In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

In spite of the consensus that has been achieved by scholars of migration and climate change—that climate-induced migration, while real, is complicated by other factors—a narrative of “invasion” persists on the part of both the general public and academics from other fields. This paper interrogates this “invasion” narrative in terms of both its cultural roots and its relevance to Christian thought. The paper unfolds in three steps. First, it sketches the history of the research on climate change and migration in order to contextualize the “invasion” narrative. Second, it argues that this narrative stems from an abstracted an oppositional imaginary for human/nonhuman relations. Third, it identifies a Christian dimension to this imaginary, both as a source of the problem and as an element in a creative response. In other words, Christian thought is both a resistance to the narrative of invasion and an expression of it.

Rising global temperatures harm everyone’s quality of life without regard to national boundaries. The effects of climate change indiscriminately destroy precious habitats and hasten species extinction, which generates incredible human and economic costs for millions of people from property loss, food shortages, disease, and needless deaths each year. As conditions worsen, unfarmable land and job loss force residents to relocate for employment opportunities and better living conditions. Contemporary discussions about migration frequently simplify/generalize the topic by asserting that displaced people share comparable stories, circumstances, and motivations. Hence, the challenge climate migration poses to discourse about people on the move, both locally and globally, is in assuming that migration is a monolithic issue. To achieve social justice for all, it is essential that religious and secular leaders recognize the diversity of migration and address each group’s various needs and goals.

As climate change accelerates forced migration, Catholic social teaching (CST) provides a critical ethical and theological framework for addressing climate-induced displacement. This paper examines how CST informs Catholic responses to climate migration through humanitarian action, policy advocacy, and global governance efforts. Using case studies from Catholic Relief Services in Central America and the Catholic Climate Covenant in the U.S., this paper highlights the Church’s role in supporting climate migrants. It explores how Catholic Social Teaching principles, especially the common good, human dignity, and the preferential option for the poor, shape faith-based interventions and influence international migration policy. Catholic organizations challenge existing legal definitions of refugees, advocating for expanded protections for climate-displaced persons. This study asserts that Catholic actors are not only responding to climate migration but actively shaping ethical and political discourse on migration governance in an era of ecological crisis.

As climate change accelerates migration, conflict, and humanitarian crises, understanding the role of religion in shaping community responses is crucial. This presentation explores multi-agent artificial intelligence modeling applied to four case studies: refugee integration in the Netherlands, religious aid dynamics in Lesbos, climate policy resistance in the EU, and conflict-climate interactions in Palestine through a collaboration with UNDP Program for Assistance to the Palestinian People.

Findings reveal that faith-based interventions often outperform secular approaches in fostering social cohesion, aid distribution, and policy adoption. In Palestine, for example, climate shocks exacerbated religious-political divisions, requiring culturally attuned development aid strategies. Our AI-driven simulations provide predictive insights for optimizing aid distribution, refugee policies, and climate mitigation efforts.

By bridging computational modeling and religious studies, this research highlights AI’s potential to enhance development aid strategies, ensuring they are ethically, culturally, and religiously sensitive in an era of climate-driven crises.

This paper advocates a new ethical paradigm for seeking and creating public policy change to bolster individual freedom for millions of health seekers on Medicaid. Bioethicists should prioritize health agency over the principle of autonomy and engage in ethical work with communities who are consistently cast outside the public’s concern. Our mixed-methods, interdisciplinary, community-valued study of Indiana’s Medicaid Expansion, the Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP), examines the “administrative burdens” (Herd and Moynihan, 2018) produced by HIP’s personal responsibility incentives. We demonstrate how these burdens interact and compound each other, contributing to racial disparities in accessing comprehensive health benefits by Black and Latine HIP enrollees. The “alchemy of beauty and events” (Coates, 2024) in the co-production of moral knowledge of sacred values with community members propels our team’s actions for policy change and challenges the framework of health promotion and autonomy through personal responsibility as it resurges through Medicaid nationally.

Narratives experiences of persons who are purposedly childless have been missing from political and public pronatalist debates. This paper examines reproductive justice and faith by encouraging a liberatory lens that takes seriously the embodied experiences of childfree Black women. Through autoethnography, qualitative focus groups, and the theorizing of ethicists Nikki Young and Wylin Wilson, this paper illuminates the moral harms caused by the repeal of Roe potentially saddling Black women who desire to be childfree with unwanted pregnancies. Rejecting pronatalist arguments as limited constructs of family, my paper investigates how Black women make themselves over as participants in new familial structures that are not contingent upon reproduction, biology, and religious rhetoric. Ultimately, the paper interrogates the role of religion in supporting these Black women’s experience of reproductive freedom and suggests that this reproductive agency has ethical and political ramifications.

COVID-19 highlighted the diversity of Catholic experience in the US when some communities experienced disenfranchisement because of public health mandates and others actively supported these policies. What factors shape how Catholic parishes experienced stay-at-home and risk mitigation public policies, as well as how public health actors and the public perceived Catholics? To examine these questions, I engage secularism studies and narrative medicine to analyze 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork I completed with two different Catholic congregations. One congregation utilized a narrative framework very similar to public health professionals to interpret their pandemic experiences and engaged in risk mitigation efforts above and beyond what public health policy required. The other parish was traditional, practicing the Latin Mass, and did not narratively interpret COVID-19 similarly to public health actors. They experienced conflict and disenfranchisement. Public health actors discursively labeled the first church as “good religion” and the second as “bad belief.”

This paper examines how religious and secular worldviews shape attitudes toward Covid-19 public health measures, drawing on empirical data from a three-year research project in Switzerland. Using a comparative analysis of semi-structured interviews, it critiques essentialist views on religion and objectivist approaches to risk. The study employs concepts from worldviews research, vernacular religion, folklore studies, and medical humanities to explore the narrative construction of risk. Moving beyond individual-centered approaches, it integrates cultural analysis to highlight how worldviews interact within social contexts. The findings challenge a binary view of compliance and non-compliance, emphasizing that risk perception is shaped more by relational positioning than by worldview content. The paper argues for a more comprehensive analysis of both compliant and non-compliant attitudes to better understand their underlying social dynamics.

In pre-modern Jain literature and in the writings of early 20th century CE scholars, the terms yati and caityavāsin, as applied to ascetics, have taken on a very pejorative connotation and have been used to refer to dissenting monks known for their lax practices. Strikingly, the term yati already appears as an equal to śramaṇa and muni in about ten long narrative works, mainly in prose and verse, written by monks between the 8th and 12th centuries CE. The aim of this paper is to examine in this under-explored corpus and in related works whether the use of the term yati applies to the so-called caityavāsins and if so, which type of monk it characterises in the complex and still shadowy monastic world of the turn of the first millennium.

The term caityavāsin has long been used to describe Śvetāmbara Jain monks accused of abandoning itinerancy and residing in temple complexes—a characterization shaped by later reformist narratives that equated temple dwelling with monastic laxity. However, pre-reform sources largely remain silent on these issues, and even non-Khartaragaccha texts do not emphasize this supposed transformation. Over time, caityavāsin became a ubiquitous polemical label, retrospectively applied to define the pre-reform past or discredit rivals. Through the case study of Upakeśagaccha, this paper examines the limitations of these polemical labels and questions the assumption that temple residence inherently violated monastic vows. By reassessing epigraphic, textual, and archaeological evidence, it challenges reductionist views and responds to broader questions of how to define the caityavāsin tradition, its practices, and the evolving concerns over monastic dwelling in Jain reform movements.

Much of the history of Jainism has been shaped by the reformist context in which it was gathered by western scholars. In the Śvetāmbara sect, 20th century CE scholars gathered most of their material from saṃvegī sādhus, who had recently all but succeeded in reforming the yati renouncers out of the tradition. This colored Jain histories of the modern era, either by characterizing yati monks by monastic laxity or śithilatā, or by leaving them out of Jain history altogether. When yatis are mentioned in histories of Jainism, they are characterized as corrupt priests who took either partial or diminished vows. In reality, yatis were highly venerated renouncers with large followings. The question remains whether they took the five great vows of a proper Jain monk. This paper will survey colonial era evidence, from gazetteers to invitation scrolls, to argue that the term “semi-renunciant” mischaracterizes the actual status of yati renouncers.

In popular conceptions of the history of Digambara Jain asceticism, ideal, naked and peripatetic mendicants (muni) are thought to have disappeared early in the second millennium CE. Persecuted by Indo-Muslim rulers, they were replaced by sedentary and clothed ‘semi-renouncers’ (bhaṭṭāraka) and only reappeared in the 20th century CE. Recent research however shows that Sultanate and Mughal era bhaṭṭārakas took the vows of fully-initiated Digambara renouncers and were venerated as paramount ascetics. The practices and symbols of sovereignty they adopted from Rajput and Persianate courtly cultures were not seen as signs of their ascetic laxity, but as expressions of their authority as the kingpins of Digambara polities. While contemporary Digambara munis operate in a social world which values different models of power, they engage in many of the same community functions as their bhaṭṭāraka forebears, and in some ways are still conceived of as kings (mahārāja).

The second revival of Buddhism in Mongol regions, particularly the Geluk tradition, established a monastic network tied to central Tibet. However, religious authority in these regions was not solely dictated by Lhasa. The Qing court, as the dominant power in late imperial China, actively regulated Mongol Buddhism, overseeing reincarnation confirmations, restricting monastic mobility, and imposing administrative policies.

This dual-layered governance placed Mongol monasteries at the intersection of Tibetan religious leadership and Qing imperial control. While Tibetan hierarchs dictated doctrinal matters, Qing officials shaped monastic administration. Mongol monks and monasteries navigated these overlapping authorities, balancing religious tradition with political constraints.

This paper examines how Mongol religious institutions operated under—and at times negotiated—the competing influences of Lhasa and Beijing, highlighting specific cases to explore the impact of Qing policies and Tibetan authority on monastic governance in Mongol regions.

This paper explores the concept of Thakhob (mtha' 'khob) as a rhetorical tool that legitimized religio-political expansion in early modern Tibet. It examines how both Tibetan Buddhists and Bonpos invoked Thakhob—a designation for borderlands inhabited by “uncivilized” peoples and untouched by the rays of Dharma—to justify their civilizing missions. Through various methods, including the interpretation of dreams and prophecies or “discovery” of hidden lands and texts, they sought to propagate their respective religious traditions. Specifically, this paper traces how, beginning in the 15th century, early Geluk monks and scholars initiated efforts to proselytize the eastern Tibetan borderlands, particularly the Bon strongholds of Gyalrong. These missionary activities intensified in the 18th and 19th centuries under the Qing-Geluk alliance, with prominent Tibetan and Mongour Geluk lamas playing key roles. By examining Thakhob as a conceptual and discursive device, this paper highlights its role in framing expansionist projects as a civilizing endeavor. 

In this paper, I consider the opposing Madhyamaka ('Middle Way') Buddhist philosophical positions of Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa (1357-1419) and Karmapa VIII Mikyö Dorje (1507-1554) as contrasting visions for theoretically grounding political authority. By comparing Tsongkhapa's and Mikyö Dorje's divergent attitudes toward epistemology and gnoseology, I argue that we see differences emerge that helped or hindered their orders in consolidating extensive political control by a central authority. Specifically, while Mikyö Dorje takes pains to profess a Madhyamaka philosophical view reflecting the apophatic bent of the Madhyamaka progenitor, Nāgārjuna (2nd c. CE), as well as his preeminent commentator, Candrakīrti (7th c.), the interpretive liberties that Tsongkhapa takes with those Indian thinkers' texts help establish justification for the kind of intensified bureaucratic control over the Buddhist monastic clergy that marked the Gelukpa order and aid its rise to power.

By 1920, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876-1933), had survived an assassination plot, two foreign invasions, and prolonged exile. Following his final return to Tibet in 1913, he sought to modernize and secure his territory through various reforms, both political and religious. Drawing on models of Buddhist kingship and Tibetan traditions of state protection, he employed the standard technologies of governance—temple renovation and monastic reform—but did so, remarkably, in a single project. Central to his undertaking was his illustrated commentary on the monastic code transformed into murals at two geomantically important sites: Ramoche and the Potala. In this paper, I consider the pictorial text and its murals within the circumstances of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s reign and the content of the historical record, contextualize them within his program of renovation and reform, and consider how the murals might have functioned more so as power objects than didactic diagrams.

The 13th Dalai Lama wrote forty-two guiding documents (bca’ yig) for monasteries throughout Tibet and Mongolia—more than double any known author before him. Scholars have speculated that this prolific output was an attempt to bring distant powers in Amdo and Kham under the control of the Ganden Phodrang. Through an analysis of the Dalai Lama’s guidelines for Kumbum Monastery’s Kalachakra college, I demonstrate how he sought to employ Buddhist practices of subjugation (‘dul ba) as bureaucratic tools of statecraft. By granting the college trainings and ritual dances aimed at subduing local spirits, the Dalai Lama gave the monks techniques to efficiently run their institution and defend themselves from threats, while simultaneously subsuming them into a larger state-sanctioned cosmology. This complicates the narrative of the 13th Dalai Lama as a modernist reformer, demonstrating his desire to use monastic technologies to forge a polity outside the mold of the nation-state.

Influenced by European Christian conceptions of divine power, the 20th century German legal theorist and Nazi apologist Carl Schmitt famously wrote that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt, 5). This paper approaches the problem of authoritarianism that Schmitt raises by focusing on a paradigmatic figure of power and exceptionality in Tibetan Buddhist political and religious thought, that of the bodhisattva. Examining how Tibetan Buddhist thinkers in three different time periods and political environments theorize bodhisattva power, intentionality, and action, this paper asks how these framings illuminate Tibetan debates regarding the moral dimensions of charisma and leadership, and the possibilities for freedom with respect to the state.

Tibet is often referenced in brief and passing notes in the literature on theocracy as the lone and somewhat anomalous Asian example of a premodern theocratic state. Focusing on the founding of the Drukpa theocracy of Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel (1594-1651) known today as the Kingdom of Bhutan, my paper investigates what theocracy, as a descriptive and analytical category, might help elucidate about notions of governance in the Tibetan region during the seventeenth century, and vice versa, what the Tibetan experiment with the union of religious and temporal domains (chos srid zung ’brel) might contribute to our understanding of theocracy as an organizing principle for social and political life.

The classic philosophy of religion is grounded in binary thinking that maintains a hierarchy of “culture” over “nature.” It reconstructs and highlights the relationship between human beings or persons to four elements: earth, air, fire, and/or water (collectively, hierarchically, or by emphasizing one) and nature. This tendency resonates with the culture vs. nature dualism, a by-product of 16th- and 17th-century European thought supported by the reflections of Hobbes and Rousseau during the Enlightenment period. Anglo-European thinkers still conceptualize “nature” as something to be observed, analyzed, and studied—an “other” distinct from us.

In my paper, I emphasize the Indian counter-perspective, which also appeals to the elements yet provides a holistic understanding of the world. A variety of beings - persons, animals, plants, etc. are considered part of a bigger whole and consist of diverse components. For naturalistic orientations, even the selves are constituents of the world inseparable from it. 

This paper draws from the Carakasaṃhitā, an early work of Ayurvedic medicine, to explore a vision of the relationship between humanity, nature, and the divine that resists conceptualizations of “nature” as fundamentally set apart from humanity. Through an analysis of Ayurveda’s “person-based world,” I argue that a key aim of early Ayurvedic medicine was to rectify presumptions and practices that treat nature and the divine as “other” than the human. Building on scholarship that illustrates the fluidity of Indic approaches to the categories of “person” and “self,” I also show how Ayurveda understands the conditions of nature and humanity—their health or illness—as direct expressions of divinity. As a totalistic program for understanding interconnections that sustain living systems, Ayurveda compels us to think beyond the anthropocentric logics of “othering” and exploitation, and to embrace philosophical, legal, religious, and ethical frameworks that extend personhood to nonhuman entities.

The philosophy of the Sāṃkhya Kārikā has puzzled scholars largely due to Cartesian-Newtonian assumptions that inform their views of nature, consciousness, and the relation between the two. This paper explores a new reading of Sāṃkhya as a phenomenology of life, where life gets construed in terms of a phenomenology of living nature and a phenomenology of human existence. And yet, while this represents a step forward in our understanding of Sāṃkhya doctrine, it nevertheless reveals deep-rooted biases that Sāṃkhya scholars have toward nature, the first-person perspective, and the relation between the two. Notably, these biases persist in the Natural Sciences, the Humanities, and Indology, but they are not to be found in the Sāṃkhya Kārikā.

Hindu philosophy of religion provides distinct thinking tools for our human, non-human and natural worlds. The Samkhya school has unique and detailed theories of nature, materiality, and evolution and can contribute to pluriversal ways (Mbembe 2016) to think about culture as a product of nature, rather than a point of contrast. Using Samkhya’s ontology of nature as a meta-category, this paper provides a philosophical reflection on classical texts, lived religion, and scientific theories to consider the significance of Samkhya’s dualist ontology of nature and consciousness in the Anthropocene. 

What would it mean to reorient the study of Islam around a conceptualization of the womb as microcosm? In contemporary Muslim theology, women’s growing prominence as religious leaders appears to be related to an increased conceptual awareness around rahma (divine mercy), rahim (the womb), and al-Rahman (the God of Mercy). To explore this development, I discuss how the womb functioned as a cosmological site in traditional Sufi discourse and then trace this connection in the thought of contemporary Muslim theologians and activists. Throughout, I ask how and when this reorientation is leveraged to support feminist modes of religious epistemology and praxis and how it shapes bodies and their ways of inhabiting spaces. I argue that, within the Islamic tradition, seemingly contradictory conceptualizations of the womb work together rather than in opposition—a paradox that holds the potential of disrupting colonial and patriarchal assumptions about Islam.