In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

As Buddhist campus chaplaincy continues to develop as a field, the work of a Buddhist chaplain requires both creative adaptation and deep engagement with Buddhist traditions. Providing spiritual care to young adults – especially undergraduate students – demands a thoughtful translation of Buddhist discourses, skillful interpretation of core concepts, and innovative ways to apply them in dialogue and practice. Drawing from my experience as a Buddhist chaplain in higher education, this presentation explores how Buddhist literature – rich with stories, similes, and parables – can serve as a resource for engaging students in meaningful spiritual reflection. I will share case studies illustrating how I have applied Buddhist teachings to campus life, including pastoral care, interfaith dialogue, and mindfulness practices. Additionally, I will reflect on how my own Buddhist experience has shaped my approach to chaplaincy, highlighting the challenges and opportunities of recontextualizing Buddhism within a university setting.

Originating in India, yoga has become globally popular, with 38.4 million US  practitioners in 2022. Despite modern emphasis on yoga postures, yoga is a multi-faceted practice system for attaining freedom from suffering. Indeed, according to Patañjali, the fifth-century author of the Yoga Sūtras, yoga aims to restrain the movements of the mind. Indeed, yoga seeks to calm an agitated mind through ethical discernment, posture, breathwork, and meditation. Here, I argue for an innovative chaplaincy based on accessible translation of Sanskrit yoga texts to provide an interfaith support system based on yoga. Since Patañjali does not overtly express a religious affiliation, yoga chaplaincy potentially resonates across faiths. Indeed, yoga enjoys widespread multi-faith traction, encompasses teachings for calming the mind, and has medical benefits, according to the scientific research literature. Therefore, it has the potential to form the basis of a comprehensive interfaith chaplaincy.

This paper explores integrating spiritual care practices within public defense, redefining the boundaries of spiritual care beyond traditional religious settings. Drawing on my experience as a public defender and training in spiritual care, I argue that these practices are crucial for public defenders to uphold the dignity of their clients and resist the dehumanization that happens to people who go through the criminal legal system. The paper unfolds in three parts: a narrative account of my work, an analysis of "story companionship" as resistance to state violence, and a call for recognizing public defense as a viable site for spiritual care. Public defenders can promote healing and liberation for clients facing a dehumanizing system by providing empathetic listening, presence, and narrative advocacy. This reimagined approach to spiritual care recognizes the profound impact of systemic injustice on the human spirit and advocates for a more holistic and compassionate approach to justice.

This paper will present three case studies based on actual experiences of social work students and their social work supervisors from three institutional settings: a high school, a long-term health care facility and a state prison. The case studies represent three unique contexts in which students and their internship supervisors have engaged with issues of religious freedom in relation to belief, identity, affiliation and practice of the clients served and/or the professionals working in the institution. The paper will examine philosophical and practical approaches for how the teaching about religion can strengthen professional and inter-professional educational learning outcomes for students and practitioners in a variety of educational and professional settings. 

“Can the mouse forgive the cat for eating him?” Howard Thurman quips after making the oddly equalizing claim that “the ethical demand upon the more privileged and the underprivileged is the same.” He identifies “forgiveness” as integral to love, yet his concluding comments are as elliptical as they are generative. How does Thurman describe forgiveness as a “spiritual discipline”? What contribution does his perspective make to this core theme of religious psychology? How can his moral vision help us navigate the dual pitfalls of what he refers to as psychological slavery to resentment, on the one hand, and oppressive religious applications of “forgiveness,” on the other? His understanding of “freedom” is key to an ethical practice of forgiveness. But Thurman adds a theological twist that helps us clarify the meaning of the term—he points away from the dispossessed to an eschatological reality that transcends any human obligation or capacity. 

The primordial darkness [Greek: ἄβυσσος; Hebrew: תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔, English: abyss] is not merely absence nor lack, but a space of fecund possibility, the womb of creation itself. This presentation explores mystical darkness as a transformative space for spiritual purification, social resistance, and divine encounter through the works of San Juan de la Cruz, Howard Thurman, and Raimon Panikkar. 

Each theologian reframes darkness—not as absence or despair but as a site of re-creations: San Juan’s noche oscura purifies the soul, Thurman’s luminous darkness resists racial oppression, and Panikkar’s advaitic mysticism dissolves dualistic thought. 

In dialogue with liberation theologies, this presentation reclaims the spaces of mystical darkness as a sacred, generative force, challenging theological traditions that privilege light and offering a vision where transformation unfolds within the shadows of the dawn of new life.

Exploring the systematic immigrant harms contributing negatively to the wellbeing of undocumented African immigrants in the USA, this paper engages the holistic conceptualization of healing in Exodus to argue for an inclusive pastoral care approach that takes seriously critical social therapeutic models for caring for the spiritual, emotional, and material needs of clients in North American contexts. Specifically, this paper will examine the liberative and holistic conceptualization of healing in the book of Exodus for pastoral care and counselling to undocumented African immigrants in the USA who are plagued with emotional and spiritual distress because of their traumatic migration experiences. This paper assumes that because the factors that contribute to the distressing mental health outcomes of African immigrants include systematic oppressions, the existing bio-medical and individualistic pastoral psychology models can be improved with intercultural psychosocial therapeutic methods as argued by Emmanuel Y. Lartey and discovered in the book of Exodus.

This study recovers a care (karuṇā)-based philosophy for building an isonomic, complex society preserved in Pāli texts. The Greek term isonomia (lit. equality), in Karatani Kōjin’s sense of no-rule, means a categorical rejection of ruler-ruled hierarchy. I extend this use of isonomia to include spiritual cultivations that relinquish habitual bondages of ruler-ruled mentality such as domination and submission. To better appreciate this kind of care-based philosophy of isonomia, I point out that it is necessary to adopt a processual paradigm, relinquish the unwarranted assumption that ancient political thought necessarily serves a ruler or a ruling class, and sidestep the Western sociopolitical imagination of governance (lit., to steer, to direct). The study further argues that, by reconceiving governance in the processual terms of establishing care-based, recurrent patterns of actions and interactions (paticca-samuppada), an isonomic complex society promises equal support for life and liberation. 

The Jain philosophers Kundakunda (second half of the first millennium) and Amṛtacandra (eleventh century) assert that an individual becomes an agent and experiencer of a cognitive or embodied state through temporary identification with that state. This paper explores how such identification, while entangling the soul in the cycle of rebirth, creates a relationship of product and producer (bhāva-bhāvaka) between karma, as the action, and the soul, as the agent. This framework imbues the soul with agency over its karmic states, which Kundakunda illustrates using the example of sexual desire: although attraction is part of karma, this does not imply a situation in which one karma desires another karma (kammaṃ ceva hi kammaṃ ahilasai). While karma is responsible for sexual desire, the individual retains control over their urges. By focusing on the tension between karma and agency, this paper examines how Kundakunda and Amṛtacandra explore the relationship between bondage and freedom. 

This paper revisits the Buddhist-anarchist encounter during late Qing China through an examination of the writings of the revolutionary philologist Zhang Taiyan. Through close readings of Zhang’s writings, in which Zhang stages the dialectical analysis of the concept of ‘nature’ (xing; svabhāva) through dialogue with the voice of an interlocuter, this paper examines not only what Zhang says, but how he argues it. I claim that for Zhang, the practice of Buddhist logic aimed not at the establishment of formally valid truth claims but instead, towards the ethical self-fashioning of an anarchist subject. The question of the ethical, at the heart of philosophical problem of nature is resolved not through an account of the good but in the very practice of dialogically analyzing “nature.” Yogācāra then, functioned not a repository of philosophical concepts but as a soteriological logic intended towards the liberation of self and others. 

While not exactly “science” in the modern sense, the Buddhist “science of reasons” (yinming 因明) aims to provide universal criteria for assessing the validity of arguments and claims. Describing the development of this discipline in China in terms of “sinification” might, therefore, appear to be a generous euphemism for what some scholars have previously dismissed as a flawed transmission, or plain misunderstanding, of these intricate Indian theories. However, in my talk I would like to provide some arguments for reconsidering the fate of “science of reasons” in China, not as a failed attempt at reproducing the original Indian system, but rather as a case of its “domestication” within a new intellectual and cultural context.  I will focus on Chinese interpretations of pramāṇas (“means” of valid cognition) in the late-Ming period, demonstrating how these Indian epistemological concepts became reconstructed and recontextualized within a distinctly Chinese intellectual framework.

This paper focuses on the notion of “mental consciousness simultaneous with five sensory consciousnesses” (henceforth abbreviated as MSF) preserved in the Chinese Yogācāra sources. I argue that this notion was crucial for better understanding Dignāga’s epistemology but it was totally forgotten by Dharmakīrti’s time. 

I begin by arguing that Dignāga’s notion of mental perception (mānasa-pratyakṣa) can be made sense by taking MSF into consideration. I further suggest that MSF is closely related to the notion of mental construction by the nature [of the five sensory consciousness] (svabhāva-vikalpa) in the Abhidharma tradition. Finally, I show how MSF could help shed light on Dignāga’s notion of self-cognition (svasaṃvedana).

In conclusion, the importance of the Chinese sources is that they preserve the relevant context before and around the time of Vasubandhu, Dignāga and Dharmapāla. By carefully studying the Chinese pramāṇa sources, we see the continuity between Dignāga and his Abhidharma and Yogācāra predecessors.

This paper focuses on xianliang (現量), a Chinese translation and interpretation of an Indian Buddhist epistemic term, pratyakṣa (perception)—Dignāga described as non-conceptual while Dharmakīrti added a non-deceptive feature. Interestingly, influenced by Xuanzang’s (600/602–664) implementation of xianliang to translate both pratyakṣa and pratyakṣaṃ pramāṇam, pre-modern Chinese Buddhist interpreters, who lacked sufficient sources from Dignāga and without access to Dharmakīrti, developed theories about pratyakṣa that would not occur in the Sanskrit context. The seeming impact of “sinifying” pratyakṣa lingers even in the twentieth-century translations of Dignāga’s and Dharmakīrti’s works derived from Tibetan sources. Drawing from the works of Lü Cheng (1896–1989) and Fazun (1902–1980) and examining them alongside the classical works, this paper suggests that the preservation of the non-literal translation, xianliang, is not merely a result of relying on the established terminology, but is essentially a linguistic adaptation and notably a hermeneutic extension of the philosophical meaning.

While not exactly “science” in the modern sense, the Buddhist “science of reasons” (yinming 因明) aims to provide universal criteria for assessing the validity of arguments and claims. Describing the development of this discipline in China in terms of “sinification” might, therefore, appear to be a generous euphemism for what some scholars have previously dismissed as a flawed transmission, or plain misunderstanding, of these intricate Indian theories. However, in my talk I would like to provide some arguments for reconsidering the fate of “science of reasons” in China, not as a failed attempt at reproducing the original Indian system, but rather as a case of its “domestication” within a new intellectual and cultural context.  I will focus on Chinese interpretations of pramāṇas (“means” of valid cognition) in the late-Ming period, demonstrating how these Indian epistemological concepts became reconstructed and recontextualized within a distinctly Chinese intellectual framework.

This paper focuses on the notion of “mental consciousness simultaneous with five sensory consciousnesses” (henceforth abbreviated as MSF) preserved in the Chinese Yogācāra sources. I argue that this notion was crucial for better understanding Dignāga’s epistemology but it was totally forgotten by Dharmakīrti’s time. 

I begin by arguing that Dignāga’s notion of mental perception (mānasa-pratyakṣa) can be made sense by taking MSF into consideration. I further suggest that MSF is closely related to the notion of mental construction by the nature [of the five sensory consciousness] (svabhāva-vikalpa) in the Abhidharma tradition. Finally, I show how MSF could help shed light on Dignāga’s notion of self-cognition (svasaṃvedana).

In conclusion, the importance of the Chinese sources is that they preserve the relevant context before and around the time of Vasubandhu, Dignāga and Dharmapāla. By carefully studying the Chinese pramāṇa sources, we see the continuity between Dignāga and his Abhidharma and Yogācāra predecessors.

This paper focuses on xianliang (現量), a Chinese translation and interpretation of an Indian Buddhist epistemic term, pratyakṣa (perception)—Dignāga described as non-conceptual while Dharmakīrti added a non-deceptive feature. Interestingly, influenced by Xuanzang’s (600/602–664) implementation of xianliang to translate both pratyakṣa and pratyakṣaṃ pramāṇam, pre-modern Chinese Buddhist interpreters, who lacked sufficient sources from Dignāga and without access to Dharmakīrti, developed theories about pratyakṣa that would not occur in the Sanskrit context. The seeming impact of “sinifying” pratyakṣa lingers even in the twentieth-century translations of Dignāga’s and Dharmakīrti’s works derived from Tibetan sources. Drawing from the works of Lü Cheng (1896–1989) and Fazun (1902–1980) and examining them alongside the classical works, this paper suggests that the preservation of the non-literal translation, xianliang, is not merely a result of relying on the established terminology, but is essentially a linguistic adaptation and notably a hermeneutic extension of the philosophical meaning.

Today, millions of Christians of Middle Eastern descent reside in Latin America—a primary destination for Arab immigrants since the late nineteenth century. Notably, more Palestinians now live in Chile than in any other country outside of the Middle East. The majority of these 500,000 Chilean-Palestinians are Eastern Orthodox, a population that far outnumbers the small Palestinian Christian community remaining in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel. Calling for more scholarship on the flourishing Middle Eastern Christian communities of Latin America and their lived religion, this paper focuses on the unique role of Chile as a place of refuge and spiritual development for Christian Palestinians. Based on ethnographic interviews it seeks to answer the following questions: What does it mean to be Palestinian Christian in the Chilean diaspora? How do Chilean Christians of Palestinian descent speak about and enact ideas of freedom and Palestinian nationhood in religious and secular spaces?

This paper presents some of the most salient results of an ongoing research on religion and politics in Peru, focusing primarily on conservative trends. We delve on the new alliances woven between political and religious actors. 

Three salient features may be identified: 1 Revisited moral agenda. In terms of sexual rights, Peru is one of the most conservative country in the hemisphere. The moral agenda focuses on protecting the population from homosexuality and on defending the conservative legal Status Quo. 2 Moral agenda and politicians. To compensate their lack of popularity and in an attempt to legitimate their position, politicians mediatize their religious practices and their closeness to clerics and pastors. Additionally, outspoken Catholics belonging to new movements and Charismatics pastors unite to create political parties. 3 Abuses in Catholic environments. The Church and its allies are confronted with an evolving crisis in its first stages.  

Political parties anchored in religious identity or issues of church and state are one of the oldest forms of political organization in Latin America. Recently, such parties have proliferated as evangelical Christians with political ambitions form their own electoral platforms, bringing diversity to a field long dominated by the Catholic Church. What forms of religious political party exist in contemporary Latin America? What factors explain their varied electoral success, longevity, and relations with other parties, both secular and religious? Do they reinforce the longstanding divide between Catholicism and Protestantism, or do they appeal to a broader Christian identity? Do these parties embrace an exclusionary Christian nationalism—asserting Christianity as the core of national identity and public policy—or do they respect religious pluralism and state secularism amid growing nonbeliever populations? This paper will explore these questions as it surveys contemporary religious political parties across Latin America.