In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

My dissertation explores a widely popular yet overlooked transgressive subaltern tradition in contemporary Pakistan known as Faqiri. Faqiri emerges at the interstices of Sufi, Bhakti, and Yogic lifeworlds through the aporetic figure of the faqir. It absorbs that which is uneschewably contradictory to dominant religious and knowledge frameworks such as conservative piety or bourgeois rational knowledge. Malangs and faqirs fulfill the highest ideal of this tradition, rejecting hegemonic social norms, including the reproduction of wealth and family at the call of the divine or a saint, and performing an embodied critique of society’s hypocritical attachment to worldly wealth and performative piety by transgressing religious law and gender norms. What unites those “in Faqiri” – from low-caste Hindus to transgressive mystics to occult practitioners to peripatetic animal entertainers is a subaltern religious imagination that defies and exceed the state and the ruling class’s conceptions of “Islam” and “religion” and “Sufism”. 

This paper examines the pivotal role of the School of Hilla (6th–8th century Hijri) in shaping Imāmi Shia charitable thought, focusing on Zakat and Khums. Set against the backdrop of Mongol rule, the school advanced crucial jurisprudential concepts, including ijtihad and the general appointment of jurists. Through the works of Al-Muhaqqiq al-Ḥillī and Al-Allāmah al-Ḥillī, the study explores how Shia scholars redefined the management of religious dues, transitioning from individual acts of charity to more institutionalized frameworks. Al-Muhaqqiq emphasized juristic authority over Khums and Zakat with a voluntary collection approach, while Al-Allāmah supported a more active clerical role. Through historical and textual analysis of primary sources, the research highlights the lasting impact of these debates on contemporary Shia charitable practices, shedding light on the evolution of religious philanthropy in Shia Islam and its relevance to modern discussions on clerical authority and state involvement.

In this interdisciplinary dissertation project, I take the Islamic idea of beauty (jamal) as starting point to reconceptualize Muslim subjectivity, studyng how Muslims in the Benelux are see(k)ing, aspiring to and actively pursuing beauty in their divine engagement and spiritual development. Writing an autoethnography in which I have been participating in covert prayer circles in the Netherlands and Belgium and conducting in-depth interviews with other fellow see(k)ers, I anchor the connection between the imaginative, the beautiful, and the ethical in this process. Accordingly, it is also through the vector of beauty that I attempt to situate and unpack the lived tradition that is Islam. Taking al Ghazali's virtue ethics and the work of his contemporary “successor” Abdurrahman Taha as starting point for this reconceptualization of Muslim subjectivity, I aim to ultimately contribute usefully to discussions pertaining to the epistemic diversity in the study of Islam and Muslims in Europe.

Graduate Student Session: American Islamic schools have been under criticism that their students learn to show primary allegiance to their ‘countries of origin’ and to the Islamic faith instead of the U.S. constitution. However, based on the few empirical research conducted so far, civic engagement is higher among the graduates of these schools compared to their public counterparts. To explore the pedagogical details of how such an outcome is accomplished, I conducted a case study research at a Chicago based Islamic school. I collected photos, curricula, lesson plans, did classroom observations and ran interviews with the school staff. I discovered that learning of history, social studies, language arts, sciences, and religious studies had a combined American and Islamic influences. Civic awareness with a primary sense of self as Muslims within the American context was the intended outcome because their Islamic faith mandated allegiance to the authority they lived under.

This paper explores the intersection of religion and politics during the emergence of Bangladesh with a special focus on Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani (1880-1976). Bhashani was a Sufi saint and peasant leader who throughout his life fought for the causes of toiling masses and oppressed peasants and was known as the “prophet of violence”, “Red Maulana” and “Fire-eater Maulana”. Though intellectuals and political commentators from Bangladesh have written volumes on him, there is a paucity of scholarly work that focuses on his religio-political philosophy, without which, one can only see the tip of the iceberg, hence, it will bring a hollow interpretation. This paper scrutinizes the core religious philosophy of Maulana Bhashani, which shaped his anti-colonial and emancipatory politics. Simultaneously this paper argues that Bhashani’s politics derived from the philosophy of Rububiyah (Divine Providence) and a hermeneutic engagement with the concept (Rububiyah), we will be able to understand how religion became a central domain for the emancipation of the oppressed. 

This dissertation investigates the development of the social roles of Muslim Palestinian scholars (ulama) and their intellectual tendencies during the 19th century. It begins with an examination of Palestinian society in the first half of the 19th century and continues in the second half with the introduction of Ottoman reform (Tanzimat) and intensive interaction with European modernity. By integrating the Palestinian experience into the historiography of Islamic reform, traditionalism, and Arab nationalism, this project seeks to expand the scope of modern Arab and Islamic intellectual and social history.

This presentation examines the relationship between presupposition and understanding,  through Vasubandhu’s discussions of perception (*saṃjñā, *pratyakṣa) and the Three Natures (trisvabhāva) in The Proper Mode of Exposition (Vyākhyāyukti). It details Vasubandhu’s phenomenological investigation, beginning with an interpretive experience where one’s perception conflicts with a text’s claim. Analyzing his notion of the Three Natures as the underlying structure of perception, it interprets that Vasubandhu affirms three irreducible kinds of perception and the ultimate validity of enlightened perception. Based on this interpretation, I argue that, for Vasubandhu, understanding arises from abandoning and accepting certain presuppositions about perception. Specifically, one must abandon privileging shared perception and assume the existence and validity of other minds whose perceptions transcend one’s scope. This argument suggests that certain presuppositions can be a path towards understanding.

Apoha (exclusion) theory, developed by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, has been widely interpreted as a nominalist solution to the problem of universals. However, scholars increasingly recognize that purely nominalist readings struggle to provide a fully satisfactory account of meaning and inference. As Prabala Kumar Sen notes, for instance, apoha requires an alternative explanation that avoids both the defects of nominalism and the pitfalls of realist universals. In this paper, I explore whether a phenomenological approach to apoha, particularly through the lens of the constitution, can provide a more coherent account. In Husserlian terms, objects and relations do not merely exist but are structured through acts of consciousness. I argue that apoha functions similarly—constituting objects and inferential relations through exclusion rather than positive construction. This reinterpretation clarifies how apoha secures the necessity of meaning and inference, not through implicit similarity but by eliminating all alternative possibilities in lived experience.

The relationship of self and world and of body and mind are central to Buddhism. In this paper, I demonstrate how one thirteenth-century Tibetan thinker addresses paradoxes within these relationships. In his treatise on the inseparability of saṃsāra and nīrvāṇa, Drakpa Gyaltsen uses a diverse repertoire of techniques to guide the practitioner in realizing that all phenomena are included in the body and mind. In conversation with the work of Merleau-Ponty and critical phenomenologists responding to his legacy, I illuminate the role of paradox in approaching appearances, experience, and nonduality within the ritual and philosophical perspectives of the Sakya Path and Fruit tradition. In the process, I interrogate what “body” and “mind” mean in this context and where and how they are situated in relationship to one another.

Can God receive a gift from humanity?

That humanity receives grace and salvation from God is a statement not likely to cause dissensus in most theological circles. The more open question is whether we could say that God receives something as well in a more mutual two-sided relationship. The distinction is not whether God’s free gift of grace comes with an obligation for return, but instead whether God can receive a transformational gift from humanity.

In conversation with Kathryn Tanner’s work on incarnation and the free gift of grace—“incarnate for our salvation to everlasting life”—I will argue that recognizing God as a generous giver of gifts who chooses to enter into relationship with humanity should include the acknowledgement that God opens Godself to vulnerability through Christ in order to also receive from us. 

Irenaeus of Lyon is a promising conversation partner for Christian theologians seeking a politics of justice, human flourishing, and the promotion of the common good, in contrast to fascistic models of domination, unchecked power, and the demonization of difference. Christian-valenced authoritarianism relies on assumptions about God, human society, and power that align more closely with Irenaeus’ depiction of the Antichrist than the complex model of Christian politics set forth in Adversus haereses and the Epideixis. Central to this model are particular assertions of divine sovereignty, the human vocation to rule, and the paradigmatic kingship of Christ. While Irenaeus has no neat answers for contemporary Christian political concerns, the heart of his political vision remains relevant today: a theo-centric, Christologically-rich politics that fosters socio-political coherence, diversity, and stability, along with practical care for the marginalized and vulnerable, without undermining individual human freedom. 

Freedom’s centrality in Gregory of Nyssa’s theological anthropology and understanding of the divine image has long been recognized. The soul, he writes in De hominis, is “without master (ἀδέσποτον),” “self-governing (αὐτεξούσιον‎),” and “ruled autocratically by its own will.” Unsurprisingly, then, interpretations of Gregory’s famous critique of slavery have focused on his judgment of slavery’s violation of the freedom and dignity proper to all human creatures. Less attention has been paid to another set of arguments Gregory deploys, which critique slavery as a feeble and misguided effort to seek permanence through unjust power and acquisition. Enslaving denies the freedom of others, but it also denies our own finitude. This paper explores the connections between these arguments, offering a constructive account of freedom as realized not in transcending the limitations of finitude but in inhabiting them otherwise, through accepting human littleness as the primary resource for the freedom of divine likeness. 

Following An Yountae’s insights on the necessary inclusion of Latin American Liberation Theology in current discourses on decoloniality, this presentation explores to what extent the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez might be understood as decolonial in its trajectory. By tracing Gutiérrez's accounts of liberation (its three levels) and providence (how God intervenes and acts in the world), this presentation investigates how decolonial reconstitutions of theological knowing arise in his work.

Abstract:

In the Christian scriptures, two prominent figures for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit are prophecy and adoption. This essay explores the possibility that these two figures for spiritual inspiration are more closely related than they would initially appear: the experience of adoption may be a condition for the capacity for prophecy. Through its readings of Romans 8, Ephesians 1, and Acts 2, it considers two scriptural models of adoption—what I term the absorptive and the dislocative—as possible ways to think about how adoption may enable prophetic gifts. It offers a critique of absorptive models, which track more closely with justifications for extant systems of international and domestic adoption, and argues that the dislocative conception of adoption offers a different sense of prophetic insight, through its openness to the fractured and complex dimensions of adoptees’ experience. 

Adoptees have increasingly been speaking out about unjust adoption practices and adoption trauma. Social media has been instrumental to getting these stories out and pushing back against years of pain caused by unethical adoption practices. The Quran, believed by Muslims to be revealed by God to the Prophet Muhammad—himself and orphan—in 7th century Arabia—preempts some of these concerns. This paper argues that the Quran contains an ethically revolutionary way of thinking about orphanhood and adoption, emphasizing not only the necessity of good treatment of the vulnerable, but also the importance of preserving their family names and identities--a major concern of adoptees today. In this way, it is a useful resource to consider ethical advancement in the way adoptees are treated in society, ideally contributing to a way forward in dismantling the for-profit adoption industry.

This paper argues that while it is certainly possible to construe “adoption” positively, MacDonald saw the translation of Paul’s υίοθεσία as “adoption” as tending to obscure the creaturely aspect of human beings, or the fact that they are God’s natural children and hence naturally loved by God as such. MacDonald argues that “the so-called doctrine of Adoption” suggests a separation between God and his creatures that can be bridged only artificially and sustained only precariously. Thus rather than encouraging faith in God’s universal love for his creatures as such, the doctrine of adoption serves to emphasize the unlikeness between God and human beings and hence to sow seeds of doubt in people concerning whether God could actually love them.

This paper places the Textual Reasoning approach to Jewish thought into dialogue with particular strands of Native American thought about the nature and role of land, place, and the more-than-human relatives of human beings, including plants, animals, and the earth itself. Peter Ochs’ dialogues with teachers like Max Kadushin and David Weiss Halivni are shown to share logical patterns with Robert Warrior and Daniel Wildcat’s readings of John Joseph Mathews and Vine Deloria Jr. I argue that the latter demonstrate a “landed reasoning,” rooted in pragmatism in a similar way to Textual Reasoning. Dialogue between the two has the potential to break down unhelpful binaries in discourses about land, peoplehood, and sovereignty.

Drawing on a series of little-known letters James Baldwin wrote in 1961 during a visit to Israel, this paper argues that Baldwin’s time in Israel powerfully impacted his thinking about American racial politics and Black liberation. Baldwin’s letters weave together reflections on Black American and Jewish experiences of political exclusion, taking scenes from his travels as points of departure for thinking about diaspora, homeland, and political liberation. Attending to the ways Baldwin mediates his feelings about Black American identification with Africa through his experiences in Israel, this paper will show that Baldwin’s early rejection of Black separatism and thoroughgoing commitment to radical racial reconstruction in the US is both historically and conceptually tied to his assessment of Zionism.

This paper explores how Protestant missionary figure Henry Aaron Stern and French-Jewish Scholar Joseph Halevy both utilized their Jewish identities to leverage religious dominance amongst the Beta Israel community in 19th century Ethiopia. By analyzing both individuals’ use of the term “White Falasha” as a form of introduction and engagement with the larger Beta Israel community, I aim to show how their European Jewish identities were used as a form of theological manipulation in order to serve their respective religious agendas.   Through a comparative analysis of their writings and by focusing on the term "White Falasha," the paper aims to reveal how religious identity was used as a tool of theological manipulation, challenging reductionist views of conversion and highlighting the intersection of race, authority, and religious persuasion.