In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

According to François Laruelle, philosophy and religion are haunted by a structure of decision–one that bears no small resemblance to the one invoked by the infamous Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. This paper offers a reading of Laruelle’s invitation to indecision, one intended to distinguish it from a number of more familiar political-theological tropes. In an important sense, Laruelle insists that the human has never really been captured by the decisional pretense of philosophy or religion; as a result, the human has no real need to be emancipated from it. The meaning of this non-emancipatory posture, the paper argues, can be clarified by way of an analogy to the difference between two political theologians whose criticisms of Schmitt have been habitually confused for one another’s: Giorgio Agamben and Ernst Kantorowicz.

This paper takes the measure of Laruelle’s discontent with deconstruction and puts it in conversation with the larger field of religious studies—in part simply to sharpen understanding of Laruelle, but also because so much of religious studies still bears the imprint of postmodern and deconstructive methods. Laruelle’s work asks scholars of religion to confront realities like the inhumanity of critique (the way that it transits in authority and remains complicit in metaphysics) but also the emergence of new alternatives when we take up another stance. What are the risks of a still-deconstructive study of religion? If our task is not to identify the slippages that betray ideology’s unstable footings, or to highlight the incoherent justifications behind religious logics of oppression, what are we to do in their place?

This paper considers a passage from François Laruelle’s Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy. In that passage, Laruelle invokes a conflict between, on the one hand, the figure of Saint Paul and the Church, and, on the other hand, the figures of Saint Sebastian and Christ. I argue that Laruelle figures Sebastian and Christ as ‘clones’ of the Victim-in-person. Toward that end, I give an account of Laruelle’s non-philosophical project, especially his theory of the subject (i.e., the clone), with a view toward articulating a method for philosophy of religion. I call this method Sebastianism. Sebastianism is a method or style of thought that—as a non-philosophical project—proceeds strictly according-to-the-Victim, but which is distinctive in that (this is its non-philosophical ‘deviation’) it makes the critique of Christianity the fundamental vocation of philosophers of religion.

Søren Kierkegaard’s sense of Divine Authority was a counterpart to 19th century liberal treatments of human freedom. German idealist philosophers and theologians—including Hegel and Schleiermacher—were striving to overcome oppositions between divine and human authority, especially to reconcile naturalistic causal accounts of the universe with Divine action. These have been key points of retrieval by contemporary theologians. But Kierkegaard was a fierce critic of the attempt to reconcile contradicting claims of agency. Instead, he offered an  account of absolute and rigorous Divine Authority. And yet Kierkegaard’s account is so interesting because it pairs with an equally rigorous account of human agency and free choice before this authority. Both  are found in Kierkegaard’s signed religious discourses and later-life polemics. I  conclude Kierkegaard’s high sense of Divine authority serves, rather than detracts from, a high sense of human freedom and a general ontology of dynamic engagement between God and world. 

In light of the proliferation of legislation against DEI, choruses abound across liberal news outlets about how critical race theory is really about understanding and empathy rather than blame, shame, or guilt. There is a temptation to defend our pedagogies by claiming that we are not teaching about guilt. In response, this paper asks: What might an articulation of sin’s inheritance offer contemporary Christians and the broader American public to challenge the racism, sexism, colonialism, and transphobia perpetuated by such legislation? I use Friedrich Schleiermacher and James Cone to explore this question. I highlight the ambivalence of sin’s inheritance. On the one hand, sin teaches us there is something devastatingly wrong with a world in which we disavow our guilt as we enact quotidian and systemic violence. On the other, the history of sin also exemplifies just how guilty we, as Christian theologians, are. 

This paper aims to be a constructive exploration of dependence as fundamental for any Christian account of human freedom. Towards these ends, both Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth offer abundant resources for thinking about the relation between dependency and freedom. Pairing these two might seem, at first glance, an exercise in inevitable frustration, but it will become clear that there are similarities in the form and substance of their Christological instincts for theological anthropology. Both men insist that true humanity is not found by first making observations on human freedom generally and then moving to think about how Jesus fits that pattern, but rather they insist that one only understands human freedom in considering how Jesus is the unique revelation of true humanity. In taking cues from both men, this paper presses further the question of freedom in dependency by attending to biblical, trinitarian, and systematic considerations.

What does it mean for theology to seek liberation in the context of structural sin and oppression? This paper  develops an answer through a constructive counter-reading of F.D.E. Schleiermacher's little-known reflections on the morality of same-sex desire. Developing his reflections on marriage, sex, and economy in the aftermath of the 1792 Allgemeine Landrecht, Schleiermacher develops an account of queer desire as natural manifestations of human sexuality under disordered political-economic conditions in which the conditions for sexual reproduction do not coincide with the conditions for social reproduction. Condemning approaches to the morality of queer desire that affirm or deny its morality for the individual outside the context of a broader commitment to social transformation and change, Schleiermacher contributes towards the formation of a new theo-political coalition that centers economic justice without neglecting the culture-wars issues that have contributed to the conditions in which partisan gridlock enables dictatorial action.

In this paper, I explore the role of Buddhist iconometry in the production of new anatomical knowledge in early-modern Tibet. In 1687, the painter Lhodrak Tenzin Norbu went where no Tibetan artist had ever gone before: the surgeon’s dissection table. There, he carefully observed and sketched the liver, heart, and spleen of a recently dissected corpse. Before his work as an artist-anatomist, Norbu earned widespread recognition as a master of Buddhist iconometry, the tradition of divine proportions foundational to sacred art in Tibet. I argue that Norbu adapted iconometry into a technology of scientific visualization that provided a precise system for anatomical mapping. As I show, at the end of the seventeenth century, iconometry answered more than just the question, “How should the Buddha be represented?” It also addressed a new and pressing challenge: “How do we visualize human anatomy?”

Paper talismans were among the most frequently ingested medicines in the premodern Buddhist world. Within the diverse forms of “Buddhist edibles,” this paper examines talismans from the Chosŏn period that were specifically employed to counteract gu poisoning, one of the most potent and feared toxins in premodern East Asia. The first half of the paper analyzes the visual elements of gu talismans, demonstrating how the deliberate arrangement of symbolic and textual components contributed to their perceived therapeutic efficacy. The latter half explores the inverse process—ingesting the talismans—to illuminate the interplay between the revelation and concealment of their visual potency. By situating this practice within the broader discourse on iconophages, this study foregrounds an understudied dimension of the “internal visualization” of healing talismans, offering new insights into their role within the material life cycle of powerful ritual objects such as paper talismans.

This paper discusses the integration of visual narrative tropes within illustrations of disease-demons produced by Buddhist monks in medieval Japan. In particular, it examines On the Types of Corpse-vector Disease (Denshibyō shu no koto, ca. 1300), a ritual and medical manuscript. Although On the Types has remained entirely unknown in research on art history and Buddhism in Japan, this work made an outsized contribution to the iconography of illness, supplying what would become the template for graphically representing pathogens. What made On the Types influential, I argue, was how its compilers depicted scenes of pathogenic horror inspired by narrative: the harrowing moment when demons assault their human victims and induce a fatal affliction. This attempt to channel the captivating power of narrative horror into disease representation, I demonstrate, cannot be understood through ritual and medical texts alone, but must be grasped alongside currents of narrative visual culture in medieval Japan.

In the post-mortem meditative state of tukdam, the bodies of advanced Tibetan Buddhist practitioners stay lifelike for days or even weeks after clinical death. These extraordinary bodies share in characteristics of images as articulated by film and cultural theorists as well as anthropologists writing on mortuary traditions. I focus on the dynamic of presence and absence, central to images, life and death, and tukdam. Unlike images and normal corpses, which make present what is absent, a tukdam body is, by definition, imbued with presence. Beyond astonishing physical signs like non-decay and suppleness, tukdam bodies exhibit dhang (mdangs). Sometimes translated as “radiance,” this can be understood as a visual manifestation of presence. Challenging photographic representation, once seen as the paragon of objectivity, as well as attempts at scientific measurement, the perception of dhang seems to resist categorization into objective or subjective domains through a visuality – and felt presence – that exceeds both.

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