Just a day before the world's largest gathering of religious scholars would kick off November 22 in Boston, the leadership of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature—the academics devoted to deep research on faith, philosophy, theology, and society ancient and modern—called for an “emergency session” on “ICE enforcement in sacred spaces,” for next afternoon.

This urgent issue had muscled into the listings of more than 900 sessions planned at the Hynes Convention Center and adjacent hotels from Saturday to midday November 25. It spoke directly to a major theme for the gathering, which was "freedom" in all its manifestations—religious, academic, social, political, and more.

"We are concerned about, and oppose, plans of ICE to detain/arrest people in places of worship, or other infringements on religious freedom," the AAR board said in a statement endorsed by the SBL council. Their statement and the session schedule were immediately uploaded to the joint meeting's web app where more than nearly 7,800 attendees were tracking their schedules through meeting rooms and a massive 85-booth book exposition.

Dozens of scholars attended the event Saturday, dubbed "an emergency town hall," cochaired by historian Lloyd Barba, an Amherst assistant professor specializing in American race, ethnicity, and immigration; and Jennifer Scheper Hughes, a history professor at the University of California, Riverside. It focused on steps academic institutions can take "to protect the most vulnerable in our communities." People were also pointed toward places at the convention where they distributed several thousand Red Cards— information cards in English and Spanish created by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, which they could share back home "to help people assert their rights and defend themselves against ICE’s unconstitutional actions," according to the announcement.

Behind—and beyond—the headlines

This was far from the only session dealing with headline issues and controversies such as Christian nationalism, gender identity, academic freedom, antisemitism, and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Mitri Raheb, a Palestinian Christian scholar, author, university president from Bethlehem, and panelist for the session "Theology After Gaza" and another session on immigration, incarceration, and detention, observed that in many years of attending the AARSBL annual meetings, he "never saw so much interest before in the Palestinian perspective."

He told the latter panel that one in five Palestinians who live in the West Bank have been held at some point in Israeli detention and many smuggle out letters written inside the paper wrappers of cigarettes. Raheb, who is also a Lutheran pastor, pointed out that "much of the Bible is letters from prison"—from Joseph and Jeremiah in the Torah to the Paul in the New Testament—extolling a God who liberates.

Another speaker on the panel, Gregory Cuéllar, a professor of Old Testament at Austin Seminary and an expert on religion in immigrant detention along the U.S./Mexico border, is working on a book about pastors in detention. He described how they center their ministry on the story of Joseph in Genesis, who was sold into slavery, imprisoned, and yet "always aware that God was with him."

AAR President Leela Prasad, the Brown University religious studies professor who set the freedom theme, led several sessions devoted to it. She invited four university scholars engaged in struggling for academic freedom to talk about "strategies and choices that make hope and freedom possible."

Making 'hope' a verb

Earlier this year, tenured professor James Bowley was fired from his post as chairman of religious studies at Millsaps College for an email he sent to students. In the wake of the 2024 election, he wrote that they might want to "mourn and process this racist fascist country.” Bowley detailed the experience and concluded that only by banding together can people face authoritarian pressures aimed at academia. He called "solidarity as a strategy of hope," by which he meant publicly "standing up for faculty everywhere."

Larissa Carneiro, an instructor in religious studies at Duke, spoke on the "precarious nature of funding and job security for non-tenured faculty." Thought religious studies is among the humanities programs at risk when universities squeeze their budgets by eliminating programs, she argued that it is a vital, interdisciplinary field that "challenges students to master complex systems of meaning, ethics, and culture."

Interspersed throughout the meetings were special sessions such as one honoring Coretta Scott King's years in Boston where she met Martin Luther King Jr. on a blind date, a theatrical performance of classic prose and poetry by the New York based Theater of War, and the Hymn Society of the U.S. and Canada gave an evening of song at Boston's Old South Church, where Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams once worshipped. Dozens of sessions addressed the role of music in Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist practice.

As the meetings wound down midday Tuesday, many of the publishers in the book exposition donated their display copies to the Theological Book Network. The TBN delivers the valuable textbooks, commentaries, and research volumes to stock libraries in Christian seminaries and schools in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America, where students and scholars have few research resources.

Next year, the AARSBL joint meeting will be in November in Denver. The incoming president of AAR is Laurel Schneider, a research professor at Boston University School of Theology and author or coauthor of a dozen books including Queer Soul, Queer Theology: Ethics and Redemption in Real Life, with Thelathia Nikki Young (Routledge, 2021). Schneider announced her theme for the Denver meeting —"The Future"—on the AAR website.

"Scholars of religion are uniquely positioned to reflect critically on the modes and capacities of religious and spiritual stories and practices, ancient and new, local and global, to imagine futures beyond despair on the one hand, or superficial hope on the other," Schneider wrote. "We know how to take seriously the narratives, traditions, and practices that have opened up or delimited our horizons of possibility."