In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Levinas, Rowing, and Infinite Relationality

This paper explores the sport of rowing as a lived metaphor for Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of infinite responsibility and ethical relationality. Levinas posits that encountering the Other binds us in an inescapable ethical obligation, akin to the mutual dependence of rowers in a boat. The synchronicity and interdependence required in rowing reflect the Levinasian notions of proximity and transcendence, where the self is called beyond its own limitations through responsibility to teammates. The unspoken promise of reciprocity in rowing mirrors the ethical commitment Levinas describes, with each stroke representing a gesture toward the Other. Even when personal conflicts arise, the ethical bond remains unbroken, reinforcing the communal nature of responsibility. Through shared effort and pursuit of perfection, rowing transcends physical exertion and embodies an ethical and spiritual practice. In this way, the sport offers a profound reflection on relationality, sacrifice, and the infinite call to responsibility.

This paper proposes an interdisciplinary investigation into the connections between C. Thi Nguyen’s aesthetics of agency in gaming and Hartmut Rosa’s resonance theory. While Nguyen explores how games structure and sculpt agency, offering unique aesthetic experiences through engagement with designed constraints, Rosa’s work on resonance provides a framework for understanding how individuals relate meaningfully to the world. By bringing these theories into dialogue, this paper argues that games can serve as privileged sites for the cultivation of resonant relationships, and that this has broader implications for religious ethics.

Yoga in church is a relatively new phenomenon. From being a practice associated with “Eastern” religiosity and culture, yoga is today widespread in the Western world and can be found in places such as gyms, schools, and health care. More recently, yoga has also traveled into new religious spaces, such as Christian monasteries and churches. This paper explores this phenomenon by taking departure in a qualitative empirical study of yoga services in the Church of Norway (CoN) and the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Denmark (ELCD). We ask: What happens when yoga goes to church? A particular focus is on how discontinuities are simultaneously re-established and bridged, especially regarding the use of the body. We argue that in these services, a dual boundary process of bodily hybridization on the one hand and wordily purification on the other takes place, displaying how discontinuities are both bridged and re-established.

What kind of memories does the epitaph of a late Buddhist master preserve? Whose memories are they? To what extent are epitaphs faithful representations of the memories of the deceased? This paper examines the genre of stūpa inscriptions—memorial texts inscribed on the exterior of typically monumental stone structures (stūpa or ta) that contain the relics of a late monk or nun—through the lens of memory construction. Focusing on the stūpa inscriptions of Buddhist monastics from fourteenth-century China, this paper explores the processes by which religious memory was negotiated, crafted, and promoted in both immaterial and material terms, as it was first committed to paper and then transposed to stone. Stūpa inscriptions preserve a combination of collective and individual memories, transmitted in writing through the concerted efforts of disciples, friends, and donors within the circles of the deceased, sometimes decades after the stūpa was built. 

“Deathbed verses” in the Chan or Zen Buddhist tradition are deliberate acts of composing poetry, performed by a master in preparation for their imminent passing. They reflect a ceremonial and intentional engagement with mortality. Deathbed verses have been traditionally understood as sacred expressions of enlightenment or transcendent spontaneity. This paper shifts attention to their calligraphic medium, and explores how visual, sensory, and temporal dimensions materialize as embodied traces within dying’s liminality. I focus on three final calligraphies by a seventeenth-century Chinese Ōbaku Zen master in Japan—brushed in his last three days. I analyze divergences in poetic rhetoric and stylistic features, and examine them alongside the master’s earlier calligraphies and disciples’ account of his final moments. Combining art historical analysis with sensory religion approaches, this paper demonstrates how intentional dying is both performed and memorialized through brush traces of the dying master.

The sixteenth-century Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition presents a model of religious practice that entails multivalent forgetfulness of oneself. The Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition is centrally concerned with a practitioner’s successful cultivation of a loving relationship with the supreme Godhead Kṛṣṇa. Initial devotional practices hinge on a central paradigm of remembering and forgetting: one must strive to remember Kṛṣṇa at all times to the degree that one ultimately “forgets” one’s own ordinary identity as an embodied being (jīva). Ultimately, a practitioner is said to realize their eternal relationship with Kṛṣṇa by awakening to one of four potential "flavors" of devotional love that correspond to Kṛṣṇa's paradigmatic Bhāgavata Purāṇa servants, male friends, parental elders, and erotic beloveds. And yet even such realization hinges on a modality of "forgetting." Even perfected devotees remain so consumed with love for Kṛṣṇa that they forget themselves, presenting a model of devotional forgetfulness that allows realization of eternal self.

Based on a book chapter recently published, this presentation will focus on the role played by religion as a force of social change in the contemporary world, discussing how Sikhi has been a major source of inspiration and a tool of mobilisation during the Kisan Andolan (the Indian farmers protest of 2020-21). Sikh ethos has indeed provided potent values and heroic figures drawn from past struggles as well as religious institutions and practices, such as langar, that have been instrumental in sustaining the over-one-year-long struggle. 

Based on interviews conducted at two of the protest sites at Delhi borders, my research provides an insight into the broad array of religious resources that were mobilised during the largest and longest rural struggle of post-colonial India, and their uneasy alliance with other ideologies, particularly the secular left, dominant among the farmers unions.

This paper examines the use of torture as a psycho-political tool during the 1980s–1990s Sikh insurgency, arguing that it targeted not only individuals but also the collective Sikh psyche. It explores the gendered nature of torture, demonstrating how patriarchal violence shaped the experiences of both men and women, particularly through sexualized abuse. Engaging with psychoanalytic theories from Freud, Sade, and Yeğenoğlu, the paper investigates how fantasies of dominance and subjugation informed both state violence and cultural representations. By drawing a comparative analysis with the Algerian War of Independence and its depiction in The Centurions, this study reveals how torture was framed as a means of reclaiming masculinity. The deliberate degradation of Sikh identity is analyzed as a tool of state control, illustrating the broader relationship between gender, power, and fantasy in modern India. This paper contributes to critical discussions on violence, subjectivity, and representation in postcolonial contexts.

This presentation explores divine energy and presence through the Lwa (S/spirits) in Vodou and the Holy Spirit in Christianity, focusing on their roles, interactions, and manifestations. I introduce "Vodou-Spirit hermeneutics" to analyze spirit possession, the embodiment of the Lwa, and the anointed Vodou community. Examining Vodou songs and prayers, I draw parallels to Christian pneumatology, employing Craig Keener’s Spirit Hermeneutics and The Mind of the Spirit, along with Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen's concept of plural pneumatology. I propose a "Multi-Spirit Cosmology" and "Pneumatological plural experiences" to further this analysis. The study also questions whether the Lwa align with the divine attributes of the Christian God, referencing Karl Rahner’s theological framework. Finally, a comparative study highlights differences in ontology, power, and authority between the Holy Spirit and the Lwa, examining their cosmic significance and their impact on believers in both traditions.

How might we understand health and healing if we started, not from a hospital or clinic, but from the graveyard? This paper explores this question through historical-archival and ethnographic analysis of  Jamaican Revival Zion’s “Physician’s Order” and its physician-healers. While Jamaican Revivalists are often viewed through an afrophobic lens that imagines them as perverse necromancers gallivanting in graveyards under the cover of dark, conjuring the dead for nefarious works; this paper reframes Revivalists’ relationship with the dead, through what I term, their graveyard etiology. Within this paradigm, disease, affliction, and misfortune, originate in the land of the dead, as it did for their Bakongo ancestors. Simultaneously, the land of the dead is also the source of powerful remedies for affliction. As such, the paper shows how the graveyard, as both a tangible physical site and a semiotic referent, is central to the healing, health, and well-being of the community.

This paper discusses how the newly independent Jamaican state used the 1963 Coral Gardens Massacre to establish founding national myths by engaging the colonial plantation tradition of suppressing Africana religions. In response to a small Rastafari group’s resistance to police violence, state officials organized Jamaica’s first joint police-military operation, also enlisting civilians in a coordinated attack on Rasta communities near Montego Bay. Taking place in the first year of Jamaican independence, I argue that the new Jamaican state used the violent management of Africana religion at Coral Gardens as its foundational performance of sovereignty. By violently suppressing Afrocentric Rastafari, the state maintained the colonial plantation practice of denigrating Africana religion. In doing so, Jamaican state officials established narrative and mythic continuity between colonial and postcolonial modes of legitimate state management of Africana religions, exhibiting a colonially legible capacity to govern in the postcolonial context.

Even terrorists, pedophiles, and murderers play religious board games. This is the case with the Order of Nine Angles (ONA), a far-right, self-identified Satanic new religious movement currently spreading around the world, and their use of a board game, The Star Game. The beliefs and practices of the group have led to the ONA being labeled as a terrorist organization in many places, and they have confirmed ties to Neo-Nazi organizations, pedophiles, and murder plots. The Star Game influences and embodies all the beliefs and practices of the ONA. Scholars tend to overlook The Star Game despite its centrality to the Order, likely due to its nature as "just a game," which are often seen as trivial at best. In this paper I present a material culture study of The Star Game and argue for the importance of seriously studying religious board games. 

Analog roleplaying games such as Ma Nishtana, Matza Matzah, and Dream Apart draw on the embodied and sensorial to transmit a continuity with Jewish traditions, even as the content of their games invites a queer reworking of historically significant Jewish narratives. Through the medium of play, they create new texts and contexts -- but by preserving ritual structure and specific sensations of touch and taste, they also remain in clear conversation with Jewish culture. This is especially notable given the way the games make space for non-Jewish players and those without any prior knowledge of the traditions they engage. To encounter Judaism through these games is to learn via affect: first by touch and by feel, and only later by text and history. 

Drawing on clothing studies, as well as performance and play studies, this paper asks how and why tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) players wear religiously-charged clothing. Physical elements of roleplaying decrease friction as players’ virtually experience what their characters experience in the world of the game. Articles of clothing and accessories can make aspects of fictional experiences tangible in the real world, and usher players into deeper enjoyment of the game world’s activities. This paper explores what happens when real clothing operationalizess player attachments to both game- and real-world religious systems, objects, and ideas to modulate experience. Namely, the use of worn religion artifacts affectively connects players to their characters’ worlds and experiences and taps into games’ power for personal growth and change.

This paper examines two versions of the legend of Rabbi Amnon of Mainz and the composition of the Unetanneh Tokef liturgical poem: the 13th-century Hebrew text from R. Isaac of Vienna's Or Zarua and a 1602 Old Yiddish variant from the Mayse-Bukh collection. Through comparative analysis, I explore how each narratives employs distinct techniques to ensure the memorability of the poem and its composer. The Hebrew version establishes a foundational martyrdom narrative, while the Yiddish, nearly triple in length, incorporates dialogue, emotional depth, and familial relationships to enhance memorability for lay audiences. Central to both narratives is the graphic depiction of Rabbi Amnon's torture and dismemberment, which serves as a visceral mnemonic device. I argue that the preservation of these gruesome details functions as a literary mechanism ensuring the continued remembrance of Rabbi Amnon and his poem, which remains a centerpiece of Jewish High Holiday services despite its fictional origins.

Judaism has a robust, and well studied, set of rituals for the work of mourning and remembering dead loved ones. Less attention has been paid to the material aspect of these rituals and the objects associated with Jewish memory of the deceased. This paper examines one modern phenomenon of Jewish material memory, particularly in the American context: yahrzeit (death anniversary) plaques that decorate many an American synagogue. These bronze plaques, which are ubiquitous in contemporary American synagogues across all denominations, are notable for their egalitarian aesthetic where all names are displayed similarly. This paper asks about the moral function of these objects in relation to their aesthetic effect. What do they do for the memory of loved ones for American Jews and how do they turn the individual memory of a deceased loved one into a larger communal concern?

This paper analyzes American Jews’ use of burials to control Jews involved in the sex trade, and sex workers’ subsequent rebellion against that control. Previous scholars have highlighted religion’s role in necropolitics, that is the way death is used to control populations. However, their analysis has typically ignored burial sites in favor of other necropolitical practices such as incarceration. In contrast, I turn to NYIBA’s cemeteries in Brooklyn and Queens to understand wayward Jews’ response to death subjugation. Methodologically, my analysis also differs from prior studies of Jewish “impure” cemeteries in Argentina and Brazil in my close attention to the NYIBA cemeteries’ spatial layout, inscriptions, and iconography. I do so to reveal how the NYIBA used their cemeteries to memorialize the dead and combat Jewish communal attempts to dictate who could attain eternal life.

What will Holocaust remembrance look like when there are no more living survivors to deliver their accounts first-hand? The USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony initiative is one response to this concern. The project has created a library of holograms of survivors that, with the assistance of artificial intelligence, can participate in “real-time, lifelike conversation.” But what are the implications of a memory that gets preserved artificially and definitively but engaged as though it is not? This paper approaches the hologram as a figure and a genre of Holocaust memory that demands attention to technology and the politics of representation. It advocates for situating these new forms of historical record within enduring conversations about the relationship between memory and history—whether figured as opposing projects, joint forces, or otherwise. With the example, I follow an Arendtian approach to memory to argue that historical representations must be contextualized and open to contingencies. 

Congregations play an important role in shaping parishioners’ political attitudes. A key way that congregations transmit political messages is through sermons. This project analyzes an original collection of over 170,000 publicly posted sermons from Chicago, IL, assembled through the Chicago Congregations Project—the first approximate census of congregations in the city.

We use this data to address three primary research questions: how often do sermons feature discussions of political issues and calls for direct action, such as marching for or against public policies? To what extent do the messages that congregations deliver reinforce or bridge political divides? What congregational-level and neighborhood-level factors explain variation in sermons’ political themes? 

This project will leverage speech-to-text and large language models to analyze both overt and subtle political messaging within complex religious discourse. We will further merge political measures of sermon text with community-level data to reveal how they interact with congregations’ local contexts.

This paper presents preliminary findings from a faith-based community development project in one of the most diverse yet impoverished neighborhoods in East Oakland, CA. The project began with the question: Given the decline in church attendance, how can urban churches repurpose vacant church properties for the good of their low-income neighbors? The two churches in this case study—one a largely Asian American and White (categorically multiracial) evangelical church and the other a Black Pentecostal church—have served impoverished groups in Oakland for decades. The project galvanized their existing partnership with Hope Avenue, a newly created nonprofit that uses asset-based community development and community gardening practices to build bridges between congregations and neighborhood institutions. Connecting a year’s worth of fieldnotes with sociological literature on churches and social capital, community activism and mutual aid, and race and class inequalities, I explore the mechanisms that are making organizational partnerships and community building across race and class possible.

This presentation will cover findings, methods, and limitations of The Church Landscape Review (CLR), a ten year study that revisits 41 church plants first surveyed in 2014. In 2014, 100 church plants in the Boston area were identified, and of the 100, lead pastors of 41 of these churches were interviewed. This research revisits these church plants first interviewed in 2014, analyzing how they adapted or persisted over the past decade. 
This paper will examine the long-term sustainability of church plants in Boston, a city where secularization, high real estate costs, and demographic shifts challenge congregational longevity. Methodologically, this study integrates pre-post quantitative and qualitative research while incorporating Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) to engage local pastors as long-term partners rather than subjects. Through the findings of the CLR, this paper will challenge static models of church decline, illustrating how congregations persist through strategic and theological flexibility. 

This paper investigates the significance of an urban nature project – a community garden - in how one Christian parish in inner Sydney, Australia responds to their rapidly changing social and political context of secularisation and gentrification. The project is part of a broader ethnography with community gardens and bush regeneration groups in inner-urban Sydney that explores the expanding and changing notions of the social – particularly relating to religion, spirituality, and meaning making - in the Anthropocene. I draw upon the work of both Burchardt on ‘infrastructuring religion’ and Bennett on ‘vital materiality’ to reflect upon the ways in which the materiality of the garden and practices undertaken within it were (or were not) productive of urban religious and political life, and the efficacy of the parish’s efforts to use the community garden to maintain their salience to their urban neighbourhood in a context of rapid religious decline.

This paper examines the fourteenth-century thinker Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī’s engagement with philosophical and theological debates about the nature of Being (wujūd) through a close reading of his Muqaddimah, the prolegomena to his influential commentary on Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam. Qayṣarī’s work offers a crucial vantage point for understanding and contextualizing several centuries of philosophical and theological debates on the nature of Being. As a pivotal figure in the Akbarian tradition of Ibn ʿArabī, Qayṣarī challenges and refines the positions of his intellectual predecessors, such as Nasīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī, Suhrawardī and Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī, bringing Sufi terminology and ideas into direct conversation with philosophical concepts such as the gradation of existence (tashkīk al-wujūd). In addition to bringing an unprecedented level of clarity and systematic exposition to Ibn ʿArabī’s often impenetrable ideas, Qayṣarī’s Muqaddimah serves as an important window to broader discourses about the nature of Being in the Islamic intellectual tradition.

Advaita Vedāntins face a paradox shared by other apophatic theological traditions. On the one hand, the Upaniṣads speak of Brahman as beyond all words and concepts; on the other hand, they affirm that Brahman exists. Insofar as “existence” (or “being” or “reality,” sat) is itself a word and a concept, how can Brahman be described as existent? In this paper I will consider two Advaitin attempts to address the paradox, drawing attention along the way to internal diversity and historical developments within the tradition. Ultimately I will suggest that Brahman’s “existence” and the “existence” of the world are equivocal terms. Advaitins themselves prefer to attribute existence to Brahman and to deny existence to the world, but I will argue that this position is not so different, in the final analysis, from attributing existence to the world and denying “existence” to Brahman.

In this paper, I revisit two key passages from Mullā Ṣadrā’s (d. 1635) Īqāẓ al-nā’imīn through the lens of Gadādhara’s (d. ca 1660) remarks on causation in his Kāraṇatāvāda. Mullā Ṣadrā maintains that the Divine is “creator” only within a specific mode of being, adding that God and creation share the same existence at the level of manifestation. At first glance, this seems to conflict with Gadādhara’s emphasis on a firm distinction between cause and effect. I argue that there is no real contradiction, because Mullā Ṣadrā’s claim of shared existence highlights the effect’s total dependence on the cause rather than denying its distinct identity. Finally, I turn to eighteenth-century India and the writings of Kundan Lāl Ashkī to show how Hindu thinkers historically compared Avicennan and Naiyāyika perspectives on causation, demonstrating the implications of such comparisons for understanding intellectual history in South Asia.