This panel brings together scholars of religion and Indigenous studies to respond to Dana Lloyd’s book Land is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Site. Here, Lloyd argues that while the struggle between Native American sovereignty and American courts involves religion and religious freedom, these discourses often obscure what is at stake in land dispute cases between Indigenous people and settler courts. In truth, at least from the perspective of empire and settler courts, the struggle is more about land—about whether the land is property of the federal government or something sacred or religious to Native people. For this reason, a move beyond “religious freedom” and even “rights” language may be necessary in achieving justice for Native people seeking their right to self-sovereignty. Our panel aims to critically discuss the implications of Lloyd’s argument for religious freedom and rights discourses, law, future Native sovereignty efforts, and resistance to empire.
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In Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition, Rima Vesely-Flad examines the distinctive features of Black-identifying Buddhist practitioners, arguing that Black Buddhists interpret Buddhist teachings in ways that mesh with Black radical thought. Drawing on interviews with forty Black Buddhist teachers and practitioners, Vesely-Flad argues that Buddhist teachings, through their focus on healing intergenerational trauma, provide a vitally important foundation for achieving Black liberation. She shows that Buddhist teachings as practiced by Black Americans emphasize different aspects of the religion than do those in white convert Buddhist communities, focusing more on devotional practices to ancestors and community uplift. These ancestral practices mirror Buddhist practices in Asian and Asian-American sanghas. This unique volume shows the importance of Black Buddhist teachers’ insights into Buddhist wisdom, and how they align Buddhism with Black radical teachings. Finally, this volume raises questions about how Black Buddhists Asian-American Buddhists align and can develop further connections.
The concept of utopia has long captivated thinkers across cultures, including in China, where diverse utopian visions emerged within Confucian, Daoist, and Legalist traditions. Scholars often argue that while Confucian utopias emphasized hierarchy and morality, Daoist models championed harmony with nature, whereas Legalist visions sought strict governance. However, rigid classifications overlook the fluidity of Chinese utopian thought, as thinkers often blended elements from different traditions. This panel challenges traditional paradigms by exploring varied Chinese utopian visions. The first paper critiques the Legalist utopia of Shang Yang and Han Feizi, highlighting its dystopian consequences. The second examines the utopian poetry of Tao Yuanming, revealing its Confucian influences. The third analyzes contemporary Confucian philosopher Zhang Xianglong’s proposal for Special Districts for Confucian Culture, showing its fusion of Confucian, Daoist, and Western ideas. Together, these studies demonstrate the adaptability of Chinese utopian thought, transcending rigid intellectual boundaries to shape evolving ideals of society.
Papers
Shang Yang and Han Feizi championed performance-based law and severe punishments, believing that strict accountability and harsh penalties would deter crime and ensure obedience. Their ideal was a crime-free utopian society where heavy punishments eliminated the need for further enforcement. However, historical evidence from Qin-Han legal statutes and cases reveals that this rigid legalism led to a distorted justice system. Administrative errors were excessively punished as crimes, subjecting diligent officials to the same severe penalties as violent offenders. The high standards and strict regulations created widespread legal violations, fostering resentment toward the law and sympathy for the punished. Despite ongoing criticism from scholars, officials, and even emperors, no significant legal reforms occurred. This study highlights the dangers of perfectionism in governance and explores its role in shaping Confucian opposition to strict legalism, offering a historical perspective on the challenges of balancing efficiency, justice, and human fallibility in legal systems.
Tao Yuanming’s poem “Time Moves On” is in close dialogue with Analects 11.26 where Kongzi asks his disciples about their aspirations. Of the four in attendance, the first three profess goals of statecraft. Only Zengxi speaks about his desire to escape from the situation and enjoy time with good company. After hearing all four disciples’ wishes Kongzi stated, “I’m with Zengxi.” Like Kongzi, Tao is with Zengxi. Utopias exist outside of time. They are imaginative reconceptualizations of the present. In “Time Moves On” there is a longing for a time that never was; a time Kongzi could only imagine. Tao Yuanming continually imagines alternatives to the present in his poetry to express his discontent with the present. This presentation will explore two of his imaginings in the context of the Analects and other early Chinese literature. I will also discuss interventions that Tao’s utopias make in utopian studies.
Mainland Chinese society is often characterized as highly secularized. Organized religion has been the subject of continuous criticism by the state and its expressions are tightly controlled. Yet, scholars also agree that secularization has been accompanied by a parallel process of sacralization – a growing drive to depict the nation-state, its institutions, and its leaders as sacred. This paper will build on this argument to shed new light on the sacralization of tradition in contemporary Confucian utopianism. Focusing on the writings of Zhang Xianglong (1949-2022), it will demonstrate that his proposal to establish “Special Districts for Confucian Culture,” small autonomous intentional communities designed to preserve Confucian values and practices, is driven by a desire to designate traditional culture as sacred in order to save it from extinction in an increasingly profane society. Zhang’s utopian vision offers us a new insight into the revival of Confucian religiosity in contemporary Chinese society.
My paper makes a case for an ecological and democratic global political order based on and inspired by the relevant resources in the tradition of Confucian political thought. I will do so by putting into conversation two most prominent contemporary proponents of Confucian cosmopolitan thinking, Zhao Tingyang of People’s Republic of China and Na Jongseok of South Korea. My thesis is that the concepts of tianxia (天下) and daedong (datong 大同), when reimagined through the lens of an ecologically grounded cosmopolitan democratic thinking, could offer a way to liberate the global commons from its enslavement to the reign of extractive neo-liberal global capitalism and the hegemonic/imperial nation-states.
Respondent
This panel discusses the recent monograph authored by Natalie Carnes, Attunement: The Art and Politics of Feminist Theology (Oxford University Press, 2024).
This panel addresses women's leadership in Japanese new religious movements (NRMs), an understudied intersection that challenges three persistent biases in religious studies: androcentrism, antiquity bias, and preference for established religions. Three papers examine women leaders across different historical periods and explore how women navigate leadership in traditionally male-dominated religious spheres. The first paper investigates Itō Asako of Muga No Ai, examining connections between her religious leadership and feminist politics. The second analyzes media representations of Okano Kimiko, founder of Kōdō Kyōdan, whose neutral-to-positive portrayal contrasts typical negative depictions of female NRM leaders. The third presents case studies of Shinsō Itō (Shinnyo-en) and Kōshō Niwano (Risshō Kōseikai), examining how they balance tradition and innovation in their leadership approaches. By positioning these women within concentric circles of personal religious experience, family dynamics, and societal engagement, the panel offers fresh perspectives on religious authority, leadership strategies, and gender in modern Japanese religion.
Papers
The Muga No Ai (Selfless Love) movement, founded in Tokyo in 1905 by one-time Jōdo Shin Buddhist priest Itō Shōshin, blended teachings of Buddhism, Christianity, and Tolstoyan spirituality. While Shōshin’s life and thought have been well-studied, the remarkable lifestory of his wife, Itō Asako (1881-1956), remains largely unknown. As a child, Asako lost much of her hair due to alopecia areata. Social pressures led her to feel ashamed and live as a shut-in. Muga No Ai teachings emboldened her to take on a new persona, engage in religious training, wed Shōshin, and become a religious leader. She also became active in feminist politics, and her feminism influenced how she practiced her religious ideal of “selfless love,” most notably in the scandal of a public love affair with a younger man. Through a study of Itō Asako’s career, this paper will investigate the connections between religious liberation and political liberation.
This paper examines the public images of Okano Kimiko, the female founder of Kōdō Kyōdan—a lay Buddhist organization established in 1936 that is also categorized as a New Religious Movement—to explore how it positioned itself within the postwar Japanese religious landscape. While mass media have largely portrayed New Religious Movements and their female founders in a negative light since their emergence, the postwar media representations of Okano Kimiko and Kōdō Kyōdan present an anomaly, as they received neutral and even positive recognition. Through historical analysis of national, regional, and organizational print media, this paper argues that Okano Kimiko’s increasingly respectable media presence was shaped by the Kōdō Kyōdan leadership’s strategic relationships with social, political, and religious actors, which facilitated the organization’s integration into the traditional Buddhist community. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the agency of New Religious Movements in shaping their public images.
This research examines women's leadership in Japanese new Buddhist movements through case studies of Shinsō Itō (1942-) of Shinnyo-en and Kōshō Niwano (1968-) of Risshō Kōseikai. As daughter and granddaughter of their organizations' founders respectively, these women navigate the intersection of gender, lineage, and religious authority in traditionally male-dominated contexts. Through textual analysis of their published works and organizational materials, the study explores how they understand their leadership roles, how familial succession influences their approaches, and how gender shapes their leadership expression. Initial findings reveal that while both emphasize continuity as "torchbearers," they differ in addressing gender: Niwano reinforces traditional norms through family themes, while Itō explicitly frames her female leadership as reflecting societal change and her parents' inclusive vision. This research addresses significant gaps in Japanese Religious Studies by simultaneously examining women's contributions and new religious movements, offering fresh perspectives on evolving organizational leadership within contemporary Japanese Buddhism.
Respondent
This panel examines the theological implications of artificial intelligence through Catholic and Anglican frameworks. From Augustinian philosophy to Vatican teachings and Anglican theological traditions, presenters explore how established religious perspectives can illuminate our understanding of increasingly autonomous AI systems. Key themes include human-AI interactions in faith contexts, theological questions of agency and freedom, and the concept of "relational intelligence" that respects both technological capabilities and human dignity. The panel investigates how AI is reshaping religious authority and spiritual practice while critically assessing its limitations compared to human consciousness and relationships. Throughout, Catholic and Anglican traditions provide distinctive lenses for addressing fundamental questions about what it means to be human in an era where our relationships with each other, creation, and God, and Technology are questions with which scholars must wrestle.
Papers
As educators and community leaders increasingly utilize generative AI to create interactive educational activities, understanding the nuances of human-AI conversations becomes essential. Religious dialogues, rich with existential and factual inquiries, provide a unique lens for examining these interactions. This study analyzes over 85,000 messages from more than 10,000 conversations with "Ask Cathy," a chatbot designed to answer questions about the Episcopal Church using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques. Our research team, comprising experts in linguistics and computer science, employed various methods—including topic and sentiment analysis validated against human-assessor baselines—to assess user engagement and evidence of learning. Preliminary findings reveal distinct patterns in human-AI religious dialogues, offering insights into designing effective chatbots for education and faith formation. These results hold significant implications for educators, technologists, and faith leaders seeking to foster meaningful interactions through AI-driven platforms.
Society’s growing reliance on artificial intelligence, along with rapidly improving AI autonomy and decision-making abilities, raises theological and ethical questions concerning agency and accountability. The recent Vatican document Antiqua et Nova, a Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, examines the anthropological and ethical challenges AI introduces regarding human and artificial intelligence, freedom, and agency. Antiqua et Nova then proposes the concept of relational intelligence, a holistic framework that acknowledges AI technological capabilities as well as humanity’s communal nature. By combining AI and human strengths, relational intelligence encourages cooperative, collaborative human-AI relationships that respect human dignity and contribute to the common good. Hence, Antiqua et Nova and relational intelligence provide theological perspectives on artificial and human intelligence, augment secular ethical views with religious notions of human freedom, and clarify the notion of moral agency within an increasingly technological world.
The recent proliferation of ‘Generative AI’ has raised a significant question: can AI generate legitimate art? I attempt to answer this question through Augustine’s theory of numbers and imagination. In his De Musica, numbers name the fundamental principle of beauty, and imagination is the faculty that (re)orders the numbers in one's memory to produce images of beauty. There are significant analogies between this theory of imagination and the operation of the ML algorithm here. However, for Augustine, the problem of our limited sensibilities and perspectives is critical. Our imagination is bound by our desires, and only transcendent love can free one's imagination. I argue that the simulated imagination of the AI is always bound by its limited architecture and the finite desires of its designers and users. Thus, it cannot but generate false phantasms and 'hallucinate.' I conclude by suggesting some practical and ethical implications of this analysis.
This paper will review the contributions of official Catholic teaching on AI within the context of Catholic Social Teaching. Using these contributions, as well as the work of Roman Catholic ethicist Margaret Farley and theologian JB Metz, the paper will ask what AI can show us in relief about what it means to be human. It will offer the thesis that it is our relationships with one another and creation that open the horizon of being human and in relationship with God.
This paper investigates the theological implications of AI-generated spiritual discourse, exploring how AI chatbots, particularly the Episcopal Church’s AskCathy, are reshaping religious authority and spiritual practice. Employing the CASA framework and practical theological methodologies, it argues that user interactions with AI reflect implicit theological affirmations of algorithmic discourse as genuinely theologically authoritative. Grounded within the Liberal Catholic Anglican tradition, the paper positions technology as integral to creation, asserting the Spirit’s dynamic activity within AI-generated discourse. Ultimately, it proposes a new theological paradigm where algorithmically mediated spirituality meaningfully extends historical Anglican engagements with technological and cultural innovation.
What is a chapel? Despite the ubiquity of chapels worldwide, there has been comparatively little scholarly effort to study chapels as a type or uncover their spatial politics. Often small in scale and built by “laypeople” outside of the purview of religious hierarchies, chapels and other small sacred spaces offer scholars a way of reading religious architectural history from the bottom up. Chapels uplift underrepresented subjectivities of lived religion and bring religious architecture’s entanglements with race, gender, and class to the forefront of study. Chapels exist at the nexus of the individual and the collective, the local site and global mobilities and networks, the singular structure and the complex. This roundtable will be structured around a series of chapels, each discussant presenting one case study. These presentations will be followed by a conversation about what a “chapel studies” based around this collection of sites might look like.
This year's roundtable will focus on yogic perception, or the idea that certain people have direct knowledge of objects or truths beyond the reach of ordinary sense-perception. Our starting-point will be Kumārila’s critique of yogic perception in the Ślokavārttika. Panelists will discuss responses to Kumārila’s objections as well as arguments in favor of yogic perception, drawing from the Yogasūtras, the Jain thinkers Amṛtacandra and Hemacandra, Abhinavagupta, and Vivekananda. The goal of the format is to create a space for lively and rigorous discussion, rather than traditional paper presentations. A handout with the original Sanskrit and an English translation of selections from Kumārila will be provided.
This panel brings together diverse feminist theological perspectives to interrogate the meaning of freedom in the face of systemic religious, cultural, and political oppression. Through papers grounded in womanist theology, Indigenous feminist practice, fat liberation hermeneutics, and psychological theory, presenters explore how bodies, identities, and belief systems intersect in both liberative and restrictive ways. Topics range from Harriet Tubman’s visionary spirituality to the role of music in shaping U.S. civil religio-political discourse, and from challenges to reproductive labor ideology in Christian liturgy to the struggles of Indigenous women navigating faith and recognition in the American South. One paper examines how a holistic doctoral program fosters theological and personal flourishing among women scholars, revealing new insights through Self-Determination Theory. Together, these papers offer creative, critical, and embodied approaches to advancing gender justice, religious freedom, and collective liberation—calling us to reimagine freedom as deeply relational, spiritual, and grounded in lived experience.
Papers
Anti-freedom and freedom movements are intrinsically intertwined, exemplified in current US political imaginaries and praxis that impede or empower freedom. In myriad ways, US civil religion perennially re/constructs an exclusionary or an inclusive worldview of “we, the people” in the US body politic. Music participates in US religio-political discourse and praxis about identity and envisions alternative possible futures. Music constitutes and signifies a sharp contrast between repressive and liberative notions of freedom, symbolized in current civil religiously-based authoritarian regimes and solidarity movements. Historically rooted in abolitionist, suffragist, and multiple subsequent social justice movements, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” played an unexpected prominent religio-political role in the 2025 US presidential inaugural event and counterinaugural protests. This paper analyzes and juxtaposes how this hymn was re-cited and re-construed in both President Trump’s inauguration and in the Women’s March-sponsored People’s March to advance either state-sponsored violence or intersectional visions of liberation, respectively.
Examining the role of the visions within the life of Harriet Tubman, this paper connects insights from womanist theology and Black feminism to describe a theology of freedom.
Engaging with feminist theologians’ work, such as Fat Church by Anastasia E.B. Kidd, and fat liberation work from Hannah Bacon, this paper will further demonstrate the need for freedom from paternalistic systems that continue to oppress bodies, especially fat bodies. Implementing extant work from fat liberation theologies, and looking to the biblical text, this paper proposes a new hermeneutical lens—a Liberative Body Hermeneutic, which gives primacy to the form of the body—as a means of understanding the will of God toward all bodies, but specifically fat bodies. If we are to free bodies from systemic control, and make a theological argument concerning this liberation, one must interrogate the biblical text toward an understanding of what lies within. This hermeneutic will provide a means to read scripture that allows the reader to see the text with new eyes—eyes of freedom for all bodies.
Native American communities in the American South face administrative and public invisibility. For the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina, cultural revitalization is tied to struggles for recognition, land protection, and religious freedom. Native Christianity serves as both political protection and a complicating factor in recognition efforts. This paper explores how Edisto women leverage an Indigenous Christian feminism to navigate political and spiritual identity. By appealing to Pentecostal Christianity, they assert sovereignty on their own terms. Through long-term community-based research, this study examines how gender, religion, and political recognition intersect in the Edisto’s fight for self-determination.
This paper details the context and findings of exploratory research investigating how women undertaking doctoral research in theology characterise the impact on their freedom to flourish of a holistic project which supports and explicitly addresses the intersectionality of their academic, spiritual and personal lives. Conceiving feminist research as spiritual practice, and females as marginalised in the academy and faith communities, it evaluates the project using Self Determination Theory: a psychological, empirically driven, organismic motivational meta-theory, rarely engaged with by feminist or practical theologians. Measures and theories of SDT are used directly or inform multiple types of qualitative and quantitative data gathering from project participants. Data analysis will identify the project’s support or thwarting of three essential ‘nutriments’ of autonomy, competence and relatedness that SDT posits as essential to human flourishing, and propose emerging insights and questions from dialogue between these ‘nutriments’ and feminist discourses around women’s self-authenticity, agency and relationality.
Despite the American ideal of “liberty for all,” work remains to definitively establish within our law and culture that people with female reproductive systems are equally free. In particular, after the fall of Roe, the targeted state domination and economic exploitation of this group for its reproductive labor power are of grave concern. As hegemonic ideology is a crucial point of intervention, this paper commends and builds upon the work of feminist liturgical scholars, who have long charged that Christian Eucharist liturgy constructs women as colonized reproductive laborers for a Father God. Analyzing content and ritual actions in a specific instance of contemporary Advent liturgy, it underscores the renewed urgency of worship problems raised decades ago and illustrates the type of work needed on a larger scale, both to dislodge the unjust cultural common sense about reproduction culturally and to advance feminist, liberatory re-formation of Christian worship.