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!
Awards and Accomplishments
Thomas Borchert Awarded 2026 NEH Grant
Project Director: Thomas Borchert; Vicki Brennan (co-project director); Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst (co-project director)
Project Title: Religion in Vermont: Religion, Secularism, and Civic Belonging
Project Description: A two-year curriculum development project on religion in Vermont.
In the News/Public Scholarship
Meghan J. Clark Featured in Major International, Vatican, and Global Media Conversations
Dr. Clark was interviewed by DW News (Deutsche Welle) on Pope Leo’s visit to Turkey and Lebanon, offering expert analysis on the theological and geopolitical significance of the visit.
Books and Publications
AAR Rocky Mountain-Great Plains Region
Journal of Auto-Academia
Announcing the inaugural volume of the Journal of Auto-Academia (JOAA) started by graduate students in the Joint Doctoral Program in the Study of Religion at the University of Denver & Iliff School of Theology (JDP).
The inaugural volume features 10 papers by student-scholars from several institutions all covering a range of topics and emphasizing JOAA’s vision for auto-academia, as well as four short introductory pieces from the editors who are current and former AAR members: Robert Monson (he/him), Sho McClarence (they/them), Dennis Saavedra Carquin-Hamichand (he/him), and David C. Kemp (they/them).
The journal has been a passion for many students in the JDP who have worked together to build this project for over a year. It is a is a single-blind, collaboratively reviewed, open-access, scholarly journal managed by the program and its Graduate Student Association.
Maxwell Kennel
(Editor) The Anabaptists: A Comedy in Two Acts by Friedrich Dürrenmatt;
(Editor) Conrad Grebel, Critic of Pious Facades by Hans-Jürgen Goertz
The Anabaptists: A Comedy in Two Acts
The Anabaptists is a rewritten version of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s early drama, Es steht geschrieben (It is Written). In contrast to the original version from 1947, The Anabaptists is sharper and more concise, but no less powerful. By drawing on the historical events of the Anabaptist takeover of the city of Münster in 1533-1534, Dürrenmatt produced a cautionary parable about human deceivability.
Conrad Grebel (1498-1526), Critic of Pious Facades
“In this brief study, Conrad Grebel (1498-1526), Critic of Pious Facades, historian Hans-Jürgen Goertz fascinatingly portrays the short life of a nonconformist, idiosyncratic, and radical figure who was first a comrade in the Zurich Reformation and later became one of its fiercest critics. “Inclined toward evil signs by nature, he had always sought some tragedy,” Ulrich Zwingli wrote to Joachim Vadian, Grebel’s brother-in-law, adding, “Now he has found it.”
Goertz’s biographical sketch shows how Conrad Grebel – born in Zurich as the son of a politically influential patrician – ended up persecuted and socially marginalized, despite having “caused one of the greatest scandals of the Christian West: the first adult baptism.” Long before Mennonites would look to him as one of the founders of Anabaptism, Grebel lived and died as a critic of pious facades. This biography – translated by Christina Moss and edited by Maxwell Kennel for the Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies published by Pandora Press – provides the most reliable, scholarly report on his life currently available. It is published in the year 2025, following the 500-year anniversary of the first Anabaptist baptisms in 1525.”
Wesley N. Barker
Desire Beyond Identity: Irigaray and the Ethics of Embodiment
“Arguing for a radical return to desire in Luce Irigaray’s thought, this book decisively intervenes in impasses around questions of identity that continue to confound contemporary discourse and politics. By prioritizing the disruptive potential of desire rather than sexual difference, Wesley N. Barker extends Irigaray’s relational theory of becoming into new territory, opening generative, often surprising pathways for conversation with philosophies of race, queer theory, political theology, decolonial theory, and posthuman thought. As a source for reimagining materiality, desire is pulled free of a phallocentric, white, colonial framework and mobilized toward a philosophy of living capable of addressing the twenty-first century’s multifaceted crises of identity, representation, and embodiment.”
Carolynne Hitter Brown
Singing through Struggle: Music, Worship, and Identity in Postemancipation Black Churches
“Singing through Struggle: Music, Worship, and Identity in Postemancipation Black Churches offers an innovative look at the vital role music and worship played in nurturing Black citizenship and identity during the Reconstruction era. In such border cities as Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, the church was where newly emancipated migrants and members of the free Black community merged identities, priorities, and experiences through a process of cultural negotiation. Music, as a sign of Black achievement and as a genuine expression of identity, produced both bastions and battlegrounds in the fight for democracy.
The music of Black churchgoers, singing together in sanctuaries as well as in homes, schools, and outdoors, expressed resistance to uplift ideologies within and to white supremacy without. Even while using hymns and music of the European sacred tradition, members infused the songs they chose with new meanings relevant to their evolving concerns and situations. Drawing on fresh archival sources, Singing through Struggle sheds light on the unexplored gap in the study of African American religious music between slavery and the Great Migration, demonstrating the continuous stream of Black creativity and dignity that existed in religious music making between gospel music and the spirituals.
This close-up investigation of three Black congregations draws out previously forgotten stories of men and women who understood church music as key to shaping a collective purpose and civic identity. Their stories demonstrate how faith, music, and ritual gave the Black community means for exploring a deeply complex and ever-changing reality.”
Robert M. Geraci
Futureproofing Humanity: Existential Risk and the Technomyths of Human Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Future among the Stars
“Asteroids and nuclear war, climate change and artificial intelligence…the universe is a dangerous place. In response to these and other “existential risks,” 21st century futurists claim that only extraordinary investment in technology can save humanity from extinction. Thanks to advances in genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, urban design, and spaceflight, futurists hope that we will transcend earthly life, becoming immortal and traveling to distant stars.
Futureproofing Humanity offers a provocative new reading on this narrative of existential risk and the modern hope for technological salvation. We do, indeed, need a mythical view for our modern world. But to futureproof our species – to ensure we live for centuries and millennia to come – requires a responsible myth, one committed to our shared human (and possibly posthuman) civilization.”