In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

What are we to make of accounts of paranormal communication between human beings and plants? In this essay, I read firsthand accounts of such communications, which are common, even in cultural contexts that have no traditional framework to explain or account for them. The content of these accounts is diverse but consistent: most often, these experiences (re)establish plants as subjects of moral status and human ethical concern. “Unverifiable” as they may be, accounts of paranormal communication with plants suggest a radical contiguity between "enchantment"—to borrow Weber’s term—and ethics. 

When we listen to a great song, says Nick Cave, “what we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it.” This audacity is the primary attribute of a comparative religious category I call “efficacious ritual song.” This category emerges from three autoethnographic ritual contexts: the Hindu folk practice of chanting for the dying; Jewish recitations for the dead in the pre-burial rite of tahara; and Shipibo Amazonian singing for healing non-natives in plant medicine ceremonies. In each case, song theurgically invokes a divine non-human agent to restore spiritual wholeness out of (psycho)somatic damage. This paper considers three interrelated aspects of efficacious ritual song: 1) its contextual mythological emergences from non-human materialities; 2) its ethnomusicological attributes, including methods of vocal masking; and 3) its protocols for calling forth divine non-human agents and vocally manifesting them: the human voice becomes acoustic flesh.

Completed more than two decades ago, Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos quartet of novels—Hyperion (1989), The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Endymion (1995), and The Rise of End­ymion (1997)—offers timely perspective on contemporary geopolitics by juxtaposing cruel excesses of self-serving powers with the life-giving value of human love. His imagining of a universal force of empathy, mystically experienced across the reaches of space, offers a welcome counterweight to current claims that “empathy is a sin,” while his elevation of environmental concerns speaks to cultural clashes over the nature of value and the value of nature. His vision of still-evolving humanity draws on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in projecting the potential transcendence of human limits, including through human and AI convergence. Humanity’s future, Simmons argues, depends on embracing forms of freedom that acknowledge the power of human connection while rejecting those that divide and oppress.

This paper details the profound impact of science fiction on NRMs, with a focus on the 1980s children’s cartoon Thundercats and how it has become fetishized, and even heralded, by NRMs based upon starseed ontology as a thinly disguised metaphor for an intergalactic feline race called the Lyrans. These starseed NRMs promote an intergalactic feline exogenesis, arguing that the Lyrans are the first bipedal beings, whom all sentient hominoid beings stem from. The more people start believing in Lyran starseeds the more they are acknowledging the uncanny similarities with their feline intergalactic ancestors and the Thundercats, questioning whether the cartoon was made consciously or subconsciously to mimic this Lyran ontology. In this paper I will analyze the specific correlation between fiction-based inspiration and these growing feline starseed NRMs, arguing that they offer an epistemological framework for a new creature theology, which promotes an intergalactic feline mysticism and ontology. 

In the seventh chapter of his Kāvyamīmāṃsā Rājaśekhara describes the different kinds of speech spoken by various celestial and mythological beings. The list includes the progeny of Brahmā, ṛṣis, vidyādharas, gandharvas, and serpents (Skt.: bhaujaṅgamam). Interestingly, another category of being is labeled yoginīgata (“abiding with yoginīs”). Rājaśekhara describes the speech of yoginīs as “a string of words with deep meaning, abounding in compounds and metaphors, and abiding within doctrine and convention.” However, who was Rājaśekhara referring to, divine mythological beings or their followers? What about human women, like Lakṣmīṅkarā? This paper will address this question by examining several texts attributed to divine female beings and teachers, will examine their style and content in light of Rājaśekhara’s comments. By so doing this paper will investigate how well an important alaṅkāraśāstra theorist was acquainted with Tantric traditions, and what insight his works might have on the style of the latter. 

This paper examines the role of mother goddesses and yoginīs in the so-called Śākteya Tantra of Kerala. The traditions of the Śākteya communities in Kerala were profoundly influenced by Kashmiri Śaivism, yogic traditions and local magical cults (mantravāda). The term Śākteya refers to a constellation of interconnected traditions in Kerala centred on the worship of divine female beings and involving rituals of possession and transgressive ceremonies that have their roots in early Krama and Śrīvidyā ritualism. The paper shows the roles of the female divine beings invoked in the Śākteya traditions in Kerala and how they represent the various concepts of the power of the divine. Based on anthropological data from fieldwork in Kerala and my reading of the Śākteya paddhati manuscripts belonging to one of the tantric families from Kozhikode, the paper aims to shed more light on this complex ritual system of goddess worship.

As powerful Tantric deities, yoginis have energies far beyond their times. While they are believed to have lived in the 6th-9th centuries, evidence of their importance in contemporary times exists in various forms. Over time, yoginis have seeped into spaces of tantric as well as non-tantric practitioners, even if often unaware (while people today chant to yoginis, they are not always knowledgeable about the meaning or power behind the prayers). This presentation looks at past yoginis and their importance today. It uses several methods of understanding yogini powers: 1. Transmission of philosophy of sangha and strategy through temple architecture, texts, and importance to contemporary women’s sanghas;  2. Transmission of powers and blessings through non-tantric textual stotram chanting; 3. Ritual propitiation of yoginis in temples by locals; 4. Literature review regarding anecdotal evidence of powers of yoginis; 5. Personal experiences in the field, including documentation of “Holi” at Varanasi’s Chausanth Yogini Mandir. 

This paper examines the roles of goddesses and divinized women in Shaiva Tantric revelation, focusing on the figure of the yoginī, a category bridging the divine and the human. The early goddess-centered or Shākta Bhairavatantras and later Kaula traditions transformed Shaiva conceptions of revelation, giving new roles to yoginīs and siddhas (‘perfected’ yogins) as agents of its transmission and positing the Goddess as its ultimate source. As this paper demonstrates, yoginīs’ transmission of knowledge is typically framed as the bestowal of “lineage teachings” (sampradāya): oral instruction or coded communication too esoteric to set be down in conventional textual forms. 

Greek vase painters were fond of representing hybrids who had been born as a mix of animals, such as the Chimaera and Pegasus, but also represented "unnatural hybrids, "creatures who were once human but who had been transformed by gods into animals(Actaeon, Callisto) by showing them as animals with lingering human features. I argue that unnatural hybrids articulate the principle that the gods created mortal creatures in particular forms at the beginning of time and that those forms were expected to remain unchanged and limited; the meta of metamorpheo implies passage between forms, rather than the invention of new forms.

I’ll also look at another figure beloved by painters whose story runs contrary to this: Scylla, transformed by Circe’s potion into a new physically hybrid form—human above the waist but canine below. This relatively late story suggests there is another generative power in the cosmos beyond that of the gods: magic.

This paper explores the figure of the centaur as a mode of figuration arising from the prolonged humanencounter with proximate others, both animals and other humans who are similar to but not identical tothe subject. Ancient centaurs can be deployed to frame the constantly shifting polarities of nature andcivilization. I explore the adaptability of the centaur by contrasting the early terracotta and bronze centaurs of the Archaic period with the centaurs in paradoxographic literature. I am deliberately moving beyond Foucault’s treatment of the threat of the anomalous and Kristeva’s emphasis on the Abject. Much more applicable is Freud’s understand of the
Unheimlich, with its emphasis on the recognition that lies below consciousness. We
recognize the centaur and gaze at it as at a companion. The centaur that looks back is the animal with whom we are locked in battle.

From wild creatures to beasts of burden, the mosaic pavement in the synagogue at Huqoq (c. 400CE) in eastern Lower Galilee is teeming with animal life. In their complex and varied use of animals in narrative and non-narrative scenes, the Huqoq mosaics continue to challenge conventional scholarly assumptions concerning the limited range of imagery used in synagogue mosaics. At the same time, the incorporation of animals in heraldic compositions in the nave of the Huqoq synagogue participates in an iconographic tradition that is familiar from other synagogue mosaics in Galilee. The heraldic imagery in the Huqoq synagogue employs iconography associated with imperial commemoration in unusual visual formulations that complicate our understanding of animal and human relationships. This paper explores the presentation of animals within these heraldic compositions as potent symbols of power which amplify the emphasis on the heroic within the mosaic pavement as a whole.

The central bema in the main church of Seleucia Pieria, the port city of ancient Antioch, was surrounded by a mosaic-inlaid ambulatory. Although only fragments of the late 5th c. composition were recovered, the design appears to have featured a continuous procession of animals, punctuated by tufts of vegetation. The range of represented species is remarkable; it includes even a large elephant. Unlikeearlier mosaics of staged hunts, the creatures are notably peaceful, and given their location, presumablyendowed with Christian meaning. It is possible that the assemblage was intended to represent paradiseas a time before sin and violence, but it seems more likely that it was primarily designed to evokewonder. Drawing upon Rafe Neis’s analysis of the functions of the menagerie, as well as uponcontemporary studies of surprise, this paper will argue for the liturgical utility of awe.

Christianity, developed in the territory of today's Egypt, between 3rd - 8th centuries AD by the local Christian community of the so-called Copts, took a lot of symbols and decorative elements from ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman paganism and also from Byzantine and ancient far Eastern arts.
These symbols and figures have many similarities, especially in formal features, but they had different meanings and religious symbolism. Decorative elements and scenes on clothing could also serve as magical protection. In addition to protective symbols, motifs intended to ensure a prosperous long life for the wearer can also be found on late antique textiles and clothing.
The paper deals with possible interpretations of the meaning, symbolic or protective role of animal medallions, human figures with hybrid features on late antique Egyptian textiles in the collection of the Silesian Museum in Opava in the Czech Republic and other Czech museums, in the overall global context.

In this paper, I will critically examine the notions of asceticism and ascetic deification as presented in The Oxford Handbook of Deification. In the first part, I will analyze how contributors to the handbook—including Paul Blowers, Paul Gavrilyuk, David Luy, Maximos Constas, and Elizabeth Theokritoff—approach these concepts. Building on this analysis, in the second part I will explore the asceticism, first as a way of the ancient philosopher’s deification and second as a practice and a method of biblical and theological interpretation, focusing on a rare and particularly intriguing hagiographical text: The Life of Hosios Elias the New, a monk and priest from Southern Italy who lived in the Southern Peloponnese.

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This paper, in dialogue with The Oxford Handbook of Deification, serves as an introduction to the deification studies. The paper offers a working definition of deification, discusses the main markers of deification, and the hermeneutical issues pertaining to term/ concept distinction in the study of deification-relevant materials. Two major shifts in the deification studies will be introduced and discussed.

Full Proposal Abstract:
Protestant traditions have been the recipients of the ecumenical achievements of the twentieth century. This has borne fruit in the interest in doctrines of theosis. Across denominational lines, doctrines of theosis are being constructed in ways that remain faithful to the central defining dogmas and practices of each tradition. These traditions utilize sophisticated methods of theological retrieval to look backwards before moving forwards. A new generation of scholars is now publishing significant works of constructive theology in which theosis finds a central place. More work remains to be done, and the ecumenical potential that theosis offers has yet to be fully realized, but the signs are encouraging. After examining the doctrines of theosis in various Christian traditions, several critical observations will be presented as an initial way to gauge the ecumenical potential and pitfalls of theosis.

In his contribution on the Pauline epistles, Ben Blackwell identifies participation as a kind of deification and as the core of Paul’s Gospel—relocating justification as a consequence of this more fundamental concept. These claims are critically correct. However, when explaining this process in more detail, Blackwell aligns with a longstanding Christian tradition that insists that the deified human body remains unaltered in substance and form. Instead, it retains its mortal nature but is infused with contranatural divine properties by the Spirit. I argue that this framework, despite its venerable Christian pedigree, is foreign to the Pauline idiom. Rather, Paul conceives of participation in Christ’s death and resurrection as involving the abolition of the flesh, which is irremediably intractable to the noble volitions of the mind, and the assumption of an ‘aethereal and luciform’ body—a more ontologically primitive form not subject to the law nor the condemnation it effects. 

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