Animals and Religion at AAR 2025
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Animals and Religion at AAR 2025
11/12/2025
Navigating the Program Book for the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) can be a daunting and overwhelming experience. With hundreds of units, panels, and papers, it is possible to miss sessions that closely align with one’s interests. This is unfortunate because for many fields, such as Animals and Religion, the annual meeting offers a rare opportunity to engage deeply and in-person with peers working on shared specialized topics.
This year, I was honored to be selected for the steering committee of the Animals and Religion Unit. This Unit
addresses the study of animals and religion and seeks to engage scholars of religion with the emergent field of animal studies . . . We value papers that attend to real animals alongside theoretical constructs, imagery, or representations pertaining to them, and papers that attend to intersectionality with race, gender, sexuality, disability and other matters of justice.
The steering committee is responsible for reviewing, discussing, and selecting proposed papers, panels, and roundtables. In this blog post, I offer a preview of the exciting work featured in the Animals and Religion Unit at this November’s conference in Boston.
First, a panel titled “Entangled Freedoms: Ethics & More Than Human Animals” asks: Do all species have the right to be free? How has religion shaped the complex notions of “freedom” that inform the human relationship with the more-than-human world? The four papers on this panel wrestle with the reality that human freedom is always entangled with other forms of life. In “Mercy Killing and Self-Sacrificing Deer,” Colin Weaver examines the ethical rationalization techniques used by Evangelical hunters. Next, Beth Quick’s “Creaturely Labor and the Problem of Christian Vocation” explores how problematic interpretations of vocation are oppressive for humans and nonhuman animals. In “A Cosmic Chorus of Praise,” Sarra Tlili argues that while the Qur’an affirms that all of creation glorifies God, the hadith expands upon this theme, presenting animals as active participants in devotional acts, as believers in Muhammad’s prophethood, and as morally accountable beings in the afterlife. Lastly, Neil Messer, in “Evolution, Eschatology, and Animal Ethics,” explores the ethical implications of a current debate about evolution, natural evil, and the goodness of God.
Second, a lightning roundtable featuring a mix of eight leading and emerging scholars discusses “Beyond Personhood: New Ways to Imagine Our Solidarity with Animals.” The goal of the roundtable is to share a range of approaches to reimagining and reexperiencing humans’ relationships with other animals. Presenters will bring a diversity of worldviews to the table, including Indigenous, Buddhist, Jewish, and Christian, along with their own personal experiences as and with animals. The roundtable will engage issues such as the advantages and disadvantages of various “personhood” framings of human and nonhuman rights, conceptions and limitations of “sentience” and “sentient beings” across religious traditions, the problem of exploited human labor in industrial animal farming operations, and interspecies communication and legibility.
Finally, the Animals and Religion Unit features a panel co-sponsored with the Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit, titled “Disruption and Renewal: Exploring Indigenous Human-Animal Relationalities.” This panel, co-organized by Maharshi Vyas and myself, explores Indigenous perspectives on human-animal relationality, highlighting how colonial forces have disrupted traditional forms of kinship, care, and ecological engagement. The panel centers Indigenous worldviews and histories to emphasize alternative ways of being and knowing. In “Muskrat is Boss of the Land: The Earth-diver Myth and Implications for Decolonization,” David Walsh explores the earth diver motif in Dene traditions of northern Canada, illustrating how Indigenous cosmogony informs ecological and political relationships with the nonhuman world. The next two papers, Melissa Coles’s “The Relationship between Indigenous Communities, Oblate Missionaries, and Horses in the Nineteenth-Century North West” and Danae Jacobsen’s “‘Ride a Man’s Saddle’: Horses, Nuns, and Indigenous Horse Culture in Montana,” focus on Indigenous and settler engagements with horses in North America, examining shifting horse cultures within missionary encounters, and the equestrian practices of settler nuns in Bitterroot Salish territory. Lastly, Maharshi Vyas turns to the Bhil Adivasi communities of Gujarat in “Sacrifice becomes ‘Violence’?: Changing Attitudes Towards Animal Life among Indigenous Communities of India”, analyzing evolving discourses on animal sacrifice as shaped by Jain, Vaishnava, and bhakti influences on Bhil attitudes towards killability of animals. I will serve as both presider and respondent for this co-sponsored panel.
Overall, the November 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion promises to showcase the dynamic state of the field of Animals and Religion. Through our Vegan Studies Initiative, Arihanta Institute strives to contribute to the evolution of this field, both inside and outside of the academy.
Jonathan Dickstein, Tirthankara Shreyansanath Endowed Assistant Professor of Jain and Vegan Studies at Arihanta Institute, completed his PhD in Religious Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He specializes in South Asian Religions, Animals and Religion, and Comparative Ethics. His current work focuses on Jainism and contemporary ecological issues, extending into Critical Animal Studies, Food Studies, and Diaspora Studies.
Professor Dickstein is the lead organizer of the Vegan Studies Initiative at Arihanta Institute. arihantainstitute.org/vegan-studies
Additional articles by Professor Dickstein: