In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Decolonial scholarship often overlooks the constitutive role of theology in shaping coloniality, framing it as a precursor to secular modernity. This paper challenges that narrative, arguing that seemingly "secular" economic and political systems are structured by theological logics in disguise. Specifically, I examine how the concept of debt, central to both Christian soteriology and capitalist economics, functions as a key mechanism of colonial power. This theological-economic logic shapes not only economic exploitation, but also racial, gendered, and epistemic hierarchies. By exposing this logic, I challenge the assumed opposition between theology and economics, demonstrating that a deeper engagement with colonial theology is essential for dismantling colonial legacies. Crucially, this analysis interrogates dominant understandings of "freedom," revealing how they are often predicated on the unfreedom of others. This calls for reimaging of freedom beyond the confines of colonial power.

Despite being framed as a safeguard against religious authoritarianism, secularism has failed to prevent the resurgence of Christian nationalism in the United States. This paper interrogates why secularism has proven inadequate, by reading Perry and Whitehead’s Taking America Back for God through the lens of An Yountae’s The Coloniality of the Secular. The secular is not a neutral space, but a colonial theological formation that has shaped religion, governance, and race in ways that have enabled—rather than resisted—the rise of Christian nationalism.

In response, I argue for the need for a "theology of the secular"—a translation of the secular into theological terms for the purposes of explicit theological discourse. An’s work uncovers the decolonial potential in making the implicit theology of decolonial poets explicit. I build on his work to argue that explicit theological discourse is essential for constructing a space of ethical and political resistance to Christian nationalism.

This paper explores the emergence and gradual ascendence of a particular formulation of secularity within the jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court. Beginning with the Court’s first overt reference to secularity as a legal principle, this paper then traces the near-simultaneous emergence of a discourse of “cruel” secularity – a characterization of the secular legal aspirations of the 1960s as both a symptom of growing American hostility to particular religious worldviews and a subtle endeavor to establish a system of values that reflects the sensibilities of political liberals. This “cruel” counterpart to the legal secularity of the 1960s hearkens back to longstanding conservative anxieties about modernity, but this paper will focus upon the way in which, beginning in the 1980s, it became framed as a legal problem to be addressed by U.S. courts. 

This paper argues that scholars of religion should treat the secular tradition and its cognate concepts, like secularism and secularity, like we treat other “religious” traditions, i.e., as a mix of good and bad and a source of both help and harm. This paper pushes back against the current trend of treating “secularism” as a catch-all name for the harms of liberalism, colonialism, technocracy, and even Christianity (such as when scholars elide the differences between Protestant and secular ways of life). Hopefully by treating the secular as an internally diverse tradition we can help resolve some glaring tensions among scholars of religion, who are wary of Christian nationalism, worried about the use and abuse of religious discourse, defensive of religious ways of life, dissatisfied with liberalism, and anxious about the erosion of the separation of church and state. Hopefully we can also have a more productive conversation about out differences.

This paper offers the first-ever translation and close reading of two poignant scenes of joy and grief in the autobiography (rang rnam) of the nineteenth-century Tibetan Buddhist master Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé. These scenes stage the dramatic reunion and inevitable separation between Do Khyentsé and his root guru Dodrupchen. By tending closely to Do Khyentsé’s description of the karmic connection these men share—one that continually draws them into the intense closeness of guru and disciple lifetime after lifetime—this paper offers a larger provocation to the field of Buddhist Studies, suggesting that scholarship on Buddhist men’s lives must account for them as men. By tending to the emotionally charged cycles of (re)union and parting, death and rebirth, this paper argues for broadening our understanding of religious masculinity beyond the Euro-American horizon of Abrahamic traditions by looking to religiously saturated relationships between men that propel emotional encounters across space and time.

Monastic "idols" in Thai Buddhism embody divergent ideals of masculinity and monastic aesthetics. Monks attain the status of idols as followers circulate their images in photographs, portraits, and statues. When these depictions spread beyond the home temple, a monk can gain national recognition. This presentation examines two types of Thai male monastics: those in the forest lineage and monks with the title kruba. These lineages reflect distinct forms of masculinity—the forest lineage emphasizing ascetic autonomy, while the kruba monks incorporate a more androgynous aesthetic. Through diverse methodologies of media analysis, focus group discussions, and participant-observation at distinct Thai Buddhist temples, this paper engages the audience with images and videos from media and fieldwork. These visual representations highlight the varied models for monastic masculinity.

This paper examines how Anagarika Dharmapala navigated the racialized and gendered constructions of masculinity in the late 19th- and early 20th-century U.S., with a particular focus on the overlooked intersection of disability, religion, and race. Western discourse often framed the “Oriental” man as both emasculated and hypersexualized, but this process was also deeply embedded in notions of bodily debility. The racialized construction of Asian masculinity relied on tropes of physical weakness, degeneration, and effeminacy—marking the non-Christian religious body as disabled in opposition to an idealized, able-bodied Western masculinity. This paper brings disability studies into conversation with religious studies and gender history to argue that the religious othering of Buddhism in the U.S. was inseparable from ableist narratives of bodily deficiency. By examining Dharmapala’s self-representation and his engagement with these tropes, the paper offers new insights into the enduring entanglements of race, gender, religion, and disability.

The use of Augustine in presidential political rhetoric has shifted from Obama’s global liberal realism to the brash nationalist integralism of  J.D. Vance’s most recent invocation of ordered love to justify the current administration’s policies on  immigration and deportation. These two views appeal to conflicting faces of Augustine’s view of neighbor love and threaten to empty Augustine’s famous notion of properly ordered love and the virtue of humanity. Such opposing appeals do not indicate incoherence in Augustine’s view of neighbor love but rather stem from an inadequate grasp of the complexity of Augustine’s view of horizontally ordered love of neighbor. Augustine adapted the Stoic ethical concept of oikeiosis to depict the competing concentric circles of affection that social and political leaders must mediate in fulfillment of their role-specific obligation to those near and far. 

The health and preservation of democratic institutions relies on pervasive practices, formal and informal, of social criticism and civic accountability. Such practices are necessary but prone to incur “characteristic damages,” often hardening polarization through cycles of confrontation, denunciation, and backlash. This paper proposes a way of conceptualizing and disciplining the work of democratic accountability through the theological notion of fraternal correction. I draw on Augustine’s account of fraternal correction as a work of mercy and an act of spiritual friendship, performed among social equals and ordered toward healing, rather than retribution or self-assertion. Augustine’s acceptance of the “rougher magics” of political coercion is well-known, but alongside this paternalist, hierarchical model of political rule he recognized a place for a distributed, fraternal mode of accountability, independent of formal office-holding, whose medium was the word, not the sword, and which cut across gradients of social status.

Given increasing religious and political plurality, conscience is an important topic relating to contemporary tensions in public life. While contemporary accounts typically characterize conscience as a faculty, I suggest that this imports a subjective immediacy that risks curtailing public reasoning and deliberation while fostering ‘partisan epistemologies’. 

My paper casts new light on current challenges facing democratic conceptions of citizenship vis-à-vis conscientious disagreement by exploring Augustine’s account of conscience—situated within late antique notions of conscientia as a virtuous practice of moral self-awareness—to enrich contemporary reflection. While Augustine affirms conscience’s interiority, he does not understand it as a faculty to be immediately followed but something fallibly formed by socio-cultural norms and warped by sin (conf. 3.8.15-16). I then explore how Augustine offers distinctive resources for contemporary tensions by re-envisioning conscience as a virtuous personal and civic practice that fosters public reasoning, resists epistemic self-enclosure, and provides resources for enduring and transforming disagreement.

Augustine of Hippo wrote extended reflections on spectacles throughout his career. Confessions and City of God offer timeless insights about how spectacles shape the public and arouse the passions of its spectators. This paper argues spectacles of antiblack violence arouse the passion of bloodlust and inebriate its spectators with bloodthirsty pleasure. This paper offers a close reading of gladiatorial spectacles in Book VI of Confessions. After parsing out the implications of Augustine’s analysis, the essay engages a Foucauldian analysis of spectacles of racial violence and the libidinal economies they produce. Then the paper considers the similarities between the gladiatorial spectacle as described by Augustine and the lynching spectacle as described by James Cone and W.E.B. Du Bois. Drawing on William Cavanaugh and Rowan Williams the paper concludes that spectacles of antiblack violence are idolatrous anti-liturgies which arouse passions like bloodlust and bloodthirsty pleasure.
 

Beauchamp and Faden’s principlist approach in A History and Theory of Informed Consent subordinates justice to autonomy and beneficence, asserting that issues of informed consent are not fundamentally problems of social justice. Medical data, especially in the era of Big Data and AI-driven medicine, often benefits privileged groups while reinforcing health inequities. Traditional autonomy-based informed consent is impractical at this scale, necessitating a justice-centred alternative. Drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Realism as well as some feminist ethics of care approaches, this paper argues for an agape-centred model of justice that prioritises collective responsibility over individual choice. This approach advocates for independent institutions to govern data as a public good, ensuring equitable distribution and democratic oversight. 

What role, if any, should principlism—the “four principles approach” popularized by Tom Beauchamp and Jim Childress—play in bioethics today? In the wake of Tom Beauchamp’s recent death (February 19, 2025), I argue that a “contractualist-principlism” has the power to preserve principlism’s best insights while addressing some of its most serious objections: 1) its constrained moral perception; 2) its want of a method for adjudicating conflicting claims; and 3) its lack of theoretical unity. Moreover, a “contractualist-principlism,” based on the work of T. M. Scanlon, suits the needs not only of bioethics but also of the emerging field of anti-poverty ethics, which also focuses on the well-being and autonomy of the vulnerable, and the just distribution of life-saving resources. Finally, to complement my contractualist approach to principlism, I conclude with a contractualist defense of principles—in particular, as helpful heuristics or shortcuts for both moral perception and judgment.