In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Tathagata Buddha songs refer to a set of singing practices, hymns, and other musical performative dimensions that is particularly dedicated to Buddha, his preaching, and the sense of emancipation that the emergence of Buddhism is rooted in. This paper aims to explore what constitutes Buddhist sonic, particularly for communities who have perceived Buddhism as a way of revival of cultural identity. Through ethnographies of anti-caste singers, the paper aims to engage with the forms, cultural practices, and meanings of Buddhist songs for Dalit-Bahujan communities. While acceptance to Buddhism, since Ambedkar’s conversion in 1956, has been a significant moment for oppressed caste cultural revival, the paper will specifically engage with the ways in which sonic culture is significant and how it reflects anti-caste cultural practices.

Keywords: Music, Buddhism, anti-caste movement, cultural practices, emancipation.

This paper explores the historicization of myths, legends, and folktales within the Ganda community of Kurul and Malgodampada, Balangir, Odisha. Challenging the dominant historiographical exclusion of caste-oppressed communities, it examines how myths are not merely remnants of the past but serve as mediums for reconstructing history. Drawing from Ambedkar’s call for imagination in exhuming history, Vico’s insights on myth as social history, Russell’s synthesis of logic and mysticism, Carr and White’s criticism of dominant forms of historiography, this study interrogates how myths undergo logical scrutiny within communities to be articulated as ‘probable pasts.’ Through ethnographic data and semiotic analysis, it engages in Asad’s view on power’s role in defining ‘true speech.’ By tracing the discourses and practices around Bhima Buddha, Saat Bahin, and Bastarain Mata, among others, across Buddhist Tantric and Hindu narratives, the paper highlights myth’s role in anti-caste cultural praxis, reclaiming lost histories beyond narratives of mere ‘loss.’

This study explores how Bengali migration, primarily of Muslim settlers, has transformed indigenous Buddhist social structures in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Bangladesh. The demographic shift has intensified ethnic and religious tensions, affecting indigenous Buddhist communities such as the Chakma, Marma, and Tanchangya. This research examines how migration, religion, and caste-like hierarchies intersect, reshaping social relations and indigenous identity. While Buddhism in the CHT traditionally emphasizes inclusivity, local communities report that Bengali dominance has led to economic marginalization, land dispossession, and socio-political exclusion, reinforcing caste-like divisions. Using ethnographic interviews and historical analysis, this study highlights indigenous perspectives on religious coexistence, resistance, and adaptation in response to settler expansion. Findings suggest that migration has not only threatened indigenous autonomy but also altered Buddhist monastic and social structures, influencing perceptions of caste, identity, and intergroup relations. This research contributes to discourses on migration, religious pluralism, and indigenous resistance in South Asia.  

The decline of Buddhism in Pakistan began with the advent of Brahmin rule in the region in the 7th century before the Arab Muslims conquered it. Today, Pakistan is dominated by Ashrafiya caste Muslims with 96.35 percent identifying themselves as Muslims, and Islam is declared as an official religion. Hindus and Christians together constitute about 3.8 percent of the population. These Buddhist communities are scattered across Pakistan mostly living in small villages and towns. Using ethnographic methods, this paper attempts to explore the Buddhist lifeworld, and their lower caste status to find ways to create a Buddhist sub-culture, visibilise their lower caste existence  to secure their fundamental rights. It delves into the fears, anxieties, and apprehensions of the Pakistani Buddhists, their unwarranted absorption into the Hindu minority and Muslim majority, influences of ashrafisation and savarnisation, and suggests remedial measures for the change agents at the local, national, and global levels.

Homes of the Good Shepherd, run by the Catholic Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, reformed and incarcerated ‘fallen’ women and girls in the U.S. as early as 1843, making it the first institution in the nation to exclusive incarcerate women and girls. The Good Shepherds in the Western United States operated in collaboration with the state to incarcerate wayward girls before structures existed at the state level, showing an uncharacteristic willingness by western states to rely on Catholic institutions for state-building. This paper frames the construction of girls’ carceral institutions in the West as arising from the precarious collaboration of the Catholic church and of state governments, while placing the Sisters of the Good Shepherd within the larger context of the federal government’s reliance on Catholic sisters to run boarding schools for Native children. 

Against the background of the unsuccessful “emergency” military decree  by South Korean President Yoon, Suk Yeol December 3, 2024 this paper explores how popular culture social protests by college-age Koreans has developed from the 1980’s anti-authoritarian demonstrations against martial law dictatorships. The 2024-2025 protests saw newer formats of collective resistance and response using many of the dynamics popularized by the “soft power” associated with the Hallyu (“Korean cultural wave of K-Pop and K-Drama K-Pop and K-Drama). This presentation begins with a brief summary of the backgrounds of the Korean political protests in the 1980’s and in 2024-2025 . Next each genre type of protest demonstrations is outlined, highlighting both common elements, and performative differences, while lifting up key common denominators such as is the strong sense of collectivity found in both genres of protests. The paper concludes with a theological interpretation in line with the Convention theme of Freedom.

In late October 1841 some 500 members of a pious association of lay Catholics were killed in battle by Spanish forces in the colonial Philippines. When surviving members of the group were questioned as to the purpose of their uprising, they responded, “To pray.” This paper attempts to unpack this statement by placing the Cofradía in the broader history of the Church's response to expressions of popular piety. Under what circumstances are the devotional practices of the laity tolerated by or incorporated into the Church, and under what conditions are they suppressed? Why was the Cofradía's membership determined to pray, up to the point of violent confrontation and death, and what made this desire so threatening to Spanish authorities that the group had to be met with violence? What can this case tell us about the modern relationship between Church and State, or religion and politics?

In recent years, chaplains have wrestled with the perceived limits of their own profession in addressing systemic injustice and suffering. While spiritual care and accompaniment have been martialed by pastoral theologians and chaplains to confront personal suffering, these practices have begun to wander into zones of political contestation. In critically reviewing two models of chaplaincy operating in such zones, workplace and movement chaplaincy, I argue that the former illustrates the potential pacifying dimensions of spiritual care per se and the former exemplifies the limits of pastoral accompaniment. To effectively meet spaces of unfreedom, chaplaincy must deepen its identity within the intersections of other fields and discourses, specifically value-based community organizing. By deploying Dorthee Sölle’s work on suffering, this essay hopes to weaponize chaplaincy’s capacity to “allow suffering to speak” for the purposes of organizing for real power, turning private grief into an effective public witness.

This study explores how the Christian-rooted framework of chaplaincy shapes spiritual care in American hospitals and its challenges in meeting the diverse needs of Asian and migrant communities. It examines how ethnicity, belief systems, and cultural understandings of healing inform experiences of life and death, highlighting tensions between Western care models and non-Western spiritual traditions. Migration histories, ancestral ties, and ghost narratives shape how patients experience fear and grief, aspects that conventional psychological treatments often overlook. By examining hauntings, this research positions hospitals as liminal spaces where ghosts materialize—representing unresolved trauma, displacement, and structural exclusion that continue to influence clinical encounters. Additionally, it examines interracial and interreligious encounters in clinical settings, highlighting how different racial and ethnic groups navigate shared spaces of healing. Through ethnographic fieldwork, this study advocates for structurally competent, culturally responsive models of spiritual care beyond dominant biomedical and Christian paradigms.

This paper explores the challenges of end-of-life spiritual care with patients who have severe mental health challenges. I argue that chaplains can play an important role as an advocate for these patients. I also argue that chaplains can approach their work with greater skill and care when they are aware of a patient's medical diagnosis, and can advocate with the medical team for the continued possibility of sustaining religious experience even amid severe mental illness. In addition, I explore how mental health challenges make it complicated if not impossible to adapt some standard models of end-of-life care, but that ways of caring for patients with mental health challenges can be found. 

In Europe, a University chaplaincy is typically perceived as a solitary wizened tree in a desolate landscape providing meagre shelter for a few ‘adherents’. Such centres risk becoming ‘repositories of religion’ (Dinham, 2016), for a minority group at an otherwise secular institution, whether providing higher education, healthcare, penal or other services. Isolated chaplaincy professionals, themselves minoritised, serve people also institutionally minoritised.

This paper analyses the opposite perspective. 

Our work moved a multifaith chaplaincy from a religious repository, into an embedded whole-organisation change-agent. Our experience shows how a chaplaincy can be re-interpreted as a much-needed rhizome (Deleuze/Guattari: 1980) that produces and replicates caring resources on religion/belief to the organisation. 

What could be learned from these insights, in terms of innovations in liberatory edges, professional frontiers and, above all, perspectives? What is gained—and what challenges arise—when chaplaincies offer a fresh understanding of their role and practise listening, researching and responding? 

This paper presents the first critical edition of Guru Gobind Singh's Ẓafarnāma (1705), a powerful critique of Mughal imperial authority that articulates the Sikh doctrine of Double Sovereignty (mīrī-pīrī). Based on my forthcoming monograph, The Zafarnama of Guru Gobind Singh: A Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary with a preface by Wheeler Thackston, this work examines thirty-eight manuscripts to correct pervasive textual distortions in modern printed editions. Nearly a third of all verses in current editions contain serious defects including broken meters and missing rhyme patterns. By returning to near-contemporaneous Gurmukhī manuscripts, this research recovers the Guru's bold assertion of sovereignty and transforms apparent praise for Emperor Aurangzeb into a coherent critique of imperial authority. The phonetic nature of Gurmukhī script additionally preserves historical Mughal Persian pronunciation. This critical edition establishes new foundations for understanding how religious authority confronts imperial power through extensive manuscript documentation, grammatical analysis, and historical contextualization.

Studies of Sikh diasporic religious politics and identity are often framed by territorial assumptions centred on Punjab. This paper examines how everyday spiritual values, aesthetics, and practices shape contested articulations of sacred space across the UK, South Asia, and East Africa. Advancing the concept of sacred worlding as a political ontology, it explores how religious practice, politics, and history intertwine within poetic, craft, and musical expressions of Sikh heritage.

Our findings reveal that diasporic support for creative heritage takes contested material and embodied forms, shaped by intersections of caste, gender, and generation. These tensions reflect and produce divergent territorialised and deterritorialised concepts of Sikh sacred space. We argue that sacred worlding offers a framework for understanding the plural, symbolic, and sensory production of religious projects. It deepens empirical analysis of creative religious expressions, contextualises diasporic settlement journeys, and reframes the geographies of diasporic religious politics across interconnected scales and sites.

In this project, I conduct a critical ethnography of Nuestra Cuir Chingoña, a Queer Latine Migrant Christian ministry, to explore how active resistance – as a Queer theoethic – critiques economic, social, and political hegemonies in churches. I engage Calvillo’s (2022) and Sostaita’s (2024) treatment of sanctuary as an alignment of Nuestra Cuir Chingoña’s approach to active resistance – parentesco (“kinship”) – which affirms relationality through alternative kinship networks that challenge eschatological essentialisms upheld by soteriological violence. Furthermore, by theorizing active resistance as a Queer theoethic, I engage Miranda’s (2022) and Geerling and Lundberg’s (2020) research on critical ethnography as a deconstruction of “value-free” knowledge production to counter eschatological essentialisms and soteriological violence that inhibit Queer livability, particularly for Queer Latine Migrant Christians and similarly oppressed groups. In this way, I attempt to contribute to scholarly-activist discourse of reimagining eschatological and soteriological interventions that assert Queer livability in churches. 

Throughout this paper, I explore the moral imperative and spiritual obligation of reproductive justice seekers and Denver organizers to advocate and organize for migrants in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection and promise to enact the largest deportation this country has ever seen. As a Latine social ethicist, I engage liberative, faith-aware ethical frameworks drawn from the tenets of Latin American social ethics: lo cotidiano, el acompañamiento, and doing ethics en conjunto. I argue that because of our culturally Catholic upbringing and lived experiences as migrants or children of immigrants ourselves, organizers like me hold epistemological privileges in advocating for these communities at the legislative level. We are the trusted messengers. 

Maize, a sacred gift from the god Quetzalcoatl, has been at the heart of Mesoamerican civilizations for millennia, shaping not only diets but also societal structures, rituals, and cultural identity. I explore how maize continues to be a powerful symbol of resistance in contemporary Mexico, particularly through its role in the fight against globalization and genetic modification. Likewise, I highlight Mexico's recent ban on genetically modified (GMO) corn as a pivotal moment for food sovereignty, indigenous rights, and environmental justice. By analyzing both historical and contemporary cultivation practices, along with the photographic work of David Lauer, which documents the resilience of indigenous maize cultures, I demonstrate how maize serves as both a living cultural artifact and a political tool of resistance in the face of global challenges like climate change and corporate agricultural control. Building upon the concept of México Profundo by Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, I argue that maize is not only central to Mexico's physical sustenance but also to the soul of its indigenous communities, offering pathways to biodiversity conservation and cultural preservation. My overall research examines how cultural values shape our understanding of the world and challenges us to reconsider what truly sustains us.

Brazil’s increase in ecological catastrophes is directly associated with the permanence of ancestral colonization dispositifs in governing territories and populations—especially among the poorest, most peripheral, and racialized. From the perspective of the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, the Falling of the Brazilian Sky—our climate apocalypse—has its cosmopolitical origins in the colonial invasion of Amerindian territories by the “napë” [white men] and the extractive violence of the “people of the commodity.” Based on the ethnographic description of what would come to be considered one of the greatest environmental crime-disasters in the modern history of mining industries in the world, the collapse of the iron ore tailings mine in the city of Mariana (Minas Gerais, Brazil), I aim to create a critique dialogue between Process Philosophy, Philosophy of Multiplicity, Amerindian cosmologies, and Black Feminist Theory to explore the state of cosmopolitical conflict observed in Brazilian ecological catastrophes. 

Modern medicine often obscures death, sustaining life at all costs and rendering mortality a choice. This paper examines two challenges Christian nurses face in caring for the dying: medicine’s obfuscation of death (Kaufman, Weber) and the hierarchy that disqualifies nursing knowledge (Foucault). Nursing traditional response in patient advocacy assumes patients can self-determine their best interests, yet institutional truths shape what patients can recognize as their own. Instead, this paper proposes parrhesia—courageous truth-telling—as a faithful nursing response. Drawing from Foucault’s late work on parrhesia and Christian asceticism, the nurse parrhesiast humbly critiques medicine’s denial of death, bearing witness to life’s finitude. By speaking truthfully despite personal risk, the nurse parrhesiast disrupts institutional silence around mortality, restoring honesty and compassion to end-of-life care.

By revealing previously unimaginable knowledge about human bodies, genetic testing and data collection hold the potential to fall into a certain pattern of medicine that views patients as objects to control, resulting in an isolating approach to healthcare. This is a particularly harmful problem for already marginalized groups like those living with disabilities and communities of color. Christian anthropology’s understanding of the human person as relational, dependent, and creative illuminates an alternative framework for the purpose and employment of genetic testing. In particular, Alejandro García-Rivera’s imaginary of the garden illuminates a way that genetic technology can be limited according to human frailty and directed towards a flourishing rooted in the interdependent nature of human life. In short, genetic technology should be employed according to a view of human persons as interdependent, fragile, and relational to serve individual and collective flourishing rather than serve as isolating and controlling. 

“Organoid intelligence” (OI) is an emerging field that aims to leverage the processing power of the human brain, which has been shown to match supercomputer processing at a tiny fraction of the energy requirement. OI builds upon recent developments in brain organoids that promise to replicate aspects of learning and memory and possibly aspects of cognition in vitro. Brain organoids are networked together to form a biological computer. This paper argues that the idealization of the human brain as a computer already de-humanizes us. To this end, this paper offers a genealogy of cognitive science and its resultant disappearance of the human in two parts: (1) the spatialization of the mind, and (2) the cybernetic mechanization of the mind as computer. The resulting cognitive science and neuroscience simply assume the mind as a computer and an ersatz incarnation of a dataist metaphysics.

Mohamed Meziane’s States of the Earth attends to the materiality of the phenomenon we’ve come to call “secularism.” Far from just a set of beliefs, orientations, or even behaviors, secularism performs literally dirt-y work, unearthing the treasures of Earth in the name of industrial paradise. Material as this work undoubtedly is, Meziane suggests it is framed by a cosmo-theological revolution. Cosmologically, the heavens are “sacrificed” or “dissolved” in favor of an increasingly disemboweled Earth. Theologically, the sovereign is (both numerically and geographically) fragmented and disseminated.

In appreciation of the author’s cosmotheomaterial account of the secular, this response turns to the recent techno-industrial recreation of human efforts in space. How might we understand the increasingly entrepreneurial storming of the “dissolved” heavens? As self-professed saviors design extra-terrestrial colonies built from lunar and asteroidal mines, are we witnessing an extension, transformation, or reversal of the secular-etractive paradigm? What do we make of the abandonment of heaven for Earth as the techno-prophets abandon Earth for the heavens?

In The States of the Earth, Mohamed Amer Meziane contends that “Secularization is not the decline of religion but the birth of a new climatic order” (xiv). Using Sylvia Wynter, I trace how antiblackness is a precursor to processes of secularization as well as that which organizes not a “new climatic order,” but an enduring Christian medieval geographic order that renders black spaces climatic to extract from the earth. Weathering black spaces unveils the “energic” function of black fungibility (Hartman 1997) in which blackness functions as an open state of energy which can be converted from one form to another (Lethabo King 2019). Black energic fungibility subjects black bodies to forms of extraction (Williams 1995) but also reveals possibilities for black life to transform and maneuver beyond “states of the earth.” Attention to the construction of blackness reveals a different story and emphasis on secularization, imperiality, energy extraction, and climate.

Meziane’s magisterial The States of the Earth ends with a somewhat mysterious subterranean provocation.  “This work,” the final sentences read, “…calls for another…work that doubles its lines by its subterranean presence, a presence irreducible to that of the fossil states of the earth.”  If the Secularocene and the “sacrifice of heaven” “overturn[ed] the earth” through the colonial dissemination of empire, as Meziane insists, then what was exposed when the earth was turned over?  While drill bits penetrate the depths of the earth to fuel modernity, no one has traveled to these realms of intense pressure and temperature.  If the heavens were “sacrificed” as a realm of divine difference, becoming instead a material realm that mortals could investigate and (eventually) travel to, then the same sacrifice has yet to occur for the realms below the earth.  Even as speculation on the heavens continues to bring science close to religion, as Mary-Jane Rubenstein has suggested, speculation on the realms below the earth has received no comparable scientific/religious rituals.  -cont-

One indelible mark of this era for fossil states was the confounding “problem” of Islam, which seemed to confound the disciplinary techniques of secularism—that is until the fateful fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920. For John R. Mott, this combined with the discovery of oil in Persia (with the assistance of U.S. missionaries) and the larger crashing of the industrial West into “the Moslem world” signaled a Muslim downfall and an opportunity for “Protestant Powers” to finally remake the world. Meziane, too, has his finger on the pulse of 19th century Orientalism and the role of fossil fuel in the acceleration of 19th century imperialism. But rather than my Protestant, mainly Anglophone archives, Meziane offers an Arab/North African perspective on the colonial dimensions of the Anthropocene.