What is the place of Canada within the “American” Academy of Religion? How do geopolitics and national borders shape the work of teaching and scholarship? The current U.S. Presidential administration brings renewed and urgent attention to these questions. In this roundtable panel, a group of University of Toronto alumni reflect on their experiences working on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border. The Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto was formed fifty years ago, alongside the postwar rise of religious studies in the U.S. Its subsequent growth, like that of the city of Toronto, was shaped by the economics of a historical period that has now changed. Our roundtable panelists’ reflections use Toronto as a site for reflecting on the cultural history of the study of religion as a North American disciplinary formation, and for speculating about this discipline’s possible futures.
In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book
All time are listed in Eastern Time Zone.
The fourth and final ALHR lecture, “With Liberty and Justice For All: Recentering Our Work as Scholars of Religion.” My aim in this final lecture is to make use of a main idea from each of the previous lectures—scholarship and teaching that are focused on creating greater spaces of justice and hope, a robust commitment/recommitment to democracy making, and growing our scholarship large in such a way that we speak directly to the challenges we are facing in higher education and our larger society that is currently leaning toward deadly polarizations that we both decry and maintain. I explore how we can employ our knowledge and skills as scholars of religion to build a better world for all.
Panelist
Myrna Perez's Criticizing Science: Stephen Jay Gould and the Struggle for American Democracy (Johns Hopkins UP 2024) analyzes the career of Harvard paleontologist and public intellectual Stephen Jay Gould against the backdrop of contemporary debates around science, religion, and political controversy. Gould is a well-studied figure in the field of science and religion, but this discussion largely focuses on a small subset of his work. Perez draws on an expansive study of the full sweep of his career, considering especially how he modeled a relationship between science and power that still holds relevance today.
This roundtable explores "The Afterlives of Memory" through Black studies and Black religion. It examines memory as a contested site, particularly for marginalized communities, where its defacement is a tool of domination. We investigate how Black cultural practices, from oral traditions of African societies to rituals of Afro-Diasporic traditions and cultures to contemporary links in Black literature and social movements, have interrupted and pushed back against the violence of captivity and erasure through the preservation of ancestral memory. Indeed, memory, in its reclamation and preservation, becomes a site of struggle and freedom-dreaming.
Topics include cultural-afterlife and haunting memory, Hoodoo understanding of death, Haitian Vodou practices, the impact of incarceration on memory, Black ecological deaths, and the role of grieving rituals in social movement. The roundtable aims to demonstrate memory's dynamic force in shaping Black religious, political, and cultural landscapes, emphasizing re-membering as sacred-duty in ongoing struggles for justice and liberation.
This roundtable explores "The Afterlives of Memory" through Black studies and Black religion. It examines memory as a contested site, particularly for marginalized communities, where its defacement is a tool of domination. We investigate how Black cultural practices, from oral traditions of African societies to rituals of Afro-Diasporic traditions and cultures to contemporary links in Black literature and social movements, have interrupted and pushed back against the violence of captivity and erasure through the preservation of ancestral memory. Indeed, memory, in its reclamation and preservation, becomes a site of struggle and freedom-dreaming.
Topics include cultural-afterlife and haunting memory, Hoodoo understanding of death, Haitian Vodou practices, the impact of incarceration on memory, Black ecological deaths, and the role of grieving rituals in social movement. The roundtable aims to demonstrate memory's dynamic force in shaping Black religious, political, and cultural landscapes, emphasizing re-membering as sacred-duty in ongoing struggles for justice and liberation.
This panel brings together leading scholars of queer and trans studies in religion to engage with Dawne Moon and Theresa W. Tobin's book Choosing Love: What LGBTQ+ Christians Can Teach Us All About Relationships, Inclusion, and Justice (Oxford University Press, 2025). Panelists will consider the book's contributions to the field and in the context of intensifying culture wars.
This panel brings together leading scholars of queer and trans studies in religion to engage with Dawne Moon and Theresa W. Tobin's book Choosing Love: What LGBTQ+ Christians Can Teach Us All About Relationships, Inclusion, and Justice (Oxford University Press, 2025). Panelists will consider the book's contributions to the field and in the context of intensifying culture wars.
The new sourcebook Global Philosophy (Equinox, 2025) is a first-of-its-kind collection of translations, writings, and conversations by sixty leading contemporary philosophers and translators, featuring some of the major ideas, themes, and arguments nearly one hundred philosophical texts of Africana, Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu, Islamic, Jain, Jewish, Latin American, Mesoamerican, Native American, and Taoist philosophy. It includes translations from sixteen different languages on topics including metaphysics, cosmology, epistemology, philosophy of language, logic, ethics, storytelling, philosophy of religion, selfhood, death, and freedom.
In this roundtable, contributors and teachers who have used the volume will discuss how it fits into philosophy research and pedagogy. There will also be discussion of the relative merits of labels like “global philosophy,” “cross-cultural philosophy,” and “fusion philosophy”; connections between these and allied fields such as the history of philosophy and the philosophy of religion; the challenges of making space for them in the Anglo-American academy; and other questions.
Respondent
This panel explores a series of new academic directions in understanding Buddhism's transmission and transformation outside Buddhist Asia. “Translating the Tathāgata” examines a failed CIA effort to use a screenplay on the Buddha's life for Cold War psychological warfare, American Buddhist Tradition: The work of the Tibetan Preliminary Practices investigates how American Buddhists engage with Tibetan practices to cultivate tradition, challenging the tradition-modernity dichotomy. Deconstructing the Dichotomy between the Esoteric and Buddhism in the West: the case study of Ananda Metteyya argues that Western esotericism is integral to understanding Buddhism's Western transmission, using Ananda Metteyya's life as a case study. Redacting Forest Spirits: A Discourse Analysis of Psychotherapeutic Uses of Buddhist Metta (Lovingkindness) Meditation Practice analyzes the secular appropriation of metta meditation in Western psychotherapies, highlighting ethical concerns and potential limitations.
Papers
“Tathāgata in Translation” explores a failed CIA effort to win the hearts and minds of Asian Buddhists in the early Cold War. Its focus is an unpublished 1953 screenplay on the life of the Buddha, conceived as a psychological warfare tool to promote U.S. bloc-building efforts in Asia. Envisioned as a Hollywood-style epic, The Wayfarer would convince Asian Buddhists to reject Communism and help the CIA forge ties local Buddhist leaders.
To examine its failure, I analyze The Wayfarer's interpretative ambiguity through a close reading of three scenes. I then frame the screenplay as a Translation Zone, in Emily Apter’s sense—a battleground for interpretative dominance. By relocating The Wayfarer from a CIA back office to a wartime frontier, we see that American efforts to court Asian Buddhists failed not from poor execution, but because they became sites of resistance where local actors adeptly re-purposed them to suit their own goals.
This paper takes up the well-worn debate over Buddhist modernism from the perspective of its neglected shadow: Buddhist tradition. Can contemporary American Buddhists ever be “traditional” (as opposed to merely “traditionalistic”)? What would that mean? Based on ongoing ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and liturgical analysis, I argue that the Tibetan Buddhist preliminary practices (ngondro) work to form Buddhist subjects with a visceral sense of tradition, binding together cosmologies, bodily postures, ethical commitments, emotional habits, and sacralized relationships. This “tradition” is neither an ahistorical essence already out there in the world nor a rhetorical posture batting ineffectually at the rupture of modernity: it is one possible outcome of human labor and desire. For American converts engaged in the preliminary practices, both tradition and modernity are live orientations, ways of being in the world in a fraught and often tragic relationship to one another.
Through the life of Allan Bennett/Ananda Metteyya (1872-1923), this paper argues that the transmission of Buddhism to the West cannot be understood without examining Western esotericism. To draw a line between Buddhism and the esoteric in a Western context is a false dichotomy. In his youth, Bennett turned towards Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, within which he became the teacher of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). After a period in Sri Lanka, he gained higher ordination as a Buddhist monk in Myanmar, becoming Venerable Ananda Metteyya. As a monk, Metteyya insisted that there was nothing esoteric or mysterious in Buddhism. In his personal life, however, Metteyya retained constructive relationships with Theosophists and continued to practice the esoteric, yogic meditation he had learnt in Sri Lanka. A dialectical relationship, therefore, existed between the esoteric and Buddhism within Metteya's life and within the Buddhism that he communicated to the West.
Western mindfulness movements, including mindfulness-based psychotherapies, have widely adopted Buddhist metta (lovingkindness) meditation practices. In their traditional contexts, these meditation practices have had an apotropaic function, and Buddhist commentary literature narrates the use of metta practice to transform conflict with "supernatural" beings. This paper engages in a discourse analysis of psychotherapy manuals, such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and psychotherapeutic research articles that include metta meditation practices, focusing on their omission or minimization of the Buddhist origins of metta practice more broadly and Buddhist metta traditions involving supernatural beings more specifically. This discourse analysis shows that adoption of metta practices by contemporary psychotherapy reflects broader patterns in secular appropriation of Buddhist traditions, such as front-stage/back-stage behavior, and that elements of Buddhist cosmology involving supernatural beings are strongly targeted for deselection. This is ethically problematic and may limit the effectiveness of metta practice for spiritually-attuned care.
Comprised of presenters from different stages in their professional careers, our panel sheds light on four lesser explored case studies of the Hindu American experience. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, each presenter pushes us to revisit the key conceptual categories that have often guided investigations Hindu diasporas. Whereas the first paper locates contemporary Canadian Brahma Kumari practices at the intersection of South Asian and Western cultures, the second explores how placemaking and ecological concerns direct devotion towards Hindu goddesses in the Bay Area. Our final papers encourage us to open our eyes and look more rigorously at the lives of Hindu objects and devotionality outside spaces that center the temple and Indian nationality. All in all, despite being a very crowded discipline, our panel reminds us that the study of North American Hindu traditions remains animated and is committed to pursuing research agendas in directions that are unfamiliar but exciting.
Papers
This paper studies the Brahma Kumari tradition in Canada and in global space. The focus is on the issue of globalized identity and female religious authority of the followers. I examine several aspects of the globalization of Brahma Kumari in Canada and its complex links with South Asian religions in India. It seems that the tradition is at crossroads, just as the devotees’ cultural identity is at crossroads – being simultaneously Western and at the same time South Asian. What happens when traditions and identities are at crossroads? Do globalized traditions produce globalized identities? Are there any other transformations that happen in this cultural mobility? By means of analysis of texts and data from interviews with Brahma Kumari followers, this paper seeks to reframe the Brahma Kumari tradition in a global context, a truly global movement, which has made home in Canada while maintaining links with the spiritual homeland in India.
In the Tamil Hindu diaspora in the United States, this paper will explore the presence, the vitality, and the active worship of two Hindu goddesses, one who is very well known, the Goddess Lakshmi, who represents wealth, health, auspiciousness and alertness and one not as focused upon, Bhudevi, the earth goddess. This ethnographic research will focus on Tamil Hindu Americans of the San Francisco Bay Area. Very recently, in January 2025, the Los Angelos area was a site of intense fires which were out of control for weeks and was one of the fiercest fire storms ever in a populated area in California. How do these uncontrollable fires affect Hindu American’s worship of Bhudevi? Or the Goddess Lakshmi? These questions will be investigated through the triple interlaced lens of economics, ecology, and climate chaos.
Jagannath is best known for his Ratha Yatra festival that carries the deity out of the temple and into the world, extending his presence even into diaspora. Another important but lesser-known festival, Nabakalebara (“New Bodies”), highlights how Jagannath's image transforms to make him available to devotees across both time and space. This paper explores how Jagannath travels and transforms with and through diaspora communities, particularly in the Bay Area and its particular images of the deity as they have been re-created by devotees there. Relying on my own ethnographic studies and close analyses of images, I examine the different manifestations of the deity and how they take up each group’s unique circumstances and experiences. The paper focuses on the personal, intimate experiences of devotion, especially in the home. The study also emphasizes the material embodiment of Jagannath and his connection with devotees.
My presentation examines the religious lives of Thai-American restaurateurs in Elmhurst, New York, site of the East Coast’s first officially recognized “Little Thailand.” By considering why paintings and icons of Hindu figures like Ganesha, Brahma, and Kubera frequently appear in restaurant décor alongside images of Southeast Asian and Chinese deities, I explore how emerging trends in Thai religion—notably the growing popularity of Hindu deities in Buddhist-majority Thailand—shape Thai immigrants' beliefs and business practices. In the process, my ethnographic fieldwork and visual analyses raise two key questions: (1) By incorporating Indian deities into their religious practices, how do Thai Americans express their cultural identities? (2) How are conventional understandings of Orientalism reshaped when Asian Americans themselves curate and participate in syncretic devotional movements with roots in modern Asia? Through these inquiries, my talk highlights the intersections of migration, religious materiality, and transnational cultural flows in shaping contemporary Thai-American identity.
This paper examines the methodological and ethical challenges the author experienced while conducting ethnographic research with a spiritual community in India between 2022 and 2024. Focusing on the author’s fieldwork with this eclectic New Age organization that outwardly promotes pluralism and universalism, this paper explores her experience of uncovering the group’s—and its members’—affiliations with Hindutva and patterns of political exclusion. Drawing on scholarship on right-wing movements, it then analyzes how anthropologists and ethnographers navigate alienation, ideological discord, and strategic engagement while considering the broader implications of these challenges for fieldwork in India today.