August 2026 Member Notes

Please join us in celebrating our members on their professional news and accomplishments!

As a reminder, AAR publishes member accomplishments including new publications, award announcements, and media mentions. Share your wins with us!

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Awards and Accomplishments

Meghan Clark Awarded 2026 Monika Hellwig Award for Excellence in Teaching from the College Theology Society

The Monika Hellwig Award recognizes the importance of teaching by honoring outstanding teachers of theology in higher education. Nominees for this year’s award all evinced outstanding performance as classroom teachers; innovative and exceptionally effective teaching methods, courses and curricular materials; and an abiding commitment to their professional identities as teachers of theology. This year’s recipient is Meghan Clark.

From one of her students:

“She does not just teach theology; she makes it habitable. As a gay student, I vividly remember entering her classroom as a sophomore, expecting to negotiate my identity against the Catholic tradition in which I was raised. Instead, I found radical hospitality made pedagogical: a space where my experience was not “a footnote” to be tolerated, but a site of genuine theological inquiry and a place of Revelation.”

 

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Books and Publications

Mátyás Bódi

How Somali Muslims Become Christians in Europe: A Theory of Religious Conversion and Disclosure

Somali Christians constitute one of the world’s most persecuted religious minorities, yet their experiences have received remarkably little scholarly attention. This book offers the first in-depth examination of conversion from Islam to Christianity among Somalis and presents the first empirically grounded theory explaining how individuals in the Global North navigate this transition and eventually disclose their new faith to Muslim relatives and communities.

Focusing on Somali converts living in the United Kingdom and Sweden – the two European countries with the largest Somali immigrant populations – the study sheds light on the complex and often precarious process by which individuals move from initial doubts to open commitment. It not only traces the stages of this journey but also highlights the moral dilemmas, intellectual challenges, social dynamics, and practical decisions that shape a convert’s path. By exploring both internal struggles and external pressures, this book provides a rare and nuanced account of what it means to leave Islam for Christianity.

This volume will be of interest to scholars of religion and migration, leaders in Muslim communities, Christian workers ministering among Somali and other Muslim-background populations, as well as policymakers and human rights professionals. How Somali Muslims Become Christians in Europe invites deeper reflection on the lived experience of religious freedom in contemporary societies.

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Karen Martinson Cherwien

Rewiring Human Spirituality: Cultivating Pneumaplasticity in a Culture of Fear

This book details the concept of pneumaplasticity, and applies it to the human spiritual experience. The author highlights fear’s role in cultivating rigid spirituality, and describes its current impact. She identifies and expounds upon pneumaplasticity as an essential factor in rewiring human spirituality today. This work provides practical examples and insight for interfaith spiritual care providers and clergy to utilize within their scopes of practice. Implementing a broad and flexible approach, pneumaplasticity provides a means for human beings to identify and rewire our fear, so it does not devolve into unhealthy or violent expressions, and can serve as energy for emotional and spiritual growth. As human beings learn to cultivate our pneumaplasticity, we will begin to also rewire our fear, and to embrace our full potential. We will begin to affirm our common humanity, to discover new ways of forming community, and to articulate new and renewed senses of meaning and purpose.