2016 Annual Meeting Summary

We were so glad to have 245 of you at the 2016 SECSOR Annual Meeting, held March 4-6 in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Marriott Perimeter Center.
Our 20 sections convened a total of 50 sessions.
The theme for the meeting was “Interpretation in Context.” Thank you to our plenary speaker, Dr. Timothy K. Beal, from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. His address was titled “Thief in the Night of the Living Dead: Revelation, Apocalypticism, and the Emergence of Evangelical Horror Culture.”
We also heard presentations from the regional presidents of AAR and SBL. The SBL regional president, Dr. Margaret Aymer of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, delivered an address titled “Outrageous, Audacious, Courageous, Willful: Reading the Enslaved Girl of Acts 12.” The AAR regional president, Dr. Anne Blue Wills of Davidson College, presented “Unofficially Official: Telling Clergy-Wives’ Stories – the Case of Ruth Bell Graham.”
The AAR graduate student award was won by Won Chul Shin of Emory University. His paper was “Sing Broken Hallelujah: A Critical Analysis on Incarcerated Women’s Moral Injury and the Role of the Religious Practice of Singing in the Healing of Moral Injury.” The SBL graduate student award was won by Carson Bay of Florida State University for the paper “Austin on Paul: Reading ἀνάθεμα ἔστω in Galatians 1:8–9 with Speech-Act Theory.” The undergraduate prize was won by Elizabeth Hardt of Transylvania University. Her paper was “‘ISIS Brides’: Western Neo-Orientalist Narratives of Female Terrorism.”
The 2017 Annual Meeting will be held on March 3-5 at the Raleigh Marriott Crabtree Valley Hotel, 4500 Marriott Drive, Raleigh, NC, 27612. The theme will be “Utopia/Dystopia.”

Sections:
AAR Black Cultures in the Study of Religion
AAR Constructive Theologies
AAR Ethics, Religion & Society
AAR History of Christianity
AAR Islam
AAR Judaism
AAR Method & Theory in the Study of Religion
AAR Philosophy of Religion
AAR Religion & Ecology
AAR Religion & Law
AAR Religion, Culture & the Arts
AAR Religions in America
AAR Religions of Asia
AAR Teaching & Learning Religion
AAR Women, Gender & Religion
ASOR Archeology & the Ancient World
SECSOR Undergraduate Research
SBL Bible & Modern Culture
SBL Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
SBL New Testament