In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This presentation challenges the interpretation by Maria Heim and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad that Buddhaghosa’s work is purely phenomenological and not metaphysical. Heim and Ram-Prasad argue that Buddhaghosa is not concerned with the nature of existence but with training attention toward experience. In contrast, the presentation contends that Buddhaghosa makes genuine metaphysical claims about what exists.

This paper investigates the heretofore unstudied arguments marshalled by the Sui-Dynasty Sino-Parthian Madhyamika master Jizang 吉藏 (549–623 C.E.) to shore up the doctrine of mereological anti-realism – the position that nothing ever instantiates mereological properties or relations – for the Sinitic Madhyamaka or Sanlun 三論 tradition in which he is embedded. In his argumentation in support of mereological anti-realism, Jizang denies the intrinsic reality of mereological sums, the composites (Skt.: avayavin; Chi.: youfen有分), posited by rival Brāhmaṇical metaphysical theories, but also rejects the mereological reductionist doctrine – upheld by the earlier Abhidharma traditions of mainstream Buddhism – which postulates the fundamental reality of ontologically-simple parts upon which composites are conceptually constructed. An examination of Jizang’s Madhyamaka-oriented critique of Vaiśeṣika realism concerning composite substances brings to light the coherence of Madhyamaka Buddhist global anti-realism denying both the intrinsic reality of wholes and the parts upon which they are built.

In September 2024, a sacred object over 300-years removed from Brazil’s Tupinambá indigenous community returned to terra brasileira. A cloak of bright-red feathers, tied with intricate knots and sealed with local beeswax, the manto Tupinambá holds deep sacred and ritual importance for Tupinambá people, their activation central to communicating with more-than-human powers. Yet, until 2024, all existing cloaks were held exclusively in museums outside of Brazil. Artist Glicéria Tupinambá has been central to efforts for repatriation of these sacred objects. This paper tells the story of her multiple museum encounters with mantos Tupinambás: visiting European museums to study colonial-era cloaks, taking up cloak weaving for museum display, and merging art and activism through video-art installations. Theorizing secular aesthetics of museums in Brazil, this paper teases out Glicéria’s striking investment in museums, her work within and against the confines of museum institutions, and the persistent museological management of sacred Tupinambá objects.

Drawing primarily on examples from the Fowler Museum at UCLA, I will explore a variety of ways in which an institution that holds a significant number of sacred objects (or ancestors, relatives, non-human beings, etc.) in its collections can engage in processes of return. Responsible stewardship in contemporary museums increasingly includes negotiating the return of sacred materials to communities of origin or their recognized descendants. As understood here, "return" broadly encompasses a range of collaborative engagements between the museum and represented groups, including deaccessioning and repatriation as well as collaborative storage and care. In my discussion of specific cases, I will highlight key issues concerning the ethics and responsibilities of collection and collection management.

Around late 2016 and early 2017, the Peruvian Ministry of Culture with the assistance of the American FBI came to the realization that three stolen paintings from Cusco, Peru were in Miami, Florida. The investigation located all three paintings on the grounds of Corpus Christi Church within the city. Upon the extraction of these paintings, the parish community not only felt jilted but greatly questioned why the paintings could not stay with Corpus Christi, especially considering that a majority of the church's practitioners were Peruvian citizens. This situation highlights the significance of religious art in diaspora communities and the greater question of what defines cultural patrimony among Peruvian citizens living outside of the country. Religious paintings and artifacts are the center point of practitioner devotion and cultural exhibitions, but where do devotional paintings belong and who determines those circumstances? This paper explores these questions both in sentiment and practice. 

This paper analyzes two of Mircea Eliade's interwar Romanian political writings in light of Eliade's later theories of religion as put forward in Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958) and Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God (1972). In question are two articles that Eliade wrote in early 1937 for the Bucharest newspaper Vremea about the deaths of Legionary volunteers Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin in the Spanish Civil War and the Moţa-Marin oath that resulted from their deaths. These articles see Eliade praising Moţa and Marin's sacrifices as exemplary instances of "Christian heroism" while valorizing the role of death and sacrifice in the Legionary mystico-fascist framework through this new "Moţa-Marin" oath. By looking at these articles through the lens of Eliade's Patterns and Zalmoxis, particularly his theories of myth, ritual, the sacred, and sacrifice, this paper looks to contribute to the conversation around the relationship between Eliade's Romanian past and his mature scholarship. 

The phrase "the dark enlightenment" occupies a highly contested and volatile space in our contemporary political moment. On the one hand, it is linked to the writing of neoreactionary thinkers Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land who use it to signal their rejection of democracy and racial equality as a viable path toward freedom. On the very opposite end of the political spectrum, feminist, queer, and decolonial scholars have turned towards a different version of the dark enlightenment or endarkenment as a liberatory framework with the unique capacity facilitate communitarian ethics, care, and resistance. Because esotericism acts as a ballast between these vastly different political positions, this paper examines the writings of medieval theosophist and mystic Jacob Böhme to understand how his cosmology and apocalypticism shaped contemporary debates about race, technology, and the end of time.

Conservative claims to sacrality ground a social/political order by appealing to external sources (e.g., Carl Schmitt’s exceptional sovereign and Mircea Eliade’s axis mundi). Progressive claims to sacrality, meanwhile, often treat the sacred as an externality that cannot be subsumed within the existing order and thus offer a resource by which to challenge it (e.g., more recent work by Barbara Sostaita and An Yountae). Despite their differences, both of these discourses suppress the Christian genealogy of the sacred that shapes its use in the academy. The result of this obfuscation is to reinstate the sacred/profane binary rather than challenge it, thus also rescripting its binaries and the modes of domination they secure. This presentation returns to the sacred/profane binary as constructed by Rudolf Otto to address the limits of the turn to the sacred and to suggest that new vocabularies are needed in the postsecular turn.

Walter Benjamin once wrote that the best tool in the struggle against fascism would be a concept of history that is not surprised by fascism. In this paper I argue that such a conception must attend to the repressed forces that continue to shape history in politically ambiguous ways. I first revisit the appeals to religious and mythical authority by fascist intellectuals in Germany and Italy, before considering the irony that recent leftist critical theories appeal to the non-rational in ways similar to the fascistic work it contests. I conclude by returning to the interwar period to consider three efforts—by Freud, Rosenzweig, and Heidegger—that articulate an “unconscious of history” in response to totalizing violence. This genealogy asks whether contemporary critique unwittingly repurposes fascist hermeneutics or whether mobilizing the “beyond” of reason by both the right and the left demands more careful consideration.

Tying together multi-disciplinary theoretical approaches of grief, my research considers the real-time institutional shifts within the largest US mainline and largest global Methodist denomination, The United Methodist Church (UMC). UMC members express grief and pain at the pending split over disagreements on the ordination and marriage rights of LGBTQ+ persons. Within my findings is a significant strand that ties language of harmed and freed to emotion and structural change. Research includes interviews and focus groups across several UMC conferences, content analysis of UMC-related documents, and over 900 in-depth qualitative surveys of current or previous UMC members.

Justice-oriented anger is a burdened virtue. This is what Lisa Tessman describes as moral goods for the oppressed. Justice-oriented anger sustains acts of resistance for those desiring freedom. This evaluation of anger as virtue looks to Martha Nussbaum’s conception of “transition-anger” that lacks a desire of payback. The absence of vengeance moves towards restorative justice. Keri Day’s conception of political moodiness in Azusa Reimagined helps to consider how to engage the emotional experiences of the vulnerable, including anger. Having to choose a less morally good option under circumstances of subjugation pales in comparison to the immorality that comes from perpetuating systems of oppression. Justice-oriented anger points people in the direction of resistance and restoration, behaviors that may be more commonly accepted as virtuous. Resistance should include anger if anger is present to the resistor, and anger should be recognized as sustained responses that can be morally good.

This paper explores a non-individual conception of freedom through a reimagination of the subject. Analyzing the liberal, post-Enlightenment self, and critiques of that self from affect theory and Black studies, the paper questions the idea that freedom can be understood in individual terms as the expression of rationality acting on/in the world. By underscoring how affect produces responses antecedent to conscious cognition, and historizing the “rational” self in colonial projects, the paper wonders how “calling” may situate a self within a more-than-human social world. Exploring the feeling of being called, and the ethics of responding, the paper rethinks freedom in collective terms. Rejecting individualist freedom predicated on violence toward others, as well as colonial forms of secularism and “religious freedom,” the paper imagines freedom as profoundly shared: not issuing from a subject but coming to it from elsewhere and animating it with ethical charge.  

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) was a key figure in interreligious dialogue, instrumental in shaping Nostra Aetate, while also advocating for civil rights and opposing the Vietnam War. His 1965 lecture No Religion is an Island articulates a vision of interreligious engagement that challenges the misuse of religious freedom as a justification for discrimination.

This presentation explores Heschel’s alternative framework: a pluralism rooted not in religious autonomy, but in divine concern, which calls all faiths into solidarity. Heschel distinguishes between “Faith in One God,” which fosters moral responsibility, and “idolatry,” which sanctifies exclusion and oppression. His concept of "dialogical freedom" reframes interreligious engagement as a moral response rather than an entitlement. This perspective provides a critical lens for resisting the weaponization of religious freedom while sustaining authentic interreligious pluralism.

This presentation investigates profound commonalities between Amida Buddha in Pure Land Buddhism and Allah in Islam, underscoring shared spiritual concepts that transcend religious divisions. By examining two key correspondences—Amida’s "Comprehensive Compassion" (muen no daihi) with Allah’s "All-Encompassing Love and Compassion" (al-Rahman), and Amida’s "Infinite Life" (muryōju) with Allah’s "The Only Ever-Living One" (al-Hayy)—this study uncovers universal themes of boundless love and eternal life. The analysis addresses the dual dimensions of divinity in Islam: the infinite and formless God beyond human comprehension, and Allah’s accessibility through the 99 divine names. Similarly, it explores how True Reality-Suchness in Pure Land Buddhism manifests as Amida Buddha, whose twelve lights symbolize his attributes. This comparative study illuminates the resonance between non-theistic Buddhist thought and Islamic theology, fostering interfaith dialogue and mutual understanding. By highlighting these shared values, the presentation offers fresh insights into universal spirituality, enriching cross-cultural engagement and harmony.

This paper has two main goals. First, it introduces the audience to ‘covenantal pluralism,’ a new concept and research initiative supported by the Templeton Religion Trust. Second, it argues for a revised understanding of religious literacy. To motivate my preferred account of religious literacy, I examine prominent accounts—namely, the knowledge-based, analytic-based, and skills-based—revealing their limitations. In response, I propose an alternative: an attentiveness-based approach to religious literacy.

In the Indonesian context, one's cultural identity is often abandoned because of one's beliefs. The researcher uses the lens of Chinese culture (Zen), specifically the text of The Heart of Sutra to read the text of Philippians 2:7 in Christianity. Both texts focus on the meaning of emptying oneself. This study intends to see culture as a friend to religion. For this reason, this study uses cross-cultural hermeneutics, specifically the seeing through method, to read the word "emptying oneself" in Philippians through the lens of Buddhism. As a result, the researcher found that the meaning of Jesus' emptying himself was not limited to Him descending into a human being, but bodily making Himself an enlightened human being (experiencing satori).

This paper explores the indirect storytelling strategies of Christian digital influencers who engage in interfaith discourse on social media. As the creator economy is projected to triple in value by 2030, successful content creators leverage narrative-based storytelling to build dedicated online communities. As a South Asian-American Christian pastor, I unintentionally fostered a diverse interfaith following through chai-making videos on TikTok, inspiring this study on how influencers use indirect communication to navigate faith expression. Applying Benson Fraser’s theory of indirect communication, this paper examines how Christian Digital Creators use storytelling to foster interfaith dialogue while maintaining their personal beliefs. Through semi-structured interviews with ten diverse creators, the study analyzes how factors like religious identity, performative belief, and algorithmic authority shape their content strategies.

The purpose of this workshop is to listen to the needs of women/femmes in interreligious leadership, to allow them to share their suffering with one another, to create space for their wellness together, and to enhance their leadership skills. This workshop aims to equip interfaith women leaders who are either currently in religious organizations or preparing for religious vocational careers with the wellness tools they need to sustain a lifetime of religious vocation and avoid burnout. By creating a small group, this workshop provides a space that encourages participants to develop and sustain their own network even after finishing this workshop program. It explores ways to meet their psychological needs and prevent burnout, especially considering the unique intersection of institutional and structural demands that participants experience as interfaith women leaders. 

Interfaith chaplaincy in Scandinavia: Complex obstacles finding answers in holistic approaches

Despite a shared commitment to alleviate suffering, obstacles exist due to theological divergences, institutional and cultural biases and insufficient specialized training. 

This paper will attempt to identify both theoretical and practical indicators that could inform potential future models for interfaith chaplaincy.

Departing from an Islam/Christianity context building on comparative analysis of key theological concepts we advocate that an emphasis on mutual central values might foster more inclusive, holistic approaches to patient centered existential and spiritual care. 

Further, the paper contends that a patient centered approach – integrating elements from both interfaith and generic models - is essential for addressing the existential and spiritual needs of individuals.

Finally, it is argued that such an integrated approach not only enriches spiritual practice but also bolsters a broader societal understanding of health in accordance with the World Health Organization’s holistic health paradigm.

This presentation opens a conversation about the evolving landscape of Interreligious Studies (IRS) within the broader landscape of the study of religion by asking about its inter- and multidisciplinary nature. How is IRS related to Religious Studies (RS), theological studies, Jewish studies, Islamic studies, and other fields beyond those represented in the AAR? This paper initiates a critical discussion on the academic classification or home of IRS and its relationship to other fields. By likening IRS to RS as ecology to biology, a thought experiment is opened – one that welcomes rigorous critical feedback – to examine IRS's roles, methods, pitfalls, and interdisciplinary potential. The session invites diverse scholarly insights to workshop IRS's academic positioning and identify gaps in scholarship to further enhance the field's future.

This workshop seeks to introduce a compelling syllabus design for teaching Mysticisms in Action. As mysticism and activist approaches gain more traction in Interreligious Studies, this syllabus gathers key sources, themes, scholarly approaches, and pedagogical devices for its teaching and dissemination in the field. Mysticisms in action highlight the importance of both inner-introspection as well as outward action. In this vein, the course speaks to important themes in interreligious studies that call for reflexivity and critical analysis as well as coformation and social-justice making. In considering the work of several scholars in the field of Interreligious Studies, this syllabus gathers voices and sources that speak to structures of oppression, intersectionality, and mystical theologies that support parity pluralism and the engagement across lines of difference. This syllabus ultimately conveys powerful interreligious learning garnered through mystical traditions, mystical epistemologies, and supporting pedagogies that emphasize collective healing and liberation, both inner and outer.

Oct. 7 was not the first time that interfaith efforts faced disruption. In New York City, 9/11 led to an increase in interfaith activities. In larger cities, interfaith centers were established to bring together faith leaders from different religious traditions for dialogue and prayer. In smaller cities, however, interfaith work remains less institutionalized and instead relies more on local participants without formal leadership. Informal institutions and cultural norms prevail everywhere but people moving across religious boundaries, language barriers, and national borders often find themselves transgressing unfamiliar local cultural norms. Therefore, the impact of disruptive events like Oct 7 or 9/11 varies across multifaith communities. Ethnographic fieldwork in Germany and the United States indicates that cultural transgressions are less tolerated in regions with less religious pluralism. There appears to be more forgiveness in more pluralistic regions with sustained interfaith activities because in such settings sometimes the transgressor is variably also transgressed.

This paper seeks to model an attentive, locally informed approach to studying and supporting decolonial Indigenous-Christian relationships through an examination of the values and practices of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and the Catholic Norbertine or Premonstratensian Order. Attention to the particular historical, environmental, and ritual circumstances of neighboring or intermingled Indigenous and Christian communities will offer those communities reliable paths for dialogue and cooperation, who in turn can offer principles distilled from their distinct situation as information or inspiration to broader Indigenous-Christian conversations and movements. After identifying core elements of Oneida and Norbertine thinking and acting, the paper will detail areas of harmony and dissonance between these groups and suggest concrete ways for these communities to live with and for the benefit of each other and the Green Bay region. The paper will end by drawing insights from the Oneida-Norbertine relationship for wider Indigenous-Catholic interactions in North America.

This contribution explores Our Shared Sacred Story, a groundbreaking project that brings together scholars and practitioners from diverse traditions to reinterpret sacred narratives for contemporary global challenges. Sponsored by the Fetzer Institute, the initiative engages contributors from Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Indigenous Spiritualities, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, and Interspirituality, modeling the scholarly-practitioner dynamic in interreligious studies. Six panelists will discuss their contributions to the forthcoming Our Shared Sacred Story volume (Orbis, 2025), critically engaging the project’s methodology, insights, and limitations. This session will highlight the complexities of constructing shared narratives, theological and philosophical tensions, and lessons for interfaith engagement in academic and civic contexts. Attendees will gain insights into how sacred narratives can foster dialogue, build community, and address contemporary issues. By interrogating both the possibilities and blind spots of interreligious storytelling, this panel advances scholarship on religious diversity, secularism, and shared ethical visions.

Divine Revelation as a source of knowledge and understanding is at the forefront of both Christianity and Islam. Therefore, interreligious dialogue between the two faiths must include a discussion on Revelation. While the two religions may, in many ways, seem to be in opposition on this matter, an important similarity may be the presence of God through the Spirit. The concept of a Spirit as a medium for divine communication with humanity exists in both faiths, albeit in different forms (the Trinitarian Holy Spirit in Christianity vs. Ruh or “the spirit” in Islam). However, disagreements on the nature of this Spirit and the ways in which inspiration occurs make dialogue on Revelation difficult. A comparative study on Revelation in Christianity and Islam, with a special focus on the Spirit, may yield common ground on the Spirit’s inspiration of humanity and open dialogue toward a more diverse understanding of divine communication.

Scholars have framed liberation (mokṣa) in terms of negative freedom, or the cessation of suffering from worldly entanglements. Pāśupata Śaivism has been similarly understood through duḥkhānta (cessation of suffering). However, this paper argues that Kauṇḍinya’s soteriology is more complex, incorporating aiśvarya (sovereignty) alongside duḥkhānta, thus introducing a dimension of positive freedom. While negative freedom (duḥkhānta) aligns with renunciatory traditions, positive freedom (aiśvarya) suggests an active exercise of divine will. Kauṇḍinya suggests that liberation from bondage (pāśa) is not merely a means to ending suffering but also leads to the attainment of absolute sovereignty—a state in which the practitioner acquires divine agency (śivatva) and unites with Śiva (sāyujya).  By analyzing Kauṇḍinya’s use of aiśvarya, śivatva, and sāyujya, this paper examines the tension in Pāśupata thought, challenging standard ascetic interpretations and offering new insights into early Śaiva conceptualizations of liberation and agency.

Freedom in the philosophies of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions is often thought to result from the cultivation of a liberating knowledge. This freedom is often negatively defined as release from suffering and samsara. Some traditions however additionally posit a freedom from the constraints of space and time as well, leading to extraordinary claims about the acquisition of supernatural states of existence. My paper explores one such occurrence of this theme within a philosophical narrative belonging to the Sanskrit work, the Mokṣopāya/ Yogavāśiṣṭha. The famous “Story of Līlā” discusses the freedom of movement between multiple worlds through its notion of an absolute “space of consciousness” (cidākāśa). The primary objective of this paper is to philosophically analyze this notion of cidākāśa through Vedāntic positions about space, externality, and ephemerality. Through this analysis, I highlight a dialectical tension latent within the Mokṣopāya’s spatial metaphysics, and propose solutions to this conceptual instability. 

This paper examines the distinctive conception of liberation in life (jīvanmukti) as the destruction of the mind (manonāśa) found in the Mokṣopāya or The Way to Liberation, a 10th-century epic that narrates the instruction of Rāma by Vasiṣṭha. Through analysis of both didactic passages and the narrative of Līlā, it demonstrates how the text contains an idealist metaphysics that not only reduces the external world to mental function, but reduces mind itself to pure consciousness. This latter reduction differentiates the Mokṣopāya from Buddhist vijñānavāda, Advaita Vedānta and non-dual Śaivism, since the ‘unreality’ of the mind in the Mokṣopāya is constituted by the fact that it arises without determinate causation or a guiding self. The paper argues that “destruction of mind” refers not to cessation of mental activity but to recognizing the mind's spontaneity and selflessness — a perspective offering unique advantages over alternative models of liberation within Indian philosophical traditions.