In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Naiṇī or Nāginā devī is the name of nine mythical serpent sisters who rule as goddesses and mothers over the Pindar river valley in Uttarakhand, India. They establish their rule and their kinship ties to the human people through half-year long journeys, during which they take the shape of bamboo poles clothed with saris. Their serpenthood sets the Naiṇīs into a relation to other serpent deities and spirits called nāg all over South Asia (and far beyond). In this paper, I aim to figure out the place of these local deities within a larger nāgasphere, exploring what they have in common with other nāginīs and nāgas, and what distinguishes them. Especially important are their relation to the Earth and to an Underworld, their connection to fresh water resources and to trees, their enmity to the Garuḍa bird, and their relation to widely known nāga kings such as Kāliya and Vāsuki. 

Nāgas are imaged as goddesses in South Indian Hinduism, where they enjoy enormous popularity due to their connection with fertility, healing, and auspiciousness. Nāga worship is also prescribed by astrologers to relieve nāga dōṣam, the astrological “blemish” caused by harming/killing snakes. Linked with late marriage and infertility, nāga dōṣam manifests in ill-fated configurations of the planetary deities Rahu and Ketu in one’s horoscope. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on nāga traditions in South India, this paper describes the multiple manifestations that nāgas may take and analyzes the rich repertoire of their worship. It also considers the tiered, ticketed pūjās to pacify Rahu and Ketu offered at the Srikalahasti temple. While these “one and done” rituals have emerged as attractive alternatives to more complex and time-intensive redressals for dōṣam, this paper suggests that shifting devotional tastes and consumption practices have contributed to decentering snakes in contemporary rituals to relieve this condition.

In previous translations of Buddhist stories, the Buddha is sometimes described as having “tamed” various nāgas, whose capacity for awakening in that lifetime is prevented by their animal birth. Yet visual narratives seem to show that artists carved such interactions with more nuance. Across early Buddhist sculptures, ancient artists represented the different bodily form of nāgas in visual narratives through their unique ability to maintain cobra form and take the form of a human body. In one Sanchi pillar scene, the artist has represented the Buddha’s encounter with a nāga as the head of a majestic and fearsome cobra peering out from behind a stone shrine representing the Buddha. Rather than “taming” the nāga there, the Buddha is written to have met the heat of the nāga’s fire, emblematic of his inability to restrain his anger, with his iddhi, matching "fire with fire".

This presentation draws on published scholarship and fieldwork in Vidarbha, central India, to consider the transformation of how Ambedkarite Indians have understood nāga figures in the past seventy years. In The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables (1948), B.R. Ambedkar offered a self-consciously speculative reconstruction of Nagas as an ancient group of humans in central India, as part of an effort to establish ancient Buddhist roots for Dalits or so-called Untouchables who would eventually convert (reconvert, in Ambedkar’s view) to Buddhism in 1956. Since then, Ambedkar’s reading of naga history has been widely adopted by Ambedkarites as a disenchanted view of nāgas that also functions mythically (as a use of a historically unverifiable past) to enable Ambedkarites to offset Hindu nationalist historiography. These views of nagas are further complicated when interacting with Japanese Buddhist collaborators whose interpretations of nagas are very different.

This paper has two purposes: it examines survey methodologies for researching minority religious communities, taking the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Motivations, Attitudes, Practices (JW-MAP) surveys as a case study; and then reports a comparative analysis of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Canada and Argentina. Analyzing responses from c. 2,000 Witnesses in each country, the paper compares religious belief, belonging, bonding, and behavior, examining differences in socialization pathways, religious motivations, and social networks as potential correlates of differences. Argentina’s predominantly Catholic context contrasts with Canada’s more diverse religious context and constitutional framework, providing useful contextual variation. Findings summarize national differences – and commonalities – in the religiosity of Jehovah’s Witnesses. By comparing Witnesses to broader population samples, the paper also provides evidence on their religious and social distinctiveness. The evidence presented here contributes to understanding of the evolving religious landscape, and the social space of Jehovah’s Witnesses within different national contexts. 

Research on Jehovah’s Witnesses in Canada often uses American data to analyze their status. Although the two countries share many legal values and cultural pluralism, Canada is very different in its management of religious diversity and its interpretation of religious freedom. Our research attempts to paint an objective portrait of the JWs through court decisions and does the same for the social integration of the communities. To do so, we distinguish the court decisions between three different periods and follow the evolution of the JWs as a religious group. We will cross-reference these results with social perceptions of the JWs. The results may provide a better understanding of the underlying gaps.

Jehovah’s Witnesses have a long history in Argentina, arriving in the early 20th century. They faced two periods of religious prohibition, but with democracy’s return, their presence gradually gained acceptance. Today, they experience “low-key integration,” publicly practicing their faith without reprisals. However, challenges persist, particularly regarding blood transfusion objections and resistance to patriotic symbols. This paper examines the Argentinean context in comparison to other countries. It draws on data from the JW-MAP (Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Motivations, Attitudes, Practices) project, which conducted three surveys across six nations. These include a member survey, a YouTube presence and reactions analysis, and a YouGov survey. By analyzing these sources, we aim to explore different forms of social integration of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Argentina and how they compare to global trends.

This study investigates and assesses the prevailing attitudes towards Jehovah’s Witnesses on social media platforms in six different countries (Argentina, Canada, France, Japan, Nigeria, United Kingdom) over a five-year period. It does so by closely analyzing the portrayal of the organization on various YouTube channels native to these countries. By drawing on critical theories in social media studies, it specifically inquires into how the content of videos and social interactions on these channels depict the organization, its leadership, practices, and its core beliefs. It outlines how these representations seem strategically crafted to impact the organization’s active members and broader societal influence, legal viability, and theological visibility. The research used web scraping Python codes to collect data and qualitative methods, R Studio and various Python libraries to meticulously analyze and interpret results. 

Using a newly collected dataset of over 12,000 non-religious Americans, and a k-means clustering algorithm, this work devises a new typology of non-religion in the United States. Instead of using the crude categories of atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, this new approach focuses on posture toward religion, views of spirituality, and other relevant factors. Further, this paper will explore how non-religious Americans make meaning in their lives.

This paper will explore how American Bahá’ís in diverse communities throughout the US have adapted to the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. I will present data on hundreds of Bahá’ís from dozens of communities concerning attendance at religious worship and religious education classes, outreach to the community, the shift to online forms of worship and celebration of sacred holidays, and their personal religious practices (prayer, reading holy writings, fasting, etc.) during the pandemic. This data will be compared with Christian churches  to see how other Americans in varied Christian denominations coped and thrived spiritually during the restrictions of COVID. Results indicate that Bahá’ís were able to maintain attendance levels at their online worship services and children and adult education classes at rates much higher than churches did on average. Both Bahá’í communities and Christian churches maintained a similar level of community service throughout the pandemic. 

The United States’ sociopolitical climate of the past year has likely shifted a clergyperson’s sense of professional agency—sense of being able to freely, safely, and confidently lead a community. A 2024 literature review confirmed that religious leaders are often burnt out and struggling, as individual, relational, and organizational factors compound upon each other, potentially jeopardizing their capacity to healthily and reliably execute their duties. Thus, any additional sense of decreased agency can have deleterious effects on not just the well-being of the religious leader but on the broader congregation and even local community. Drawn from the qualitative transcripts of group meetings with clergy from across the United States, two case studies will elucidate some of the ways congregational clergy have felt shifts in their sense of agency to freely perform their role since the presidential election in November 2024. 

Devotional textiles in traditional Indian artisanal forms can be considered as spiritual objects as well as embodiments of human labor and creativity that act as a culture’s heritage. In addition, our understanding of Indian textiles in both South Asian and Western collections can be enhanced by reflecting on the lives of artisans who made such cloths worn for religious rituals. As the weavers who made such cloths are long gone further context on these textiles is only possible by researching today’s practitioners who are inheritors of a craft and knowledge tradition. In light of my recent fieldwork on double and single-ikat Patola weaving in Gujarat, I approach making as arduous and repetitive physical labor. What do we learn about the spiritual attachments of such cloths when they are related to the conditions in which they are made and viewed as forms of work? What does devotional labor look like?

This paper introduces preliminary research into the possibility that the concept ‘Bahujan’ has in world-making and futures, inside museum collections. Bahujan, a political term meaning ‘many, or ‘majority’ refers to the diversity of religious peoples who numerically make up a majority in comparison to so-called twice-born Hindus, but whose practices, social positions, and everyday lives are increasingly marginalized in India and in diaspora communities. Historically, institutions have prioritized casteist perspectives on and of South Asian religious material culture, based on colonial logics of classification and history. These perspectives have rearticulated themselves in contemporary diasporic narratives, often normalized through appeals to affect and heritage. What is at stake for contemporary museum practice if we mobilize ‘Bahujan’ as an art-historical concept? This paper approaches this broad question by working through examples of Indo-Caribbean and Indian Ocean religious materiality.

The Religionskundliche Sammlung (est. 1927) in Marburg, Germany houses the university’s special collection of religious objects that was conceived of and founded by German theologian and author of The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Otto took two trips to India under the auspices of his role as founding-director of the collection during which he acquired books, objects, and ideas for his Hinduism exhibit. In this presentation, I draw on exhibition photographs, a goddess painting, two statues of Hindu deities, and a series of Otto’s reports and receipts to analyze the role that the process of collecting plays in the formation of cultural history and the dissemination of religious education, especially with the aim of representing Indian Religions to European audiences. 

This research interrogates the shifting semiotics of South Asian religious objects and images as they traverse museum and temple spaces in the UK. It critically examines the processes of decontextualization and recontextualization that shape the reception and interpretation of these objects. While museums position South Asian material culture within taxonomies of art and heritage, temple reliquaries and community spaces engage in their own acts of curatorial framing, embedding objects within devotional and ritualistic contexts. The paper explores how South Asian visuality is negotiated in these spaces, how institutional practices mediate religious materiality, and how objects maintain their agency despite secularized modes of representation. By foregrounding visitor engagement and institutional responses, this research reveals the contested nature of South Asian objects in contemporary diasporic settings, where the tensions between veneration, preservation, and public display continue to challenge rigid binaries of the sacred and the secular.

The Inquiry of Maitreya (Maitreyaparipṛcchā, abb. Mp), a chapter within the 49-chapter Mahāratnakūṭa collection, is an early Mahāyāna sūtra that presents a distinctive doctrinal configuration, contrasting the bodhisattva paths of Maitreya and Śākyamuni. The Mp reinterprets and echoes elements from the pre-existing multi-buddha framework, particularly the Bahubuddhakasūtra, to depict divergent trajectories in their bodhisattva careers. Maitreya’s path is characterized as an "Easier Path," emphasizing skillful means yet requiring more kalpas, whereas Śākyamuni's journey is framed as a swifter but more heroic course, marked by greater emphasis on compassion and self-sacrificial efforts. This contrast underscores the fact that Mp is more fittingly regarded as a bodhisattva-sūtra, offering perspectives on bodhisattva practice and bodhisattva path, rather than as a fully developed text on the Maitreya cult, in contrast to what is seen in the Maitreya's Ascend/Descend texts.

This paper examines how Maitreya is narratively connected to maitrī (loving-kindness) as a form of meditative cultivation (bhāvanā). While Maitreya is typically understood in relation to his role as the next Buddha, there is a tradition that utilize past-life narratives to construct a link between Maitreya’s name and the meditative maitrī as the first of the four immeasurables or brahmic abodes. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the paper argues that, in these narratives, Maitreya is conceived as a meditation virtuoso, embodying and extending the practice of maitrī in unique ways. The etymological link can also be seen as a bridge that connects the meditative maitrī in Śrāvakayāna sources and its elaboration in Mahāyāna sources.

Like other bodhisattvas, Maitreya is a figure in the Vairocanābhisaṃbodhi (大日經), a major Mantrayāna text that in 724 was translated by Yixing 一行 (673–727) and Śubhakarasiṃha 善無 畏 (637–735). Yixing subsequently produced a commentary on the text based on the oral teachings of Śubhakarasiṃha. The commentary is unique in that it provides a direct interpretation of both the text and accompanying maṇḍala by a major Indian monk. This paper will first discuss the role of Maitreya in the Vairocanābhisaṃbodhi, before moving on to the commentary and extant visual representations of the figure in the related maṇḍala. The symbolic interpretation of Maitreya in these contexts evolved from earlier Mahāyāna and Āgama literatures, but took on new elements. We can better understand the early reworking of established lore in Mantrayāna through examining Maitreya in the Vairocanābhisaṃbodhi as it was transmitted to China.

This paper reflects on the interstices of religion and drama written in English around the year 1925. In this formative year for modernist literature, playwrights explored the relations among theater, religion, and ritual, developing theories of dramatic performance that persisted across the long twentieth century. As I show, 1925 marked an apogee of Anglophone dramatists’ diverse investments in religion. Authors from G. B. Shaw to Zora Neale Hurston, inquiring into the dramatic roles of religion in modernity, participated in a set of consummately modernist formal concerns, insofar as they sought to reinvigorate the theater by returning to its presumptive origins in devotional practice. These artists turned to religion to peer into the deep histories of their chosen art and to speculate about its potential futures. Their fascinations with religion – centrally, but not exclusively, related to medieval Christianity – served, paradoxically, to make modernist theater new.

In 1925 Dorothy Adlow completed her first year as art critic for The Christian Science Monitor. While forging a strong national reputation, Adlow gave singular attention to the Boston Expressionists. Chief among them was Hyman Bloom who probed the metaphysics of corporeal disintegration. Like Bloom, others in the group integrated occult and mystical themes with references to the Jewish and Christian Bible. Noone knew these artists better than Adlow.  In her reviews of the Boston Expressionists, one discovers the interplay and influence of traditional religion and new religious movements in modern art in the Jazz Age and beyond. 

Theme: “Arts, Literature, and Religion at the Centennial of 1925”

In 1925, Benito Mussolini proclaimed that Italy had given the world the "most holy of saints to Christendom and humanity:" St. Francis of Assisi. As part of the seventh centenary anniversary of the saint’s death the following year, Mussolini proclaimed Francis’s feast day a national holiday.  This paper examines how these events in 1925-1926 impacted Francis’s legacy in the context of Italian culture, fascist ideology and shifting Church–State relations. The paper also traces this history through several works linking contemporary issues with the saint, which attested to the attempted rapprochement in the lead up to the 1929 Lateran Pacts. Propaganda efforts exemplified the radical reinterpretation of St. Francis’s political legacy considering Mussolini’s cult of personality and autocracy, itself a form of political religion. The connections between Mussolini and St. Francis in 1925-26 also anticipated a broader cultural, post-war afterlife of the fascist co-option of religious ideas.

In May 1925, the New York Times reviewed Toyohiko Kagawa’s Before the Dawn, a Japanese bestseller that helped to bring Kagawa national public recognition both at home and in the United States. North Americans reviewers labeled Kagawa a mystic comparable to American spiritualists such Walt Whitman. But why was Kagawa, who in the Japanese context was primarily known and recognized as a social reformer, termed a mystic? Kagawa’s significance and his representation to American audiences as a mystic is best explained against the backdrop of another Asian Christian author who was published during the 1920s – Sundar Singh. Singh was a Sikh convert who lived as a Christian sadhu, or holy man, and became internationally famous through his books and speaking tours. Like Kagawa, Singh and his theological writings were largely discussed as mystical. This paper looks at Singh and Kagawa’s reception during the 1920s within the context of North American interest in mysticism and non-traditional religious movements and seeks to understand 1) how the reception of Singh informed the reception of Kagawa, and 2) how the publishing successes of both men shaped the North American religious imagination with regards to Asian Christianity and theology. 

Analysis of the 1925 Ben-Hur film within its historical and theological contexts displays that the film functioned both as religious and cultural artifact, one that advocated Christian orthodoxy and essentialist Christian gender roles amid shifting ideologies of the 1920s. In particular, this paper will use the 1925 film as a case study, holding it up in contrast between the 1880 literary work that spawned it and the 1959 version that followed it, to ask how its particular vision of gender and theology was unique to its moment.

This paper draws on extensive fieldwork with Maya and Mennonites navigating land conflict in southern Mexico in order to map possible paths towards common freedom understood as collective self-determination. Over the past 40 years, European Mennonites have begun settling in Maya ancestral territory and have brought with them industrial agricultural practices which deplete the local ecosystem. Their large families have fed a sharp expansion in this industry while their religious and economic systems remain resistant to innovation. Nonetheless, a Maya peasant network resists animosity with their new, insular neighbors and has invited us to accompany them as they seek paths toward sharing in the land. We offer this report on these Indigenous-led processes for transformative justice and share political and theological insights we are gleaning over seven years of collaboration. 

This paper focuses on contemporary debates about the dynamic between individual reproductive freedom and collective environmental sustainability. I examine two competing views: 1) population policy advocates, who argue that reproductive freedom should be constrained by governments because of global climate threats, and 2) reproductive justice advocates, who reject the notion that governments should constrain reproductive freedom for any reason. While environmentalists are correct that population growth exacerbates climate threats, RJ advocates are also right to direct our attention to the systemic conditions that situate reproductive choices. As such, I argue that governments are responsible for improving the environmental contexts in which reproduction takes place, namely by reducing our reliance upon the most carbon-costly energy sources. Because massive fossil fuel subsidies and the influence of industry lobbies make this difficult, I conclude with lessons from religious environmentalists who participate in anti-fossil fuel activism through institutional divestment campaigns and intergenerational organizing.

This essay enters and responds to a live and ongoing debate in global politics regarding the climate crisis—namely, between ecomodernism and degrowth theory—using Sabbath as a theological lens. I begin by developing Sabbath as a theological and political lens. In particular, I emphasize Sabbath as a spatial politic. With the help of the Marxist geographer Doreen Massey, the first half of this essay challenges Abraham Joshua Heschel’s notion that Sabbath is a purely temporal practice. Instead, I highlight Sabbath as a spatial project. A spatial Sabbath, then, enables a reorientation of Sabbath as both a spiritual and political project. This leads to the second half of the essay, where I use the spatial politics of Sabbath in combination with degrowth theory to build a collaborative vision of post-capitalist economics from a theological perspective. I conclude by offering one modern concrete example of spatial Sabbath in highlighting Agrarian Trust and the FaithLands project.

The #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock (2016-2017) ushered in a new era of spiritually grounded eco-activism. Over six years, I conducted fieldwork and participated in grassroots organizing among three of the most high-profile spiritually anchored eco-activist movements in the US: the Anishinaabe-led #StopLine3 oil pipeline resistance (MN); the coalition of Yogis and Baptists who helped derail the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (VA); and the partnership of Mennonites and Roman Catholic Sisters who resisted a fracked gas pipeline with a cornfield Chapel blockade (PA). Through the process, I identified the following themes running through all three campaigns: (1) a deep conviction that eco-activism is a sacred duty; (2) a shared commitment to principles of non-violent mass action; (3) the performance of religious ceremony as a tool of direct-action; (4) the embrace of an intersectional theory of justice; and (5) the emergence of new, interreligious spiritual communities arising from the crucible of eco-activism.

It is undeniable that human beings are at the heart of environmental issues. The root of the ongoing ecological crisis is in human exploitation of the Earth. In light of the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation, this paper explores the ecological crisis, focusing on the detachment of humans from the land as a pivotal condition of exploitation. Engaging with the feminist reinterpretations by Silvia Federici and ecological insights in Marx’s understanding of human-nature relations, the paper highlights the process of capitalist appropriation, expropriation, and exploitation in the commodification of land. Incorporating an animist perspective, the study examines how the detachment of humans from the land has contributed to the alienation of both humans and nature. The anthropological and religious literature on animism and indigenous wisdom is proposed as an entry point to call for a revolutionary imagination to restore the reciprocal relationship between body and land.