In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This paper investigates the cultural violence leading up to the assassination of Imam Muhsin Hendricks (d. 2025), the first “openly-queer” imam in the world. It argues that while dominant clerical groups (ʿulamāʾ) in Cape Town condemned the extra-judicial killing of the imam, they spread a toxic theology of violent exclusion. For the last ten years, members of the ʿulamāʾ advocated a position of virulent exclusion or takfīr based on a theological reconciliation between Islam and queerness. This form of excommunication presents a religio-cultural system of marginalization, legitimating the murder of the imam, and even proposing it as a form of cleansing the “moral corruption” in the broader Muslim community. This paper investigates how religious forms are deployed in service of hegemonic sexual scripts legitimating exclusion. Therwsfater, it will analyze the constructive theological work of Imam Muhsin as a form of reimagining Islam. 

This paper examines the anti-trans discourses of neotraditional Muslim American preachers as an adoption of conservative white Christian political discourse in the United States. Transphobia offers discursive mileage to conservative religious leaders and politicians to promote their exclusionary visions for religious norms or the state. This paper considers anti-trans discourses as an expression of white Christian supremacy relying on the marginalization of gender, sexual, racial, and religious minorities such as Muslims. First, it draws parallels in anti-trans rhetoric between the open letters, essays, and fatwas of neotraditional Muslim preachers and the bills and executive orders of conservative white Christian politicians. Thereafter it theorizes the use of discourse for neotraditional Muslim preachers.  Lastly, this paper ends with queerness as a necessarily intersectional political position as reflected in queer and trans Muslims reclaiming Islam as well as in the growing movement challenging anti-trans legislation.

This paper will explore examples of queerness in contemporary American Jewish pro-Palestinian spaces to better understand the ways that queerness is being mobilized as a resistance to mechanisms of political violence and paradigms of national belonging. What are the possibilities borne of a refusal to align with the political role ascribed to Jewishness by, for instance, the Trump administration's privileging of campaigns to combat anti-semitism on college campuses? What is the role of queerness in religious and liturgical performances of this refusal? How is queerness sparking re-imaginations of Jewishness, Jewish life, and Jewish ritual in direct opposition to political violence and Zionism as an attempt to enclose and emplace Jewishness? This paper seeks to answer these questions through a reading of queer anti-Zionist Jewish communities through the lenses of queer theory, theories of space and place, and religious studies

This paper examines the works of two queer artists in U.S. Chinatowns who imagine alternative spaces and alternative futures in resistance to rising gentrification, displacement, and jail-building in New York City and Boston’s Chinatowns. In these cultural communities that are increasingly forced into spatial visions of futurity offered by capitalism and carceral violence, queer Chinatown-based artwork (many of whom employ religious and mythical symbolism) instead opens up alternative futures that redefine what safety and freedom look like: they instead illustrate queer visions of freedom and safety through kinship and community that reject mass incarceration or cultural assimilation as means to queer diasporic safety. Reading these queer artwork through the lens of both queer theory and theological aesthetics, this paper considers how these queer/feminist artworks reimagine futures of freedom for Chinatown communities and open up “sanctuary spaces” for queer and minoritized subjects.

Our study draws upon 66 first-person accounts of women and men in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS) who, only months after the denomination approved women’s ordination in 1984, reflected on how they came to support women’s ordination. The majority of these individuals were either neutral or opposed to women’s ordination before the 1984 conference. How then did they come to support women’s ordination? Ultimately, we argue that support for women’s ordination in the RLDS Church did not simply reflect how individuals wanted to position themselves in relation to ecumenical partners and the great project of “modernity,” as Mark Chaves might suggest, but that the experiences of ritual and its power to shape people after the fact, as described by Molly Farneth, and relationships with authority, as explained by Craig Harline, were key to individual church members changing their minds about women’s ordination.

The Young People and Christian Worship study listens deeply to how young people, including teenagers and emerging adults (aged 13-29), experience public Christian ritual in a range of liturgical expressions—Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, evangelical, and charismatic. This binational, multisite, mixed methods research is situated at the intersection of sociology of religion, ritual studies, and liturgical theology. Research at six field sites included focus groups (185 participants), individual interviews (69 participants), and participant observation (29 days), and is complemented by a survey (1000 respondents). This paper is focused on challenging transactional approaches to ritual and young people through (1) a robust description of the diversity of ways young people experience ritual, and (2) a clear conception of the formation of young people within distinct traditions. Attention to these dynamics frees young people to experience and value diverse dimensions of Christian ritual and illuminates what ritual is meaning and doing today. 

This study examines the response of Japanese Buddhist monks to contemporary mindfulness programs, which have roots in Buddhist traditions but have evolved into secular practices in the West. While mindfulness has gained traction in Japan, the response among monks varies. Some reject its Western interpretations as distortions of Buddhist meditation, while others acknowledge its potential benefits, particularly in alleviating suffering. Concerns are raised regarding the lack of a holistic perspective in these programs, the failure to address underlying issues, and insufficient support for individuals facing challenges during practice. The research involves a questionnaire survey and interviews with Japanese monks from diverse sects to capture both vocal and non-vocal perspectives on mindfulness. The anticipated outcome is to highlight common concerns about the adaptation of mindfulness in Western contexts and its perceived impact on Buddhist philosophy, ultimately contributing to the ongoing dialogue about the intersection of traditional Buddhist practices and modern mindfulness.

Keywords: Mindfulness, Japan, Buddhism, monks, meditation

Over the last twenty years, challenges have been waged at the viability of ritual to capture the complexities and indeterminacies of late modern life: how can we prioritize symbolic meanings of the sacred and profane in analysis while also capturing interpretive agency and contingency? The analytic framework of social performance is a robust solution. I argue that social performance analysis is a valuable approach for scholars of religion, given the framework’s sensitivity to meaning, aesthetics, and audience agency in powering ritual action as well as the ways in which power—both material and symbolic—empowers and constrains ritual action. This framework also doubles as a strong methodological advocate for the importance of studying religion, given the ways it illuminates moral frameworks that undergird seemingly secular spaces. This paper explores these conceptual affordances through a multi-method qualitative study of American travel writer, PBS host, and Lutheran philanthropist Rick Steves.

Just as works of speculative fiction address social and ecological concerns through dystopian scenarios, delog (revenant) narratives animate Buddhist ethical concerns and the Tibetan imagination about death and rebirth through visceral images of hellish torment. Accounts of a delog’s visionary journeys into the realms beyond death both edify and generate anxieties about the workings of karma. What if a relative is suffering in hell? What if something we ourselves have done leads to such suffering? This paper takes up literary anxiety, the creation of speculative scenarios in literature that invoke anxieties about possible futures. We place the visionary autobiography of delog Kunzang Chökyi Drolma (b. 1869–70) in conversation with the speculative tale Elsewhere (2022) by Alexis Schaitk about mothers who disappear into the mists in order to explore the edge between the known and unknowable and how literary anxieties over local customs can propel liberative pursuits.

This paper examines narrative control and agency through a comparative analysis of the Tibetan collection of "Zombie Tales" (ro sgrung) and George Saunders' 2022 dystopian short story "Liberation Day." Both works employ speculative fiction to present protagonists who become so engrossed in narratives that they forget themselves and fail to achieve their goals. In the Zombie Tales, a prince repeatedly responds to a captive zombie's stories about karma, compromising his mission. In Saunders' dystopia, a memory-wiped "Speaker" named Jeremy kills his would-be liberators while absorbed in narrating a historical battle. Both works thus explore a central tension: narratives can be vehicles of both control and liberation. This comparative reading highlights a salient feature of Buddhist ethics–though they espouse general moral virtues, they also insist on the irreducibly particularist nature of ethical action.

What does a 17th-century Tibetan travelogue have to do with the novel Piranesi? Taktsang Repa (Stag tshang ras pa, 1574-1651) documented his arduous pilgrimage from Central Tibet to the land of Padmasambhava in Travel Account to Orgyen, the Land of Ḍākinīs: the Steps to Travel on the Path to Liberation, which brims with disarming straightforwardness, candor, and unexpected turns of poetry. In 2020, the British novelist Susanna Clarke, who was by then highly celebrated despite having only published one other novel, released a puzzling new work of speculative fiction entitled Piranesi that took critics and readers alike by surprise. This paper argues that both texts weave the simple act of documenting facts into a grand and startling narrative about the awe and agony implicit in the discovery of truth. Through juxtaposition with Clarke’s radical work of fiction, the narrative moves made by Taktsang Repa centuries earlier are brought into focus.

This paper compares the Thirteenth Dalai Lama's last testament with the British novel Darkness and the Light in order to help better appreciate the content, context, and significance of both narratives. In 1942 British science fiction author Olaf Stapledon published his novel, Darkness and the Light, which narrates a near-future global political order where forces of "darkness" and "light" vie for power. The side of light begins with an independent Tibet's renaissance, where "Young Lamas" lead a scientific and social revolution that spreads across the globe. Just four years later in 1946 Thirteenth Dalai Lama's "last testament" was published in English. The Dalai Lama narrates his efforts toward securing a sovereign and enlightened Tibetan nation. Bound by time, these two texts vividly depict the value of Tibetan voices, both real and imagined, for readerships in a period of world war as they grappled with human suffering and flourishing.

Choné Yum Tsering’s contemporary work of speculative fiction, The Meeting of the Mountain Gods depicts a young man’s experience of attending a meeting of regional gods who are in crisis due to changes in their relationships with humans and each other. Yumtsering employs Tibetan myths about the origin of these relationships in a narrative that probes contemporary realities of environmental degradation and secularizing forces, while also asserting the power of storytelling. Clouds of Offerings for Nyenchen Thanglha similarly addresses a shift in relationships between humans and local gods, in this case precipitated by the new Buddhist regimes of knowledge and ritual technology taking root in Tibet in the 8th century during the time of its attributed author, Padmasambhava, and again in the 14th century, when it was revealed. Both works demonstrate the power of literary creativity to address and construct intersubjective relationships between humans, gods, and the environment.

This paper brings three narratives of sacred landscape and place-based personhood into conversation, exploring how the poetics and politics of imagination engage human and more-than-human powers of cultural memory and resistance. In Alai’s novel A Song for King Gesar, the events of the epic intersect with the present-day story of a young Tibetan man navigating a time of cultural erasure. In the myth of Three Sisters Mountain, the mountain’s female-gendered body enacts a multidimensional protective relationality with the masculine bodies of mountains in Eastern Tibet, as well as with Padmasambhava and Gesar. In N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, each borough of New York City takes embodied form as a more-than-human being tasked with defending the city from destruction. Evoking anthropologist James C. Scott’s ideas of the “hidden transcript,” this paper explores how speculative fiction and place-based chronicles of more-than-human relationships engage multiple registers of meaning-making and truth telling.