In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

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.

This paper explores the intersection of Christian materialism and open theism in shaping a theological understanding of resurrection and eschatological hope. Christian materialism asserts that humans are wholly physical, with personal identity formed through experience, grounding ultimate hope in bodily resurrection where suffering is redeemed rather than erased. Open theism portrays God as relational and responsive, experiencing time dynamically and suffering genuine loss at death, which it views as the true end of existence. Together, these perspectives challenge traditional notions of an immediate, disembodied afterlife, instead emphasizing salvation as the healing and restoration of creation. The resurrection, therefore, is not merely an individual hope but a cosmic fulfillment of both human and divine longing for embodied transformation.

In his chief work on pneumatology, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, Jürgen Moltmann explores three conceptions of freedom--as subjectivity, as sociality, and as orientation towards the future--associating these with the theological virtues of faith, love, and hope, respectively. He explores each with reference to a theology of the Holy Spirit, focusing on the hope that springs from the "liberation for life" by which the Spirit makes us participants in God's ongoing creative work.

On a classical conception of the theological virtues, love is the only one of the three that belongs to God. I argue, however, that Moltmann's theology invites us to understand our hope as grounded in God's own hoping as a dream for the future of the world.

A central theme of Open and Relational Theology is the need for a theodicy that explains the confession that God is love and the presence of evil. The response generally suggests that God does not have the power to overcome evil. For some in this movement, these theodicies fall short, thus the need for an eschatological alternative in the form of the restoration of all things (apokastasis). This paper begins with the assumption that the future is largely open, but that God will in time draw all things to a close, restoring all things to their proper order such that God will be all in all. This paper draws on Scripture, early Christian theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa, and modern theologians Jurgen Moltmann and Sergius Bulgakov, to offer an alternative vision.

Following Jürgen Moltmann, this paper holds that eschatological thinking is crucial for expanding our imaginations beyond present unjust realities and orienting ourselves towards new possibilities for transformation. The consideration of other theologians writing against German fascism such as Karl Rahner, and critiques by decolonial theologians such as Miguel De La Torre, however, surface questions regarding the imagination of freedom and hope in Christian eschatological discourses. To what extent must Christian theologians emphasize the openness of the future in an effort to maintain human freedom, and to what extent should eschatological hopes for “freedom” be grounded in the assurance of liberation for marginalized communities? This paper draws the works of Moltmann, Rahner, and De La Torre into conversation, considering the ways their unique problem-spaces shape their theological questions, and argues constructively for an eschatological imagination that balances the freedom of the future with the need for concretizing hopes against injustice.

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.

.

.

.