In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This paper presents a creative and interdisciplinary approach to teaching Gurbānī Sangīt (the music of Sikh scriptural hymns) at a North American college as part of efforts to decolonize Liberal Arts education. Grounded in the decolonial notion of ‘listening as a way of knowing’ (Feld 2024; Becker 2004), the courses emphasize practical engagement with the pluriversal vision enshrined in the songs transmitted in Sikh Scripture and Gurbānī oral literature, as an ecology of knowledges (Santos 2014) inclusive of Bhakti and Sufi voices. This experiential approach provides an avenue to reflect on the role that kīrtan, or the singing of devotional poetry, had - and still has - in transmitting spiritual knowledges from the Global South. Additionally, by reviving the pre-colonial pedagogy, Gurbānī Sangīt classes create opportunities to explore Sikh history, philosophy, and practices while learning firsthand the rāga and tāla system, along with traditional instruments to perform kīrtan’s heritage compositions.

Decolonizing pedagogy is a crucial endeavor for the discipline of religious studies to undertake to better understand and explore religious traditions that have long been understood through a colonial lens, such as Sikhi. Fortunately, Sikh scholars continue to  provide indigenous perspectives on the dynamic development of Sikhi as a religious, cultural, and politically sovereign empire; yet a successful course focused on decolonizing pedagogy must do more than emphasize scholarship within a tradition.  This paper focuses on the successful implementation of a recently developed decolonizing teaching method, Interfaith Community-Advised Pedagogy (ICAP), in which courses are co-taught between religious studies faculty and members of minority religious traditions to gain first-hand knowledge about how religions are lived.  After we (a religious studies professor and Sikh activist) collaborated on the ICAP framework, our class was able to engage with indigenous scholarship, build rapport with a Sikh community, and effectively center Sikh sovereignty with students.

This presentation explores how engaged learning and experiential pedagogies of seva (selfless service), simran (meditative reflection and contemplation), sakhi (storytelling), shabd (song/word) and sangat (community engagement) can function as decolonial practices to transform the self in relation to community, past, present, and future. Through student engagement in the course Sikhism: Sage Warrior and collaborations with grassroots initiatives led by activists, artists, and musicians, I will examine the ways in which the afore mentioned pedagogical approaches can provide a transformative framework for student learning and collective well-being. 

Altars have long served as sacred spaces of memory, reverence, revelation, and restoration, evolving to meet the spiritual needs of various communities. This paper explores how altars function as a metaphor for Black women’s evolving spirituality in the fourth wave of womanism. Like altars, Black women’s spirituality embodies both tradition and fluidity, as they reclaim ancestral practices and craft autonomous, inclusive faith traditions beyond Christian doctrine. Through the dimensions of remembrance, reverence, revelation, and re-membering, Black women create spiritual spaces that honor ancestors, engage divine presence, receive wisdom, and heal from systemic oppression. Drawing from historical shifts in Christian altars, womanist theology, and contemporary critiques of religious exclusion, this study highlights how Black women’s spirituality is a site of liberation. It argues that the fourth wave of womanism calls for a faith that is expansive, self-determined, and rooted in radical wholeness, offering Black women sacred autonomy in their spiritual journeys.

There are many hardships that are encountered by members of the Africana diaspora in efforts to remember and reclaim lost ancestral memories. However, the desire to belong to a communal identity located in a particular set of ancestral memories facilitate what Dionne Brand refers to as “way-finding.” In her book A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging, Brand argues that religion is one of many methods of way-finding that can be used as a means to navigate the Black experience of a ruptured historical memory resultant from the practice of colonialism and slavery. Using Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust to illustrate Brands notion of way-finding, this body of work contends that diasporic religious practices like Hoodoo, are legitimate methods of way-finding that have resulted in loving and caring connections to one’s lost ancestral past, themselves, and others.

This discussion explores some of the ways we catalog and document the Black, Latinx, and Indigenous cultures in our foodways systems, focusing especially on how history is passed down in the preparation of hand-patted foods at the kitchen table. Here is where we can reclaim the art of oral history, of inducting new griots in the skill of retelling our stories. Some attention will be given to food storytelling through film and television, including the 1997 Black film classic, Soul Food, Norman Lear’s classic 1970s sitcom, Good Times, and the 2001 comedy, Tortilla Soup. A cursory look will be given to Idiomatic and cultural expressions, like this food is so good you put your foot into it, or this food is bucklin’ or you did that! as a means of gratitude and extension of the social mores and values that are learned at the kitchen table.

This presentation will explore the concept of the “Womanist Athlete” as a framework for understanding the significance of Black women’s movement as acts of liberation. First, I will define the term Womanist Athlete, situating it within Womanist theology &  ethics. Second, I will examine the lives of Harriet Tubman, Angela Davis, and Serena Williams, demonstrating how each exemplifies athleticism: Tubman as an Endurance Athlete, Davis as a Political Athlete, and Williams as a Olympic Athlete. Third, I will argue that beyond their roles as historical & cultural figures, all three are theologians of liberation. Finally, I will engage the works Townes, Williams, Copeland, and Coleman to explore the role of imagination and hope in Black women’s experiences. By bringing these scholars into conversation with the lives of Tubman, Davis, and Williams, this presentation will illuminate how Black women’s movement—whether through escape, activism, or professional sports—serves as a theological act of liberation.

This paper explores how the affective aspects of reciprocity in the deity-human relationship are essential to understanding the vitality of pilgrimage practices in the cult of the Goddess of Mount Tai. Inspired by Monique Scheer’s use of practice theory in the history of emotions and Barbara Rosewein’s work on emotional communities, this paper explores how exhortations about pilgrimage practices in three widely circulated baojuan 寶卷(precious scrolls) shape what devotees do and feel. I showcase how these texts use the word gandong 感動 (stimulate and move) to depict the Goddess as physically stimulated and emotionally moved by her devotees’ prayers, and propose to appropriate the indigenous notion of gandong as an interpretive lens to capture an intimate deity-human relationship unmediated by the impersonal, metaphysical correlation of cosmos and virtue.

When accomplished visual artists join the monastic Order in Buddhist China (and thus enter a new “community of emotions”), is there room for continued expression of emotions through artistic engagement? Abundant primary sources enable granular study of Hongyi (1880-1942), a notably accomplished man of the arts who became a monk at age thirty-eight. Here we will consider complex issues related to emotions, discipline, and creative activities through examination of: (1) the eminent monk Yinguang’s written teachings to Hongyi in the 1920s about calligraphy (including blood writing) and its procedures in monastic contexts; (2) the witness of Hongyi’s sustained body of visual work created in this new context - what he actually created (and why), as well as what he no longer created; and (3) after he came to maturity as a Vinaya master, Hongyi’s cautionary yet encouraging statements and teachings regarding the role of artistic expression within a monastic vocation.

This paper contributes to research on emotions and Chinese religion by examining the laughter of derision directed at female spirit mediums. These women occupy an ambiguous role in Chinese historical texts. Some accounts depict them as vital intermediaries who communicate with the unseen for the benefit of local communities, while others condemn them as charlatans who undermine social morality. The article analyzes the literary trope of mocking female mediums in three stages: from the Han dynasty, through the late imperial period, and into the Maoist era. Through their derisive laughter at female mediums, Chinese elites crafted narratives about civilization, modernization, and revolution. Yet even as these women became objects of ridicule, their portrayal in elite writings inadvertently reveals their crucial role in local religious life. The power dynamics of laugher offer important insights into the intersections of gender, emotion, and politics in Chinese religious history.

This paper explores the emotional facets of Hakka pilgrimage practices at a temple to the bodhisattva Guanyin 觀音 situated on the outskirts of the town Daxi 大溪in northern Taiwan. Its analytical framework draws on Tuan Yi-fu’s concept of “topophilia” (defined as “the affective bond between people and place or setting”) to hypothesize that sacred sites like the Guanyin Temple lie at the heart of what I tentatively term a “cultural nexus of feelings” featuring the moving experience of journeying on pilgrimage accompanied by family members along paths trodden by one’s ancestors that inspire memories of individual lives and family histories. Thus, worshippers at the Guanyin Temple experience feelings of well-being due to its serving as a ritual and affective venue for coping with life’s challenges, while also joining with family members to enjoy time together and recall memories from their childhood or stories told by their forebears.

This paper examines the conservative political influence of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI). The impetus for the organization came from missionary-turned-pop-intellectual Francis Schaeffer who insisted that American evangelicals had lost their commitment to both the inerrant Bible and the US Constitution that it allegedly inspired. Other politically-active evangelical leaders, and others abstained precisely because they saw the “political cast” of the ostensibly theological organization. Through its 1982 Congress on the Bible, the 1983 “Year of the Bible,” and its 1986 Statement on Biblical Application, the ICBI made its connection with the Reagan Revolution clear. Ultimately, the ICBI showed that evangelical biblicism was not separate from the emerging culture wars. Rather, a literalist theo-political hermeneutic of biblical and constitutional interpretation drove a much larger and more lasting fight over definitions of evangelicalism, religious liberty, and American law.

This paper will examine Conservative American Christians who believe that Biblical Inerrancy provides the moral defense for racism in several forms: African slavery, production of the Slave Bible, and the rejection of Critical Race Theory. These defenses are best observed in The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI), the views and agenda of Albert Mohler Jr former President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Richard Furman’s letter “Exposition of the Views of the Baptists Relative to the Coloured Population...”, and Voddie Baucham’s book Fault Lines that rejects Critical Race Theory.

Defense of American slavery, creation of the Slave Bible, and the contemporary rejection of Critical Race theory all stem from the controversial reality that Biblical Inerrancy is part of the same heritage that continues to demand Black inequality within ideal Conservative American Christian culture and society.

Since its modern development in the 1970s and 80s, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy has worked to protect inherited beliefs by minimizing and often demonizing alternative interpretations of scripture, presenting them as biblically subversive and thus necessarily erroneous. Utilizing new interviews with Beth Allison Barr (The Making of Biblical Womanhood, 2021) and Sarah Stankorb (Disobedient Women, 2023), this paper will tell one part of this much larger story, particularly how inerrancy has been weaponized to promote and protect a patriarchal theology of authority, submission, and abuse. Special attention will be paid to how inerrancy has been used to attack Barr, Stankorb, and others via social media, blogs, reviews, sermons, books, and threats of lawsuit. The weaponization of inerrancy is a lived reality for these and other authors, many of whom have dared offer a hermeneutic of risk that takes seriously our historical consciousness and thereby challenges inerrancy’s desire for certainty

Opposition to reproductive freedom can be understood as a symbolic masculinity that defends a particular religious tradition as well as the discursive economy of project 2025 Given the current political climate and the rise of evangelical restrictions to other’s freedoms through legislative action, understanding this symbolic masculinity is important both communally and for the academy. Leaning on the scholarly works of Butler, Cassino, Ammerman, and Primary source documents from the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, this paper advances the following claims. Reproductive freedom liberates women from their assumed participation in the “form” of the receptacle. Reproductive Freedom creates a sense of communal and personal crisis for evangelicals who affirm Biblical Inerrancy and Complementarianism. This sub-culture contains materializes the body through the perpetuation of “conversational plausibility structures” and a sexed economy grounded in a perpetuation of Plato’s receptacle strangely arising from an interpretation of the “inerrant” biblical text.

Ethics is sometimes thought to be narrowly a concern with our treatment of the Other, a living thing: the neighbor, the loved one, animals, the earth, or God. However Jewish ethics also has a robust understanding of our obligations to the no longer living, to the no-longer-human. Of course Jewish rituals around death and mourning are well known and well studied. What has received less attention is our moral obligations to the dead body itself. By studying the Jewish visual response to death, namely how Jews traditionally (do not) depict and gaze upon the dead, I argue that ultimately it is the ethical agent’s moral responsibility to render the dead invisible. The Jewish corpse, a no-longer-human being who is not quite an object, who can experience shame and contains the image of God, requires that it ultimately be erased from this world, no longer available to living eyes. 

While recent feminist Jewish thought has used critiques of abstraction as a feminist tool to criticize the way that canonical figures in Jewish thought have theorized the “ethical relation," this paper will suggest that abstraction plays a key role in a range of experiences, including experiences of infertility. To do this, the paper will show that, like many other kinds of experiences related to childbearing and childrearing, experiences of infertility are deeply shaped by obligation, but these obligations are directed towards an Other who remains abstract—the hoped-for child. In this way, the paper challenges us to develop new tools for describing the important conceptual contributions that theorizations of parental experience can make to contemporary ethical discourse. 

This paper explores the emerging phenomenon of AI-based simulations of the dead and the ethical issues they raise, particularly in a Jewish context. The capacity of AI to mimic styles from limited data offers potential therapeutic and memorialization benefits, yet also presents serious concerns. Central among these are questions of consent, privacy, the integrity of data-driven identities, and disruptions to the grieving process. Within Jewish tradition, the decentralized nature of authority and the reliance on historical precedent complicate the establishment of new norms. The author proposes two guiding principles—a right to be remembered and a right to be forgotten—and shows that these principles can be grounded in Jewish sources. Drawing on examples from twentieth-century and medieval Jewish history, the paper outlines how entirely new moral norms can be developed in response to unprecedented ethical dilemmas.

Missionary geographic enthusiasm was a vital component of nineteenth-century missionaries’ attempts to inform the American Protestant public about the world, its people, and their supposed need for evangelism. Starting in the late 1820s, missionary leaders of Monthly Prayer Concerts turned to maps and other geographic information as a key part of the “missionary intelligence” they shared with American audiences. Maps served several purposes in missionary intelligence: to educate and entertain, to make the far away and distant feel near, and to help American Protestants take a livelier interest in the world around them. Ministers sought to harness the power of visual aids and compelling narrative to turn public educational lectures into tools for the advance of foreign missions in the world at large. But these efforts to educate Americans about the world brought missionary conceptions of the hierarchies of world religions, cultures, and race into American geographic understandings.

Recent scholarship on maps suggests we must reimagine what we think a map looks like and what a map does. Maps are lively images that can take many visual forms, perform many functions in society, and assert many different claims about the relationships between human beings and their environments. Maps can also make claims about time, articulating relationships between the past, present, and future. This paper invites scholars to rethink the significance of maps in Protestantism by examining two Bible maps from the early twentieth century: a map of “The Holy Land” in the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909 and a chart made by dispensationalist minister Clarence Larkin in 1920. Examining the materiality of these images and their functions in Protestant communities, this paper argues Bible maps and charts made distinct claims about contemporary politics, the Bible’s relationship to geography in the past and present, and the sacrality of time.

William Dawson was a staunch Presbyterian. He was also a celebrated nineteenth-century geologist, president of Montreal’s Natural History Society, and principal of McGill University. In his view, cataloging scientific specimens bolstered his faith. This paper begins by considering Dawson’s taxonomic work as a form of Protestant mapping. It then jumps to the present when it inspired my experiment organizing a new “Natural History Society” at McGill, which included scholars and artists. We presented artifacts to each other, created our own weird taxonomic maps, and made a digital pedagogy tool. The project was a “serious parody” (Wilcox 2018), a ludic protest that parodies a dominant cultural form, while gaining real insights in the process. Making our own taxonomies was also an experiential form of critique, a way to move “map” closer to “territory” in J.Z. Smith’s terms. Can it help us to reimagine complex relationships with each other and the planet?

This paper thinks diagrammatically about how to visualize Protestant subjects and subjectivities. Thinking about subjects through diagrams allows us to ask: How are subjects made in and through their spatial existence? Rather than starting from the classic trope of Protestant interior individualism, I argue diagramming is a method that can help us shift toward a deeper understanding of Protestant subjects-in-the-world. I especially build on recent scholarship on diagrams as methods of mapping in cultural anthropology, and I extend this into religious studies. When we think about subjects through the lens of space, it becomes clear the Protestant tradition incorporates a multitude of types of cartographic subjectivities. The paper discusses three example diagrams of Protestant subjectivity: the subject as concentric circles; the subject as a relational ensemble; and the subject as a friction-filled coupling.

This paper historicizes how scholars came to frame Protestantism as a disenchanted, modern religion focused on thinking about immaterial beliefs. It demonstrates that this view, although pervasive, is not inherent to Protestantism itself. This view is a modern definition of religion that took hold among freethinkers who practiced the “religion of secularism” from the 1890s onward. In cartoons, freethinkers criticized Protestantism as a material form of religion that focused too much on supernatural objects and beings. Freethinkers offered new interpretations of Enlightenment epistemologies that suggested secularism was a truly enlightened, modern religion because it focused on immaterial beliefs. Ironically, the religion of secularism informed the secular historical method, through which scholars studied Protestantism as a tradition of immaterial beliefs. This paper offers a way of remapping belief in Protestantism according to eighteenth-century Enlightenment epistemologies, which Protestants adapted to practice their enlightened, material form of religion well into the twentieth century. 

This paper examines the emotional life of Confucian sages, drawing upon the Korean Confucian scholar Seongho Yi Ik’s 李瀷 (1681-1763) account of human emotions and the emotions of sages. While much scholarship has explored the cultivation process that leads to the exemplary life of sages, less attention has been given to their inner emotional experiences. To address this gap, I first outline the effortful life of ordinary people, who must remain vigilant in monitoring and regulating their emotions, distinguishing moral emotions from personal emotions and ensuring that the latter are properly guided by the former. I then turn to the effortless life of sages, whose actions are always appropriate and spontaneous. I make two key claims: 1) sages do not experience the Four Beginnings, and 2) sages experience only the Seven Emotions. This analysis reveals an overlooked dimension of Confucian ethics that extends beyond interpersonal relationships. 

Since Mengzi, who argued that the four basic emotions demonstrate the inherent goodness of human nature, Confucianism has emphasized the moral significance of emotions in ethical behavior. However, negative emotions such as jealousy, arrogance, and dissatisfaction disrupt internal harmony and strain relationships, raising questions about their role in moral cultivation.
In Confucian thought, emotions have traditionally been linked to qi (氣) or physical temperament, complicating the concept of emotional autonomy. However, Jeong Yagyong (Dasan), an influential 18th-century Korean philosopher, challenged this view. He rejected the idea that temperament significantly influences morality, diverging from Neo-Confucian interpretations.
This presentation will explore Dasan's perspective on negative emotions, examining how he reframed their ethical significance and offered a more individualized approach to moral self-development. The analysis contributes to broader discussions on the moral role of emotions in Confucian ethics, offering new insights into the intersection of emotion, temperament, and morality in East Asian philosophy.

This paper explores the role of resentment in Joseon women's literary expressions, challenging traditional Confucian views. While resentment is often seen as a sign of weakness, it becomes transformative when combined with moral emotions like filial longing and self-respect.

The study analyzes how these women's writings—poems, letters, and notes—served as a medium for self-empowerment and solidarity. Despite their wishes to have these works destroyed after death, they were preserved and shared across generations.

By revealing vulnerability through writing, Joseon women empowered themselves and created a shared emotional landscape with others facing similar circumstances. This research highlights the interplay between Confucian ethics, gender dynamics, and emotional expression in Joseon society.

This article explores the philosophical implications of “Jeong,” a concept cluster that represents the emotions of Koreans today. “Jeong” originated from the Chinese character 情, but after going through a long and persistent debate on emotions in Joseon Confucianism and riding through the conceptual history of the modern period when Eastern and Western cultures clashed and merged, thereby establishing itself as a core notion representing the basis of Korean minds. 
Since its meaning has evolved between the waves of Eastern and Western cultures, to gauge the context and semantic nuances of “Jeong”, I first examine the philosophical discussed in ancient Greek and Chinese traditions from a comparative philosophical perspective. Then, I will argue that “Jeong” is a philosophical joy that reflects and encompasses other emotional keywords that express emotions in Korean culture and arts, such as the two aesthetic emotions in a dynamic relationship, joy (heung) and sorrow (han).
 

Thomas Merton was a pioneer in interreligious dialogue and interspirituality, engaging in years of correspondence with practitioners from Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Indigenous and other religious traditions. His extended dialogue with Zen writer D.T. Suzuki was published in Merton's Zen and the Birds of Appetite, and many of Merton's final days in Asia were spent with Tibetan monks and other Buddhist practitioners. Yet, Richard King and others have argued that despite Suzuki's warm reception in the West, he occupied a minority viewpoint within Zen which was tailor-made for such export. But this paper argues that Merton is no Orientalist appropriator. He was uniquely qualified to engage in interreligious dialogue, not because he was a scholarly expert, but because he was a mystic. Merton cultivated dialogue for the purposes of deepening his own monastic practice and fostering justice in the world. His pathbreaking interreligious exploration shows how interreligious dialogue can move in decolonizing directions.

“However strange it may appear, I was led to Yoga by William of Saint-Thierry.” This sentence began the preface of Jean-Marie Déchanet’s English translation of his mid-twentieth century book titled La Voie Du Silence later translated as Christian Yoga. In the text, Déchanet argues the aim of both William of Saint-Thierry, a French Benedictine mystic,  and Christian Yoga is the union and balance of anima, animus, and spiritus. For him, Yoga creates an “openness [toward the] mystical life,” “quickens the life of faith, the love of God and our neighbor,” and “sharpens our sense of duty and responsibility as men and, above all, as Christians.” While he argues yoga supports the Christian spiritual life, Déchanet enforces parameters on what type of yoga a Christian should practice. This paper examines Déchanet’s argument for a Christian Yoga through his historical context and scholarship of William of Saint-Thierry. 

By primarily incubating his imagination and that of his audience, both as a writer and preacher, Howard Thurman draws from various resources: spiritual traditions, nature, poetry, and friendships, and invites himself and others to transcend the boundaries of a life contained by a dominant, totalizing narrative. This essay dives into a common theme that unites Thurman’s writings: the stretching of one’s vision and desire for interconnectedness amidst the vicissitudes of life, collective trauma, racial and class discrimination, and other forms of systemic oppression. Multiple religious belonging adds more taste buds to Thurman’s religious sense, metaphorically speaking. Thurman drank from several spiritual wells. Following my examination of Thurman’s spirituality, which finds roots in inter-spiritual experiences, I will reflect on Thurman’s spiritual fluidity and his philosophy of interdependence.

In 1960, the Catholic monk, Thomas Merton (1915-1968), received a copy of the Talks on the Gita. This commentary on the Bhagavad Gita was written by Vinoba Bhave, disciple, confidant, and spiritual successor to Mahatma Gandhi. The book has a marked impact on Merton, providing him with a framework and language to process his vocational crisis in 1960, to bear non-violent witness in 1962, and to critique contemporary spirituality in 1965. In this paper, we explore a transition in Merton’s understanding of the Gita. We argue that, with the Talks on the Gita, Merton comes to understand the Gita as a text of both personal and universal application, and to see Vinoba as an inter-religious sage. Merton envisions Vinoba and his teachings as universally applicable: transcending ideological boundaries and broadening his more global worldview. Merton’s efforts proffer relevant questions about the identification, meaning, and lived experience of “multiple religious belonging.”