Keegan, Duke University, “Eco-Halal: Negotiating Religious Authority in an Environmental Age”
• Adrienne Krone, Duke University, “Eco-Kosher: An Ethical Approach to Kashrut with Counterculture Roots and Contemporary Branches”

5-5:30pm: Break

5:30-6:30pm: Keynote Speaker 2: Leigh Eric Schmidt (at the John Evans Center)

6:30pm: Reception

7:30pm: Visiting graduate student dinner

 

Sunday, November 2 (at the Hagstrum Room, University Hall 201)

8:30am: Breakfast/coffee

9-11am: Nature, Politics, and Action Panel

• Meredith F. Coleman-Tobias, Emory University, “Po(r)table Ritual: Sobonfu Somé and ‘Walking for Water’”
• Alex Sieber, Claremont School of Theology, “Totem and Tension at the Top of the Terrene”
• Jeffrey Wheatley, Florida State University/Northwestern University, “Refining the Missionary Field: Nature, Catholic Missions, and American Expansion”
• Lucas Wright, University of Nottingham, “The Tragic Constitution of Nature: Bloch’s Subversive Politics, Job, and the Fall Narrative”

11-11:15am: Break

11:15-12:30pm: Keynote Speaker 3: Dyan Elliot

12:30-1:30pm: Lunch Break

1:30pm: Optional Site Visit to the Bahai Temple in Wilmette (meet at the Arch)