In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This paper surveys the Buddhist meditation technique known as the reflection on the repulsiveness of food (Skt. āhārepratikūla saṁjñā), tracing its origins in early canonical texts to its eventual decline in Mahāyāna Buddhism. It explores how food is interwoven with Buddhist concepts such as suffering, non-self, and dependent origination. Within this framework, contemplating food—by eliciting loathing toward both food and the body—reinforces the realization of non-self, fostering disenchantment and ultimately leading to nirvāṇa. Early Buddhist texts, including the Pāli Nikāyas and Chinese Āgamas, employ vivid similes to depict food consumption as an experience of suffering, while later Abhidharma traditions of both Theravāda and Sarvāstivāda systematized the practice. With the rise of Mahāyāna Buddhism, doctrinal shifts emphasizing emptiness led to its reconfiguration, as reflected in widely circulated Mahāyāna texts. Overall, the paper examines the relationship between this practice and the evolving doctrinal understanding of food in Buddhism.

This paper examines representations of disability in Chinese narrative tradition from the fourth to tenth century, arguing that disability is not a fixed category, but a fluid condition embedded in broader discourses of the body, suffering, and karma. Through an analysis of both translated Indian avadāna literature and indigenous Chinese miracle tales, I explore how these texts frame disability in shifting and context-dependent ways, sometimes as karmic retribution, sometimes as a contingent condition to be healed, and sometimes as an ambiguous marker of distinction. Rather than reinforcing a moralist view of disability as punishment, Buddhist narratives allow space for an empathetic recognition of disability as a shared yet transient condition among all sentient beings. Engaging with scholarship on disability aesthetics and ethics, this paper highlights how Buddhist texts mobilize bodily difference not only to elucidate doctrine but also to invite moral reflection, compassion, and a reimagination of embodied experience.

This paper explores the treasure origin (gter 'byung) genre in Tibetan literature, focusing on the works of Guru Chowang (1212–1270 CE.) and Ratna Lingpa (1403–1478), whose works provide some of the earliest systematic reflections on treasure revelation. These texts serve dual purposes: they not only theorize the nature of treasures—defining their origins, categories, and legitimacy—but also offer richly detailed narratives of the discovery process. These accounts describe how revealers located treasures through visions, prophecies, and signs in the landscape, how they negotiated with guardian spirits, and how they verified and authenticated their finds. By examining both the theoretical frameworks and vivid discovery narratives, this study sheds light on how treasures shaped Tibetan Buddhist understandings of revelation, sacred geography, and lineage.

This paper explores the reframing of Buddhism as ‘culture’ amid its growing popularity in South Korea. Recent Buddhist events like DJ NewJeansNim’s Lantern Festival performance and the Seoul International Buddhism Expo have attracted immense public attention despite declining interest in organized religion. Notably, both non-Buddhist audiences and Buddhist organizers increasingly describe Buddhism as a ‘culture’ rather than ‘religion.’ This study examines how the categories of religion and culture are being understood in post-COVID South Korea, the consumerist impetus behind articulating Buddhism as culture, and the tension that arises when organized Buddhism engages in propagation within this climate. I argue that the concept of culture operates on two main levels: as a consumable form of popular culture and as national heritage. While this strategy enhances Buddhism’s visibility, it also raises questions about the intersection of propagation and consumerism, ultimately highlighting the fluid and contested nature of religion in contemporary, non-Western societies.

Levinas, Rowing, and Infinite Relationality

This paper explores the sport of rowing as a lived metaphor for Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of infinite responsibility and ethical relationality. Levinas posits that encountering the Other binds us in an inescapable ethical obligation, akin to the mutual dependence of rowers in a boat. The synchronicity and interdependence required in rowing reflect the Levinasian notions of proximity and transcendence, where the self is called beyond its own limitations through responsibility to teammates. The unspoken promise of reciprocity in rowing mirrors the ethical commitment Levinas describes, with each stroke representing a gesture toward the Other. Even when personal conflicts arise, the ethical bond remains unbroken, reinforcing the communal nature of responsibility. Through shared effort and pursuit of perfection, rowing transcends physical exertion and embodies an ethical and spiritual practice. In this way, the sport offers a profound reflection on relationality, sacrifice, and the infinite call to responsibility.

This paper proposes an interdisciplinary investigation into the connections between C. Thi Nguyen’s aesthetics of agency in gaming and Hartmut Rosa’s resonance theory. While Nguyen explores how games structure and sculpt agency, offering unique aesthetic experiences through engagement with designed constraints, Rosa’s work on resonance provides a framework for understanding how individuals relate meaningfully to the world. By bringing these theories into dialogue, this paper argues that games can serve as privileged sites for the cultivation of resonant relationships, and that this has broader implications for religious ethics.

Yoga in church is a relatively new phenomenon. From being a practice associated with “Eastern” religiosity and culture, yoga is today widespread in the Western world and can be found in places such as gyms, schools, and health care. More recently, yoga has also traveled into new religious spaces, such as Christian monasteries and churches. This paper explores this phenomenon by taking departure in a qualitative empirical study of yoga services in the Church of Norway (CoN) and the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Denmark (ELCD). We ask: What happens when yoga goes to church? A particular focus is on how discontinuities are simultaneously re-established and bridged, especially regarding the use of the body. We argue that in these services, a dual boundary process of bodily hybridization on the one hand and wordily purification on the other takes place, displaying how discontinuities are both bridged and re-established.

What kind of memories does the epitaph of a late Buddhist master preserve? Whose memories are they? To what extent are epitaphs faithful representations of the memories of the deceased? This paper examines the genre of stūpa inscriptions—memorial texts inscribed on the exterior of typically monumental stone structures (stūpa or ta) that contain the relics of a late monk or nun—through the lens of memory construction. Focusing on the stūpa inscriptions of Buddhist monastics from fourteenth-century China, this paper explores the processes by which religious memory was negotiated, crafted, and promoted in both immaterial and material terms, as it was first committed to paper and then transposed to stone. Stūpa inscriptions preserve a combination of collective and individual memories, transmitted in writing through the concerted efforts of disciples, friends, and donors within the circles of the deceased, sometimes decades after the stūpa was built. 

“Deathbed verses” in the Chan or Zen Buddhist tradition are deliberate acts of composing poetry, performed by a master in preparation for their imminent passing. They reflect a ceremonial and intentional engagement with mortality. Deathbed verses have been traditionally understood as sacred expressions of enlightenment or transcendent spontaneity. This paper shifts attention to their calligraphic medium, and explores how visual, sensory, and temporal dimensions materialize as embodied traces within dying’s liminality. I focus on three final calligraphies by a seventeenth-century Chinese Ōbaku Zen master in Japan—brushed in his last three days. I analyze divergences in poetic rhetoric and stylistic features, and examine them alongside the master’s earlier calligraphies and disciples’ account of his final moments. Combining art historical analysis with sensory religion approaches, this paper demonstrates how intentional dying is both performed and memorialized through brush traces of the dying master.

The sixteenth-century Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition presents a model of religious practice that entails multivalent forgetfulness of oneself. The Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition is centrally concerned with a practitioner’s successful cultivation of a loving relationship with the supreme Godhead Kṛṣṇa. Initial devotional practices hinge on a central paradigm of remembering and forgetting: one must strive to remember Kṛṣṇa at all times to the degree that one ultimately “forgets” one’s own ordinary identity as an embodied being (jīva). Ultimately, a practitioner is said to realize their eternal relationship with Kṛṣṇa by awakening to one of four potential "flavors" of devotional love that correspond to Kṛṣṇa's paradigmatic Bhāgavata Purāṇa servants, male friends, parental elders, and erotic beloveds. And yet even such realization hinges on a modality of "forgetting." Even perfected devotees remain so consumed with love for Kṛṣṇa that they forget themselves, presenting a model of devotional forgetfulness that allows realization of eternal self.

Based on a book chapter recently published, this presentation will focus on the role played by religion as a force of social change in the contemporary world, discussing how Sikhi has been a major source of inspiration and a tool of mobilisation during the Kisan Andolan (the Indian farmers protest of 2020-21). Sikh ethos has indeed provided potent values and heroic figures drawn from past struggles as well as religious institutions and practices, such as langar, that have been instrumental in sustaining the over-one-year-long struggle. 

Based on interviews conducted at two of the protest sites at Delhi borders, my research provides an insight into the broad array of religious resources that were mobilised during the largest and longest rural struggle of post-colonial India, and their uneasy alliance with other ideologies, particularly the secular left, dominant among the farmers unions.

This paper examines the use of torture as a psycho-political tool during the 1980s–1990s Sikh insurgency, arguing that it targeted not only individuals but also the collective Sikh psyche. It explores the gendered nature of torture, demonstrating how patriarchal violence shaped the experiences of both men and women, particularly through sexualized abuse. Engaging with psychoanalytic theories from Freud, Sade, and Yeğenoğlu, the paper investigates how fantasies of dominance and subjugation informed both state violence and cultural representations. By drawing a comparative analysis with the Algerian War of Independence and its depiction in The Centurions, this study reveals how torture was framed as a means of reclaiming masculinity. The deliberate degradation of Sikh identity is analyzed as a tool of state control, illustrating the broader relationship between gender, power, and fantasy in modern India. This paper contributes to critical discussions on violence, subjectivity, and representation in postcolonial contexts.

This presentation explores divine energy and presence through the Lwa (S/spirits) in Vodou and the Holy Spirit in Christianity, focusing on their roles, interactions, and manifestations. I introduce "Vodou-Spirit hermeneutics" to analyze spirit possession, the embodiment of the Lwa, and the anointed Vodou community. Examining Vodou songs and prayers, I draw parallels to Christian pneumatology, employing Craig Keener’s Spirit Hermeneutics and The Mind of the Spirit, along with Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen's concept of plural pneumatology. I propose a "Multi-Spirit Cosmology" and "Pneumatological plural experiences" to further this analysis. The study also questions whether the Lwa align with the divine attributes of the Christian God, referencing Karl Rahner’s theological framework. Finally, a comparative study highlights differences in ontology, power, and authority between the Holy Spirit and the Lwa, examining their cosmic significance and their impact on believers in both traditions.

How might we understand health and healing if we started, not from a hospital or clinic, but from the graveyard? This paper explores this question through historical-archival and ethnographic analysis of  Jamaican Revival Zion’s “Physician’s Order” and its physician-healers. While Jamaican Revivalists are often viewed through an afrophobic lens that imagines them as perverse necromancers gallivanting in graveyards under the cover of dark, conjuring the dead for nefarious works; this paper reframes Revivalists’ relationship with the dead, through what I term, their graveyard etiology. Within this paradigm, disease, affliction, and misfortune, originate in the land of the dead, as it did for their Bakongo ancestors. Simultaneously, the land of the dead is also the source of powerful remedies for affliction. As such, the paper shows how the graveyard, as both a tangible physical site and a semiotic referent, is central to the healing, health, and well-being of the community.

This paper discusses how the newly independent Jamaican state used the 1963 Coral Gardens Massacre to establish founding national myths by engaging the colonial plantation tradition of suppressing Africana religions. In response to a small Rastafari group’s resistance to police violence, state officials organized Jamaica’s first joint police-military operation, also enlisting civilians in a coordinated attack on Rasta communities near Montego Bay. Taking place in the first year of Jamaican independence, I argue that the new Jamaican state used the violent management of Africana religion at Coral Gardens as its foundational performance of sovereignty. By violently suppressing Afrocentric Rastafari, the state maintained the colonial plantation practice of denigrating Africana religion. In doing so, Jamaican state officials established narrative and mythic continuity between colonial and postcolonial modes of legitimate state management of Africana religions, exhibiting a colonially legible capacity to govern in the postcolonial context.

Analog roleplaying games such as Ma Nishtana, Matza Matzah, and Dream Apart draw on the embodied and sensorial to transmit a continuity with Jewish traditions, even as the content of their games invites a queer reworking of historically significant Jewish narratives. Through the medium of play, they create new texts and contexts -- but by preserving ritual structure and specific sensations of touch and taste, they also remain in clear conversation with Jewish culture. This is especially notable given the way the games make space for non-Jewish players and those without any prior knowledge of the traditions they engage. To encounter Judaism through these games is to learn via affect: first by touch and by feel, and only later by text and history. 

Drawing on clothing studies, as well as performance and play studies, this paper asks how and why tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) players wear religiously-charged clothing. Physical elements of roleplaying decrease friction as players’ virtually experience what their characters experience in the world of the game. Articles of clothing and accessories can make aspects of fictional experiences tangible in the real world, and usher players into deeper enjoyment of the game world’s activities. This paper explores what happens when real clothing operationalizess player attachments to both game- and real-world religious systems, objects, and ideas to modulate experience. Namely, the use of worn religion artifacts affectively connects players to their characters’ worlds and experiences and taps into games’ power for personal growth and change.