In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

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.

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.

This paper examines “Catholic feminism” as a term and analyzes the meaning(s) of these words as various Catholic women theologians and leaders have used them throughout the last three decades (~1990 to ~2025). Through engaging Catholic feminist theologians such as Rosemary Radford Ruether, Elizabeth A. Johnson, and Ivone Gebara, this paper reveals how progressive Catholic women are defining Catholic feminism. Through engaging contemporary Catholic women leaders such as Abigail Favale and Josephine Garrett, this work also analyzes how conservative Catholic women are considering Catholic feminism. Bringing the progressive and conservative Catholic women into conversation with one another, this essay uncovers what each approach has in common with one another, while revealing key differences that may prove irreconcilable. This paper establishes the slippery nature of the term “Catholic feminism,” suggests the need to reconsider the use of the term, and proposes new language to use in scholarly conversation.

In the year 2000, the World March of Women (WMW 2000) organized a series of international events to condemn poverty and violence against women.  Development and Peace – Caritas Canada (the official international development organization of the Canadian Catholic Church) financially supported the March and encouraged Catholics to participate as a sign of “courageous solidarity” with women around the world.  WMW 2000 became controversial as some of the other groups that also supported the March called for greater access to abortion, which contradicted established Catholic moral teaching.  Pro-life organizations in Canada called for a boycott of the March and for the Canadian Bishops to withdraw their support from Development and Peace.  As bishops lined up on both sides of the issue, WMW 2000 became one of the most divisive debates in Canadian Catholic history.  This paper explores why this event was so polarizing and explains its impact on contemporary Canadian Catholicism.

This paper explores contemporary Catholic feminism and abortion rights activism and advocacy in Mexico, Argentina, and the U.S., with a focus on three nongovernmental organizations: Catholics for the Right to Decide Mexico, Catholics for the Right to Decide Argentina, and Catholics for Choice in the U.S. Specifically, I examine how these organizations strategically employ saints and their hagiographies to advance abortion rights. In the wake of Pope John Paul II's "sustained programme of ... 'strategic canonization,'" Catholic feminists have demonstrated that the “many models of holiness” the pope sought to highlight to advance the Vatican's agenda can also be employed to challenge the Church’s official positions (Bennett, 2011, p. 441, p. 448). Ultimately, the use of saints in Catholic feminism points to the ways in which the Catholic tradition, perhaps paradoxically, sets the stage for Catholic feminism to emerge.

The 9th century Tamil narrative poem Cīvakacintāmaṇi is not the first place most scholars of Jain studies would think to look for Jain perspectives on contemplative practice. This text, which tells the story of Cīvakaṉ (Jivandhra in Sanskrit) is well known–even infamous–for its excessively erotic nature. Although some scholars interpret it as ultimately critical of embodied experiences, we can also read the work as exploring what it means to be embodied while on a spiritual path. In the narrative world of the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, animal interactions form a critical part of that path for Cīvakaṉ. This paper looks at the ways animal interactions and animal suffering catalyze intense emotional experiences, moments of contemplation, mantric practice, and the central character’s ultimate decision to renounce kingship and the world. Despite the story’s antiquity, these key moments can serve as guiding examples even in today’s world.

Pātañjali's teachings on the workings of the mind and the experience of meditation have been well-researched. The first part of his Yogasūtra—the samādhi pāda—presents, among other topics, different practices to stabilize the mind, obstacles in meditation, and different types of samādhi. Its compact style has often posed challenges for commentators. This paper examines Yaśovijaya’s engagement with this part of the Yogasūtra in the Dvātriṃśaddvātriṃśikā, a long Jain compendium on mendicant conduct that includes an auto-commentary. Despite his influence on Jain thought, Yaśovijaya remains understudied, and much of his work has not been translated into English. With original translations, this paper explores how Yaśovijaya offers a particular interpretation of Patañjali’s teachings on meditation, drawing from Vyāsa at points, building on earlier Jain authors like Haribhādrasūri, and applying Jain ontological and ethical frameworks. It also shows how his engagements with different current of thought reveal important concerns of his time.

This paper features Jain contemplative practices in the “Arhum Yoga” tradition of Acharya Sushil Kumar (1926–1994), a Jain guru who left India to establish a community in North America in the 1970s. While Kumar described his contemplative system as “Jain Yoga” in his book, Song of the Soul (SOtS), a study of the contemplative practices contained therein reveals that Kumar was drawing from manifold non-Jain pan-South Asian influences to create his yoga system. He was therefore carrying forward a medieval tradition found in Jain yoga texts such as Hemacandra’s Yogaśāstra and the later Yogapradīpa, both of which drew contemplative practices from non-Jain traditions though without losing their commitment to Jain soteriology. What is most striking, however, is how Kumar draws from non-Jain Vedic, haṭha-yogic, and tantric traditions, and in doing so appears at times to present a non-Jain ontological and soteriological system – features of SOtS this paper will carefully untangle.

The term contemplation (anuprekṣā) is an ancient Jain meditative practice which is based on continuing to think about religious subjects with soteriological purpose. The Uttarādhyayanasūtra describes the daily routine of ascetics which consists of the practice of five types of self-study (svādhyāya) wherein anuprekṣā is one technique used as a component of advanced types of meditation (dharma-dhyāna and śukla-dhyāna). This paper notes a shift toward a systematized, modern packaging of anuprekṣā, which is different from its traditional forms in the Jain Āgamas and Tattvārthasūtra (9.7), as it is presented under the meditation system named prekṣā-dhyāna by Ācārya Mahāprajña (1920–2010). The main difference between the premodern practices and modern anuprekṣā is that the premodern method involved merely mental thinking, whereas in modern anuprekṣā many steps such as relaxation, positive affirmation, color visualization and concentration on psychic centers within the body are introduced, demonstrating the entanglement of secular and soteriological goals.

The 9th century Tamil narrative poem Cīvakacintāmaṇi is not the first place most scholars of Jain studies would think to look for Jain perspectives on contemplative practice. This text, which tells the story of Cīvakaṉ (Jivandhra in Sanskrit) is well known–even infamous–for its excessively erotic nature. Although some scholars interpret it as ultimately critical of embodied experiences, we can also read the work as exploring what it means to be embodied while on a spiritual path. In the narrative world of the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, animal interactions form a critical part of that path for Cīvakaṉ. This paper looks at the ways animal interactions and animal suffering catalyze intense emotional experiences, moments of contemplation, mantric practice, and the central character’s ultimate decision to renounce kingship and the world. Despite the story’s antiquity, these key moments can serve as guiding examples even in today’s world.

Pātañjali's teachings on the workings of the mind and the experience of meditation have been well-researched. The first part of his Yogasūtra—the samādhi pāda—presents, among other topics, different practices to stabilize the mind, obstacles in meditation, and different types of samādhi. Its compact style has often posed challenges for commentators. This paper examines Yaśovijaya’s engagement with this part of the Yogasūtra in the Dvātriṃśaddvātriṃśikā, a long Jain compendium on mendicant conduct that includes an auto-commentary. Despite his influence on Jain thought, Yaśovijaya remains understudied, and much of his work has not been translated into English. With original translations, this paper explores how Yaśovijaya offers a particular interpretation of Patañjali’s teachings on meditation, drawing from Vyāsa at points, building on earlier Jain authors like Haribhādrasūri, and applying Jain ontological and ethical frameworks. It also shows how his engagements with different current of thought reveal important concerns of his time.

This paper features Jain contemplative practices in the “Arhum Yoga” tradition of Acharya Sushil Kumar (1926–1994), a Jain guru who left India to establish a community in North America in the 1970s. While Kumar described his contemplative system as “Jain Yoga” in his book, Song of the Soul (SOtS), a study of the contemplative practices contained therein reveals that Kumar was drawing from manifold non-Jain pan-South Asian influences to create his yoga system. He was therefore carrying forward a medieval tradition found in Jain yoga texts such as Hemacandra’s Yogaśāstra and the later Yogapradīpa, both of which drew contemplative practices from non-Jain traditions though without losing their commitment to Jain soteriology. What is most striking, however, is how Kumar draws from non-Jain Vedic, haṭha-yogic, and tantric traditions, and in doing so appears at times to present a non-Jain ontological and soteriological system – features of SOtS this paper will carefully untangle.

The term contemplation (anuprekṣā) is an ancient Jain meditative practice which is based on continuing to think about religious subjects with soteriological purpose. The Uttarādhyayanasūtra describes the daily routine of ascetics which consists of the practice of five types of self-study (svādhyāya) wherein anuprekṣā is one technique used as a component of advanced types of meditation (dharma-dhyāna and śukla-dhyāna). This paper notes a shift toward a systematized, modern packaging of anuprekṣā, which is different from its traditional forms in the Jain Āgamas and Tattvārthasūtra (9.7), as it is presented under the meditation system named prekṣā-dhyāna by Ācārya Mahāprajña (1920–2010). The main difference between the premodern practices and modern anuprekṣā is that the premodern method involved merely mental thinking, whereas in modern anuprekṣā many steps such as relaxation, positive affirmation, color visualization and concentration on psychic centers within the body are introduced, demonstrating the entanglement of secular and soteriological goals.

Scholarship on food, gender, and religion remains marked by historical male dominance and the marginalization of women’s practices. In communities like the Tablighi Jama‘at, women’s culinary roles are framed as religious obligations, often limiting their spiritual engagement. Sermons discourage excessive time spent on cooking, yet these same roles are enforced as pious behavior. Ottoman-era reforms tied women’s identity to kitchen work, further solidifying their domestic roles. Scholars like Darakhshan Khan and Parna Sengupta reveal how food-related rituals, often overseen by male authority, are central to religious women’s lives. Yet, these practices are rarely recognized as legitimate religious knowledge. Broader scholarship could illuminate the power dynamics that confine women to food-centered roles and empower them within their traditions. By bridging religious, gendered, and culinary intersections, such research could foster mutual understanding and pave the way for greater gender equality within religious communities.

Small towns and big cities alike witness the phenomenon of the independent café that is either supported by a local church or was created to meet many of the functions of a parish church – a place for meeting, study and prayer. But, increasingly, some evangelical Christian women – who eschew formal leadership roles for women in their congregations and micro-denominations – theorize themselves as celebrating the “sacrament of the people” through their coffee service. This paper marshals years of ethnographic research to analyze why and how female coffeehouse owners and baristas construct alternative sacred sites and popular priesthoods that are tolerated within their own gender schemas. Coffee becomes a central mediator of gendered authority for evangelical Christian women. 

The environmental nonprofit organization, Adamah, named after the Hebrew word adamah meaning “soil” or “earth,” regularly engages with foodways in an effort to help Jews live more sustainably. Adamah offers educational resources on making shabbat and seder meals more ecologically-feasible, as well as advocates for just food options year round. Their programs include community supported agriculture, retreats featuring vegan food, and educational materials on sustainable food systems. Through Adamah’s Farm And Forest School, participants gain hands-on experience with organic agriculture. Adamah asserts that growing food is part of climate action. I seek to answer, how does Jewish environmentalism and eating eco-kosher coincide in the work of the nonprofit Adamah?

What does food justice in an era of mass incarceration require of us? As I come to argue, putting criminal justice and food justice in conversation benefits both. By highlighting the indispensable part food plays not only in well-being, but also in identity and community, food justice teaches criminal justice to see better some of the most serious threats posed by incarceration. Meanwhile, by highlighting the conflicting interests at the heart of ethics and political philosophy, criminal justice urges food justice to make its moral theory (or theories) explicit in order to judge better what we owe incarcerated individuals as well as those they have harmed. In the end, I argue that we all, incarcerated and unincarcerated alike, have pro tanto positive rights not only to food security, but also to food autonomy, if not also to food sovereignty.

In this presentation, I explore how Marsilio Ficino’s fear of inquisitorial scrutiny influenced his portrayal of polytheism. Ficino was subjected to Papal investigation after he published Three Books of Life due to the work’s portrayal of magic. This paper argues that the threat of inquisition led him to obscure his polytheistic cosmology, central to his magical praxis, particularly in his Platonic Theology. Ficino based his cosmological model on Plato’s concept of the 'One,' which preserved the autonomy of Greek deities. However, Ficino aligned his language with Christian monotheism to avoid persecution. His inclusion of Orphic hymns and his treatment of gods and goddesses, such as Jupiter and Nemisis, demonstrates Ficino’s cautious integration of ancient polytheism in a Christian intellectual theater. I hope to reframe Ficino’s work within the context of polytheism. I urge a reconsideration of the legacy of Platonism and challenge the traditional Christian-centric interpretation of the philosophy.

The Song of Songs is key to articulating the sefirotic cosmology of kabbalah, its conceptions of the human body, its kinships, its relationships cosmos and divine, and its capacity to act on both through ritualized sexuality. Over time, these kabbalistic interpretations of the Song of Songs are used to innovate ritual performances that push orthodox, nomian conceptions of the power of the body past its limits and into heterodox antinomian practices that led to widespread condemnation, litigation, and punishment of practitioners. At the same time, and by similar strategies, each iteration is grounded in its time and place and in dialogue with the discourses and practices of its neighbors. In this essay I examine these synthetic interpretations and ritual performances in kabbalistic texts from the 13th to the 17th Centuries to show how they are all part of a cumulative orthodox tradition leading from sacred sexuality to self-sexuality and heterodoxy. 

Moral panics are revealing of social anxieties, popular critiques, and tensions bubbling up from beneath the surface of a community. In this paper I trace a series of up-swells of rumors and “mob” actions connected to an esoteric boogieman in Trinidad called Gumbo Glisse. According to popular accounts, Gumbo Glisse uses devil dealings and esoteric books in order to menace and mesmerize unsuspecting victims. I argue that the initial appearances of Gumbo and the mass vigilante justice that followed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggest social tensions connected to anti-witchcraft laws, esoteric practice, and race as well as emerging disquiet over oil extraction in the colony. 

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.