In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

In the Hebrew Bible, depictions of famine, flood, and the destruction of civilizations are haunted by the presence of ravens. As Jewish and Christian interpreters read these texts, they found the birds who showed up at these sites of death “good to think with.” They considered ravens as they contemplated the pressures of food scarcity in the story of Elijah or the deaths that follow rising waters in the story of Noah. These ravens were neither simple victims nor passive witnesses to these catastrophic events; instead, like the human characters in these stories, they often played active roles in the devastation. This paper examines places in the history of biblical interpretation in which readers thought with ravens as they read these scenes of ecological destruction or precarity, sometimes seeing ravens as a threat to their own survival and other times as a mirror to the devastating impacts of their own hungers and predations.

Are the sources of modern Jewish thought capable of theorizing a planetary politics? This paper suggests a non-anthropocentric Jewish ecotheology by conceptualizing sacrifice as interspecies transformation. An interpretive tradition developed by medieval and modern Jewish thinkers understands biblical sacrifice as a sacrament symbolizing apotheosis. Unexpectedly, human union with the Divine opens up interspecies possibility. Thinking beyond the human becomes possible because apotheosis is contingent upon the human offerant’s identification with the sacrificial animal. What is the nature of this “identification”? In what ways are human and more-than-human life bound together by their shared materiality? And what is the fate of this materiality? This paper populates an interspecies sacrificial imagination that reworks human-critter relations to reimagine the nature of perfection.  

Behind every horror of genocide, war, or other similar acts of shocking violence are the mental and social frameworks that justify such actions. Among the most potent of these justifications is the language and logic of dehumanization. This paper incorporates social psychological research over the last decade which has demonstrated strong links between perceived Human-Animal division and dehumanizing beliefs towards human out-groups. Critically, this research finds that education about animal-human similarities reduces belief in a strong Human-Animal divide, while also providing the knock-on effect of reducing out-group dehumanization. These insights introduce a key litmus test for theologians: to what degree does the theology under question reinforce rigid (and hierarchical) categorizations between human and animal? This paper concludes by applying this test to common interpretations of the imago Dei, suggesting that even well-intentioned anthropocentric definitions may mistakenly cause harm to all animals, including Homo sapiens.

The politics of our moment lurch toward future(s) of climate disruption, mass extinction, global warfare, and social collapse with louder and louder denunciations, proclamations, and aggrandizements—nihilistic forms of nostalgia. If we recognize, building on Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, that the apocalyptic roar of “anthropos” rushing headlong toward collapse has long been a voice that relies on un-earthing and burying of “unhuman” others (in both a racialized and speciated sense), perhaps the time has come to imagine a posthuman offramp that places trust in meaningful silences.

Tea is historically entangled with Chinese Buddhism, as networks of monasteries in medieval China were predominantly growers and distributors of tea. Beyond production, Buddhist communities over the years were responsible for the ritualization of tea, contributing to a thriving culture of tea in East Asia. In contemporary Taiwan, Buddhist communities are involved in the production, circulation, ritualization, and consumption of tea. Tea is harnessed for modern forms of practice, community building, and the financial sustainability of Buddhist groups. Approaches to the place of tea and its relationship with Buddhist identities and cultivation vary in ethical, philosophical, and practical aspects. This paper examines the place of tea within the context of environmental approaches to its production, consumption, and incorporation in modern rituals. The study is based on ethnographic data, examining large-scale Buddhist monasteries and smaller-scale Buddhist grassroots communities, from the perspectives of practical, material, and social effects on Buddhist life worlds.

Looking at a case study in Sagaing, Myanmar, a main monastic hub, this paper explores how gendered structures of merit and monastic discipline often place Myanmar Buddhist nuns (thilashin) at a disadvantage when receiving food. At the same time, the ability to “make their own rules” and flexibility in practice may strategically help them in navigating these material constraints. Culinary knowledge formed in the villages together with thilashin food practices not only help in the formation of these female renunciants but also cement reciprocal relationships and responsibilities between monks and nuns as well as between monastics and the laity. These practices are essential for maintaining the sāsana, which are often dismissed as being insignificant as domestic duties.

At Cherry Blossom Zen Monastery, Vietnamese American families gather every Sunday to perform funeral rites for their dead. There, resident nuns help them navigate the perilous crossings that connect life and death. Together they chant sutras, light incense, and, most importantly, offer food to help the consciousness of the deceased move from their previous existence on to the next. Mahayana Vietnamese Buddhism teaches that, when a person passes away, their consciousness wanders for forty-nine days before being reincarnated into a new body. In this period of liminal existence, the deceased, distressed, confused, and sometimes angry, needs guidance. Living family members, also afflicted by the broad spectrum of emotions and potentially unwholesome states that accompany grief, need attention too. In this paper, I present ethnographic data to show that food serves crucial functions in enabling and conditioning the crossings that shape the experience of death at Cherry Blossom temple.

When nourishment turns to rot, what happens to Buddhist offerings to the dead? By focusing on nōkotsudō, indoor ossuary facilities that house cremated remains, this paper examines food offerings in contemporary Japanese Buddhist deathcare practice. In this context, food waste emerges not simply a matter of excess or neglect but a distinctly Buddhist problem of care. Offerings are embedded in logics of abundance in which nourishment sustains ongoing relations between living and dead. Yet these practices unfold within temple ritual economies that must manage perishable goods within institutional infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic research in rural Japan, I show that waste emerges when multiple temporal regimes embedded in Buddhist deathcare practice, such as ritual cycles, microbial decay, bureaucratic regulation, and disaster preparedness, fall out of alignment. I describe this friction as temporal dissonance, revealing how temples become sites where abundance, decay, and ancestral care must be continually negotiated.

Tea is historically entangled with Chinese Buddhism, as networks of monasteries in medieval China were predominantly growers and distributors of tea. Beyond production, Buddhist communities over the years were responsible for the ritualization of tea, contributing to a thriving culture of tea in East Asia. In contemporary Taiwan, Buddhist communities are involved in the production, circulation, ritualization, and consumption of tea. Tea is harnessed for modern forms of practice, community building, and the financial sustainability of Buddhist groups. Approaches to the place of tea and its relationship with Buddhist identities and cultivation vary in ethical, philosophical, and practical aspects. This paper examines the place of tea within the context of environmental approaches to its production, consumption, and incorporation in modern rituals. The study is based on ethnographic data, examining large-scale Buddhist monasteries and smaller-scale Buddhist grassroots communities, from the perspectives of practical, material, and social effects on Buddhist life worlds.

Looking at a case study in Sagaing, Myanmar, a main monastic hub, this paper explores how gendered structures of merit and monastic discipline often place Myanmar Buddhist nuns (thilashin) at a disadvantage when receiving food. At the same time, the ability to “make their own rules” and flexibility in practice may strategically help them in navigating these material constraints. Culinary knowledge formed in the villages together with thilashin food practices not only help in the formation of these female renunciants but also cement reciprocal relationships and responsibilities between monks and nuns as well as between monastics and the laity. These practices are essential for maintaining the sāsana, which are often dismissed as being insignificant as domestic duties.

At Cherry Blossom Zen Monastery, Vietnamese American families gather every Sunday to perform funeral rites for their dead. There, resident nuns help them navigate the perilous crossings that connect life and death. Together they chant sutras, light incense, and, most importantly, offer food to help the consciousness of the deceased move from their previous existence on to the next. Mahayana Vietnamese Buddhism teaches that, when a person passes away, their consciousness wanders for forty-nine days before being reincarnated into a new body. In this period of liminal existence, the deceased, distressed, confused, and sometimes angry, needs guidance. Living family members, also afflicted by the broad spectrum of emotions and potentially unwholesome states that accompany grief, need attention too. In this paper, I present ethnographic data to show that food serves crucial functions in enabling and conditioning the crossings that shape the experience of death at Cherry Blossom temple.

When nourishment turns to rot, what happens to Buddhist offerings to the dead? By focusing on nōkotsudō, indoor ossuary facilities that house cremated remains, this paper examines food offerings in contemporary Japanese Buddhist deathcare practice. In this context, food waste emerges not simply a matter of excess or neglect but a distinctly Buddhist problem of care. Offerings are embedded in logics of abundance in which nourishment sustains ongoing relations between living and dead. Yet these practices unfold within temple ritual economies that must manage perishable goods within institutional infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic research in rural Japan, I show that waste emerges when multiple temporal regimes embedded in Buddhist deathcare practice, such as ritual cycles, microbial decay, bureaucratic regulation, and disaster preparedness, fall out of alignment. I describe this friction as temporal dissonance, revealing how temples become sites where abundance, decay, and ancestral care must be continually negotiated.

This paper examines how Hikaru Okuizumi’s novella The Night to Kill a Snake (1992) destabilizes religiously mediated futures—often sustained by cohesive narrative structures—by proliferating religious imagery to the point where narrativity itself collapses. Through free association, the text disperses snake metaphors drawn from Shinto myth, Genesis, Greek legend, and Japanese imperial symbolism without allowing them to converge into symbolic resolution. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s account of modern literature as repetitive language without securing memory, this paper argues that the novella’s proliferating religious imagery exposes the fragility underlying both religious futurity and interpretive desire. As images multiply, the protagonist’s imagined future unravels, and the reader’s interpretive expectations are similarly frustrated. Literary art here neither redeems nor resolves; instead, it reveals futurity as radically open, suspended within the unsettling repetition of religious language itself.

This paper studies visions of the future, apocalyptic imagination and discourses on climate change in Hindu theistic traditions as revealed in the Vaishnava Puranas (4-18 c.CE). Hindu imagination sees time as cyclic, and not linear, and understands the cyclic creation and dissolution of the universe as a repetitive and normal process that is good, desired and necessary. In the Vaishnava tradition, Vishnu and his avataras, or bodily descents, in which he incarnates in various anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic forms, comes down to earth in order to save humankind from natural calamities and disasters, such as floods, draughts, etc. Similarly, the proliferation of contemporary discourses on the future, climate change, are often immersed in Hindu mythology and religious culture, and cannot be ignored when discussing the issues of apocalyptic imagination and climate change in Hindu traditions. Thus, my talk seeks to explore the complex links between visions of the future, apocalyptic imagination, the mythologizing of the divine, and the mythologizing of contemporary cultural and religious discourses on climate change. 

In reimagining life-giving futures that are more expansive and inclusive of all peoples, Christian theology must be a part of the creative conversation given the ways that it has been co-opted by political powers to assert domination and control. As a result, Christian theology must intentionally re-center marginalized communities and re-imagine more life-giving and expansive futures through theopoetics. 

Through a close reading of Garry Kilworth's sci-fi novel The Night of Kadar (1978) as a map key to the challenges that will attend any Islamofuturist project, I argue for a distinction between Islamicate science fiction (as a mere projection of Islam into the future) and Islamofuturism (the placing of Islam at the center of future possibility). Insofar as science fiction is a literature of change—one in which "the limit" is the main problematic—then the very possibility of Islamofuturism relies on the negotiation of Islam's historical and normative limits, on the one hand, and the imaginative limits of the orientalist and secularist conventions of sci-fi, on the other. 

I conclude that any viable Islamofuturism must confront four interrelated challenges: that of form, affect, technics, and home. In response, I propose four key concepts that might act as orienting coordinates for the aspiring Islamofuturist today: farq, adab, tafsir, and hijra. 

This paper investigates Gershom Scholem's positing of an “anti-ideological turn in Jewish mysticism”. I illuminate Scholem’s thoughts on the matter by way of an appraisal of the relationship between nominalism and antinomianism in his work. Scholem assessed the mystical function of nomoi (laws) having sought to peel off and separate an ideological, discursive, temporal, and providential (nominalist) structure from the bare bones of law. By seating law below language, despite Scholem’s best attempts to argue that there is “no such thing as mysticism in the abstract”, he essentially permitted a messianic and apocalyptic isolation of the mystical law from any temporal and providential context.

This paper historicizes the power of feelings of shock at the center of antinomian expressions of sacred eros from Sabbatian to modern New Age kabbalistic sex magic. Donovan Schaefer argues that feeling functions as “a mode of creating, transferring, and consolidating space, community, and power.”[1] Medieval kabbalistic myths and rituals of sacred sexuality cultivated an oceanic feeling, unifying the practitioner with the ten sefirot and divinity itself, in the contex of a particularistic society. However, the myths obscure the homoerotic and even incestuous relationships required to make them work. Early Modern Sabbatian kabbalists engage in a sort of emotional-theological edgeplay, creating a sense of sacred shock as they expose and expand these undercurrents with explicit images of homoeroticism and incestuous, necrotic, no-future models of generation. These new emotional repertoires of sacred shock powerfully enact new theologies of self, cosmology, and universalist models of kinship incorporating religious others. 

Recent conflicts between the indigenous Parmalim community and industrial forestry in North Sumatra are often framed as disputes over land rights or environmental protection. This paper argues that such conflicts reveal a deeper ontological divergence concerning the moral status of land. Parmalim cosmology understands land as spiritually constituted through tondi, a life-force that binds humans, forests, and territory within reciprocal moral relations. By contrast, missionary Protestant theology introduced in the nineteenth century reframed land through a stewardship paradigm that conceptualizes nature as divinely entrusted resource under human management. While stewardship theology is not inherently extractive, its managerial anthropology historically aligned with colonial and postcolonial land governance. Drawing on decolonial theory and political ecology, the paper argues that Parmalim cosmology generates structural resistance to commodification by disrupting anthropocentric moral hierarchies embedded in modern land regimes. The case reveals how competing religious ontologies shape environmental futures in Southeast Asia.

This paper examines the relative disappearance of race language in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century under Abraham Kuyper’s Ethical Politics. Although racial discourse was widespread in European colonialism, colonial governance in Indonesia increasingly relied on the moral idioms of ethics, education, and tutelage rather than overt racial classification. I argue that this shift did not mark the end of racial hierarchy but its displacement into theological, moral, and pedagogical forms. The contrast is especially striking because Kuyper employed explicit racialized language elsewhere, including in his 1898 Princeton lectures and in his support for the Boers in South Africa. The Indonesian case shows how colonial domination could be recast as ethical responsibility while preserving structures of exclusion and inequality. Read from the present and through the lens of haunting future/s, this history suggests that racial power may survive most effectively when it no longer appears explicitly as race, but lingers in the moral vocabularies of care, tutelage, and responsibility.

The myth of the Infinito Dios presents a “heretical” cosmology that reimagines the Genesis creation account by positing a deity who precedes the Biblical God. The presentation describes the content of the Infinito Dios myth, tracing its development through the scant available source materials, which have traditionally been held in secret and hidden from researchers. The paper also speculates on the origins of the narrative within the context of ten centuries of Asian and European migrations to the Philippines and the beliefs and ideas that accompanied them. There are reasonable arguments and circumstantial evidence suggesting that the myth of the Infinito Dios has roots in dualist and Gnostic cosmologies in the Mediterranean world and Silk Route, specifically Manichaeism.

This paper examines the role of Islam, local customs, and modernity in influencing Maldivian marriage culture based on ethnographic research. I explore the causes and norms surrounding the divorce rate in the Maldives that is currently the world’s highest and yet unaddressed in Anglophone Islamicist scholarship. While religiously inclined communities are often considered more likely to preserve practices of lifelong monogamy due to their presumed commitment to notions of sexual purity, Muslim societies are thus stereotyped even more frequently not only in orientalist imagination but also by modern Muslims themselves. An increase in marital breakdown in a Muslim society is attributed to Western hegemony and the legacies of colonialism on indigenous legal systems that presumably devalued lifelong marital bonds and encouraged consumeristic, flippant, "transactional" attitudes towards romantic relationships. I question the premises of such binary assumptions by exploring the legal and ethical dimensions of Muslim romantic life in the Maldives.

This paper examines how Islamic jurists on the Shariah boards of Islamic financial institutions in North America adapt Islamic law to local financial regulatory systems. While scholarship on Islamic legal adaptation in North America has focused mainly on family law and arbitration, the ethical dimensions of Islamic finance remain understudied. Drawing on textual analysis and ethnographic research, the paper shows how Islamic law and finance, which prohibit interest, are made workable within regulatory systems structured around it. It argues that jurists use fiqh al-aqalliyyāt (jurisprudential accommodations for Muslims as minorities) to create pragmatic, profitable financial products while preserving claims to Islamic legality. By analyzing how Shariah boards structure financial contracts and justify their legal-ethical reasoning, the paper positions Islamic finance as a key site for understanding how Muslim minorities in North America pursue financial prosperity without compromising religious commitments.

At the behest of the Sunni-Muslim monarchy and state apparatus, the densely-populated, GCC island-nation of Bahrain has undergone accelerated urbanization and architectural programs, particularly since the Arab Spring. This is most visible in Manama, the political capital, and in Muharraq, selected Arab cultural capital for 2018. However, the majority Shi‘i Muslim community has enacted different visual cultural and urbanism projects, largely beyond foreign attention. This presentation will focus on the ma’tam, a commemorative ritual space akin to the Husayniyyas of certain other Ithna‘ashari Shi‘ite societies.  We examine why Shi‘ites in Bahrain have begun to adorn or re-adorn such spaces of memory in ornamental and epigraphic programs distinct from those on Sunni mosques. In contrasting their architecture and communal narratives, we investigate the different relations the communities prioritize with foreign interests, but also the different policies and populations that successive US administrations have prioritized in diplomacy with Bahrain and local reactions.

What may be involved in a Muslim’s aspiration to leave Islam? How can experiences of leaving Islam complicate our conceptions of Islam as an object of scholarly inquiry? I ask these questions by drawing on fieldwork among non-observant Muslims in Kyrgyzstan—those estranged from key aspects of Islamic observance by the Soviet state. I focus particularly on the story of Begimai, a woman in her fifties who, after an unpleasant encounter at a mosque, attempted—but did not succeed—to convert to Christianity. I examine several experiential fields that mediated Begimai’s relationship with Islam, including the conceptual legacy of Soviet secularization, the post-Soviet Islamic revival, and the agency of Begimai’s deceased ancestors. This exploration illuminates a relational web of forces through which Begimai’s (in)ability to imagine a future without Islam was articulated. The paper concludes with a broader argument about how non-observant or ambiguous ways of living Islam may be conceptualized.