In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Existing for only six years, the Combahee River Collective has had a long-term impact on Black feminist organizing, teaching, and writing through the 1977 publication of its Combahee River Collective Statement. This paper explores how the Combahee River Collective Statement’s themes—genesis, values, burdens, and focus—offers a vital framework for transformative pedagogy by womanist theologians and religious scholars. Key principles include embracing an outsider identity, decolonizing assessment, addressing emotional labor, and centering Black feminist perspectives. By reflecting on a crisis in a racial reconciliation course, this presentation illustrates how womanist pedagogy fosters liberatory learning spaces, breaking free from double consciousness to cultivate classrooms committed to survival, wholeness, and courageous exploration.

The Combahee River Collective Statement was the first articulation of “identity politics,” offering a Black feminist framework in which knowledge, revolutionary theory, and practice was created out of the lived experience and study of "interlocking" systems. I suggest the Statement’s theory of identity politics was not only a theory that centered Black women’s experiences in critiquing heterosexism, capitalism, and white supremacy, but also a method of knowledge-production in service of coalitionary politics. While it is critically important to center the Black feminist history and labor in its genesis, I also suggest that its methods of the “revolutionary leap” (Hong, 2015) might provide a pedagogical pathway toward learning in ways that catalyze contemporary coalitions. Drawing on my teaching of white clergy men, I explore how studying the Statement invites white men, who often don’t have methods for feminist praxis, into learning and joining the legacy of the coalitionary politics of Black feminism through developing their own feminist statements in 2025.

Creative projects can further student engagement with sexual ethics education that understands sexual justice as a social project, not merely a series of prohibitions on individuals. This paper describes projects such as mapping sexual geographies, roleplaying policy strategists, scripting meetcutes, and designing menstruation rituals. These assignments further learning objectives through creative action: they perform intersectional analysis of the risk of sexual violence, they create examples of how opportunities promoting sexual justice can be socially produced and/or hindered, and they orient students to democratic action for a sexual health and sexual justice-informed approach to public education. Lesson plans and assignments available as handouts for adaptation or re-use.

This paper attempts to test hypotheses of the French anthropologist Alain Testart, for whom women have been almost universally excluded from martial practices involving bloodshed due to an unconscious law consisting of an avoidance of blood accumulation (blood from a wound and menstrual blood), on the basis of Ambā’s episode in the Mahābhārata. The study of this literary example reveals that Ambā reincarnated as a woman under the name of Śikhaṇḍinī, then cross-dressed and transformed into a man under the name of Śikhaṇḍin, can express her desire of death and her warrior-like anger, can receive a martial initiation, can become an excellent warrior described as “man-woman” but will act merely as a protective shield during the final battle. Moreover, the analysis of Bhīsma’s discourse shows a new line of research not noted by Testart: the warrior act toward a woman is likened to an act of sexual nature. 

This paper is a discussion of the pedagogical utility of the Mahābhārata beyond captivating undergraduate students with stories of love and war or an introduction to several key aspects of Hindu beliefs, sociality, and literary fecundity. As students grapple with the turbulence of their local and global lived reality and desire to engage with contested issues, the epic holds a unique promise. It allows for a pedagogy for problem-solving that moves students beyond reacting to problems to critically assessing the tensions that constitute a problem in order to then think of perspectives to understand or solutions to solve them. Through examples from classroom, I illustrate the strong appeal for students to have a venue to grapple with their personal stake in an issue and to articulate and refine their ethics for uncertain, chaotic, or “messy” situations as they increasingly feel pressured to take and declare their stance on a matter.

A consistent question in the study of moral injury is whether it should be treated as a medical condition, and a consistent focus of mad studies and disability studies is the downsides of medicalization. Despite this, moral injury has largely not been analyzed through the lens of disability. Taking Tyler Boudreau’s paradigmatic argument against the medicalization of moral injury as a starting point, this paper argues that the insights of mad studies and disability studies provide strong additions to the argument against this medicalization. As Boudreau argues, psychiatry tends to privatize discussions of moral injury and avoid real political or ethical grappling with the conditions that lead to moral injury; medicine similarly privatizes and depoliticizes the social conditions that create disability. Psychiatrized people are also discredited as knowers, which excludes the insights of veterans with moral injury from public discourse.

The paper examines the friendship forged by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal Movement, and Howard Thurman, Christian mystic and social reformer, beginning in the 1950s when Schachter-Shalomi was a graduate student at Boston University and Thurman was serving as the dean of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. The paper argues that interreligious friendships are central to the leadership styles and practices of both religious leaders and examines the legacies of friendships among other religious leaders trained in Thurman and Schachter-Shalomi’s intellectual lineages at Boston University and Hebrew College respectively and beyond. The paper also gives particular attention to the influences of Schachter-Shalomi and Thurman on two pairings of contemporary Jewish-Christian friends: a senior rabbi and mid-career United Methodist pastor/academic, each with deep ties to Hebrew College and Boston University respectively, and a pair of their students, each now emerging into prominent national religious leadership positions.

According to an influential tradition in Christian theology, human flourishing is at least partially constituted by enjoying friendship with God. One worry about this tradition is that it encourages disengagement from the world, and thus functions ideologically to support an unjust status quo. In this paper, I argue that seeking friendship with God need not be in tension with striving to achieve social justice and freedom from oppression. Indeed, it can provide powerful motivation for participation in liberatory politics, and participation in liberatory politics can serve as a site for enjoying friendship with God. Whether the goal of sharing friendship with God is repressive or liberatory depends principally on one’s conception of what God cares about and seeks. If one conceives of God as caring deeply about justice and seeking to end oppression, then a theology of friendship with God can be a valuable resource for liberatory politics.

In this paper I discuss the relationship between the Buddha and his archnemesis Devadatta, specifically as depicted in the Lotus Sutra. In traditional Buddhist lore, Devadatta is something of the “Judas of Buddhism,” in that he tries to usurp Buddha’s role as leader of the sangha, encourages a royal patron to murder his father, and even seeks to kill the Blessed One on several occasions. He is, thus, regarded as one of the greatest villains in Buddhist history, yet in the Lotus the Buddha proclaims to his rapt audience that Devadatta was his “good friend” (kalyna mitra) whose life and teachings were instrumental in his (the Buddha’s) own awakening. Devadatta’s example in the Lotus suggests that common understandings of “friendship” may be inadequate and even misleading from a Buddhist spiritual standpoint. Paradoxically, perhaps a “bad friend” can turn out to be the best friend we could ask for. 

As the conflict in the Israel-Palestine region continues, committed friends and interfaith relationships have been severely strained across the globe, and the past eighteen months have been catastrophic for many of the friendships forged between Jews and Muslims in the UK.

Nevertheless, despite the polarised voices and radical opinions, some friendships have flourished. Through auto-ethnography and more recent anthropological work on friendship, this session will work to disentangle the complications of a robust friendship across religious belief, political affiliation, and the expectations and allegiances of a person’s own faith community.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2023-2025 at Nepal’s four holiest Hindu sites, or chār dhām—each located by a sacred river—this paper explores varied Hindu responses to rapid and ongoing environmental changes brought about by climate change and development.  It asks: How have Nepal’s chār dhām been affected by anthropogenic environmental changes? How do Nepali Hindus understand and relate to the rivers at these sites, and what are their reactions to changes in water flow and quality in these rivers? The paper investigates how Hindu beliefs, values and practices regarding the sacred rivers at these sites exist in a tense and complex relationship with, on one hand, conservation efforts, and on the other, development initiatives intended to bring economic and quality-of-life benefits. 

After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, South Asians were shipped to plantations across the Caribbean as indentured workers. The system of indentured labor produced the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. The Madrasis are a religious minority within this diaspora. They cohere around the south Indian goddess Mariamman and practice drumming and spirit possession rituals. Since the 1980s, Madrasis have been migrating to the United States. In New York and Guyana, Madrasis live on the coastal edges of climate change, oil spills, and water pollution. Drawing on ethnographic work in Guyana and New York, this paper examines how Madrasis invoke their history of indentured labor and the language of karma and kaliyuga to criticize ExxonMobil’s expansion along the coastline of Guyana and water pollution in Jamaica Bay, New York. The paper places the Madrasis’ terminological experiments in conversation with recent debates about the terminology and dating of the Anthropocene. 

The Anoop Mandal is a century old anti-Jain Hindu religious sect centered throughout the arid and drought-prone districts surrounding the border between Rajasthan and Gujarat. According to devotees (bhāviks), the Jain merchant castes, baniyas, control all the world’s governments, the economy, and even the weather; they are the source of the current climate crisis. Critics contend that this is evidence of the backwards status of the group’s members, who are mostly low-caste, and the underdevelopment of the region. This paper argues that the Anoop Mandal’s beliefs represent not a pre-modern prejudice, but a form of Hindu theorizing which connects anthropogenic climate change with the demands of a specific economy; it is a theory of the Capitalocene.  Why, this paper asks, do the causes of ecological devastation become conceptualized as personal rather than systematic? How does religion facilitate this process? And why is the target of this theory an ethnoreligious group?

This paper explores Hindu conceptualizations of death through three stories involving Yama, the God of Death in Hinduism and Bhūdevi, the Earth Goddess. The first story, in the Katha Upanishads, is of Nachiketa, a sixteen year old boy whose dialogue with Yama illustrates the apotheosis of an individual soul’s desire. The second story, in the Mahābhārata, is of princess Sāvitri, her chosen husband, Satyavan, and Sāvitri outwitting Yama on her husband’s survival. The third story centers on the goddess Bhūdevi’s call for help, resulting in the the third avatar of Vishnu, Varāha. These three Hindu stories are analyzed through prisms of mythic transformations of self, desire, and evil and expanded from the lone individual’s dealing with impending death to the imagination of a collective human species dealing with the possibility of death and extinction.