In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper examines how Buddhist youth programs at Hsi Lai Temple in Southern California function as sites of experiential religious education for second-generation Asian American adolescents. Drawing on ethnographic research with 22 youth participants and 7 program leaders, the study explores how volunteering, peer relationships, ritual participation, and community activities serve as pedagogical processes through which Buddhist values are embodied and transmitted. Rather than relying primarily on formal doctrinal instruction, these programs cultivate learning through participation, relational mentorship, and everyday ethical practices. Using the Buddhist concept of the Five Skandhas as a theoretical lens, the paper proposes a pedagogical framework that highlights the roles of environmental learning, role modeling, and linguistic transmission in shaping identity formation. The study contributes to broader discussions of experiential learning and demonstrates how temple-based youth programs function as important environments for teaching Buddhism beyond the classroom.

In a secularizing society, art museums offer an accessible and low-stakes environment for diverse public audiences—particularly K-12 and university students—to learn about Asian religions. Among these, Buddhist art has had the broadest geographical reach. This paper examines the ways in which select high-profile museums present one of the most vibrant and dynamic facets of Buddhist visual culture, that of the Himalayas and Tibet. It will examine radically different displays of Tibetan artworks at major institutions across the United States, from gilded sculptures against austere, deep gray walls, sparsely exhibited under dramatic lighting, to vivid, intricate, and densely populated shrine room reconstructions. In the process, this comparative study will closely consider the experiential and pedagogical impact of gallery displays and their accompanying didactics, shedding light on various attempts to elucidate one of the most pervasive yet intellectually challenging schools of Buddhism in the United States today.

In Mircea Eliade’s seminal work The Sacred and the Profane, he notes that religious [humans] “experience two kinds of time: the profane and the sacred” (104). The repetition of a ritual or the “cosmicization” of a space is to get closer to the gods (32). Is this possible in contemporary and public spaces? What of helping the sacred erupt in profane spaces?

For four years, the lifelong formation department of a Chicago-based seminary has partnered with The Way of the Cross, a non-profit in the historically Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago. The event mobilizes hundreds of volunteers and thousands of participants for Via Crucis, a mile-long re-enactment of the stations of the Cross. 

This paper uses Via Crucis as a way to explore this question: what can we learn about public religious practice and nontraditional theological education in the face of dwindling traditional church communities and seminaries? 

How can an Islamic building assert a civic presence in an American state known for its megachurches and conservative politics? What architectural language might such a building adopt to navigate sensitivities surrounding the public visibility of Islam? This paper argues that Ismaili Center Houston negotiates minority recognition through aesthetic rather than political means.

The building signals no explicit reference to Islamic motifs; it is composed of cubic volumes clad in white surfaces. The architect Farshid Moussavi evoked a seventeenth-century Safavid palace in Isfahan, Iran, as well as columns in Persepolis as her inspirations. The choices are strategic: rather than a "religious" style, Islamicate spatial configurations are translated into "neutral" types. Drawing on Talal Asad's embodied traditions and Rancière's partage du sensible, I argue that just as Islamicate identity is inscribed in spatial organization rather than visible style, the Ismaili community articulates its faith through civic inclusivity rather than doctrinal closure.

This paper explores how New York City religion, politics, and urban space were shaped by a massive scandal over police corruption and brutality at the turn of the 20th century, and the New York Police Department’s turn to institutional Catholicism in response. After the revelations of the Lexow Committee (1894-95), the NYPD began to identify with the Catholic Church, through public processions, an annual St. Patrick’s Day Communion Breakfast, and a discourse of the sacred moral work of policing. While the majority of NYPD officers had been Catholic since the department’s founding in 1844, Catholicism had not previously been part of NYPD institutional practices or discourses. I argue that deliberately claiming Catholicism was crucial not only for departmental morale and for the spiritual needs of its officers in a period of moral crisis, but especially for cementing the cultural legitimacy of the NYPD in the aftermath of a massive scandal. 

This paper examines how an outdoor Eucharistic community in downtown Atlanta transforms a surveilled urban park into a space of healing for people living without stable housing. Drawing on nine months of participant-observation and interviews at the Church of the Common Ground, an Episcopal “church without walls” that gathers weekly in Woodruff Park, I argue that healing is produced through spatial liturgy: rituals that reconfigure public space, time, and social relations into a mobile heterotopia. Building on Lefebvre’s produced space via Knott’s spatial method and Foucault’s heterotopia, I show how embodied practices, such as call-and-response, circle prayer, testimony, Eucharist, and shared meals, suspend urban hierarchies and cultivate Turnerian communitas. These practices generate belonging, safety, and hope, while contesting redevelopment logics that frame downtown parks as spaces to be cleared. The paper offers an ethnographic account of urban healing and a transferable conceptual lens for studying how liturgy makes place.

In May 2025, the Korea-Israel Bible Institute, one of the oldest Christian Zionist groups in South Korea, inaugurated the Holocaust Museum in Paju, a border city next to North Korea. The city is marked by Korea’s collective trauma from Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, and the division of North and South Korea. This paper investigates the significance of Paju in Korean Christian Zionist political theology and practices. The paper will argue how the Holocaust Museum of Korea serves to localize Christian Zionism in the divided country and disseminate its theo-political visions for the future, reflecting a complex interplay of religious, political, and spatial narratives with historical remembrance. 

Traces of memory remain in and on the land but often require skilled interpreters. Interpreting archives, land, and buildings together allows for memorial interpreters to piece more robust memories together from the traces that remain on the land from its uses. This paper examines a case study from the construction of a Levittown in New Jersey in the late 1950s to elucidate these two claims. I use archival evidence of the Levitt Corporation’s land donation to the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey and of the diocese’s subsequent forced liquidation of a Black parish to fund the construction of a new White parish in the Levittown to sketch the contours of the imagined future of the Episcopal Church in New Jersey at that time. Careful interpretation made it possible to reconstruct the memory of racially exclusive fantasies despite attempts to relegate these memories in archival oblivion. 

This paper will examine the religious dimensions of the internment of Japanese Canadians (1942-1949). By drawing on archival materials, The Landscapes of Injustice Project, and contemporary temple discourse, I will also argue that the destruction of Buddhist temples and other spaces and objects during the internment was intended to erase not just the Japanese community but their spiritual foundations in Canada. As such, I contend that the sanmon gate is a place where memories of injustice, the present, and the future are negotiated. I argue that Steveston Buddhist Temple's newly built sanmon gate functions as a nostalgic reconstruction of Japanese Buddhist—specifically Jōdo Shinshū—space in Steveston, a return to land that was once taken by the state, and as a launch pad for future-oriented projects at Steveston Buddhist Temple. This paper allows us to start building an understanding of Japanese Canadian religious space during the internment, now, and in the future.

This paper argues that depictions of maternal cannibalism in the Hebrew Bible (2 Kings 6 and Lamentations) intentionally invert the usual maternal role as provider and nourisher. In contexts where women were typically responsible for food processing and preparation, siege-induced famine tragically reverses the maternal task of feeding children. These texts therefore portray starvation not only as physical suffering but also as the catastrophic collapse of maternal roles. The paper combines three data sets. First, it examines ANE siege warfare and its deliberate use of starvation as a weapon. Second, it explores modern cognitive and sociological research on starvation to understand how prolonged hunger affects moral judgment and maternal behavior. Lastly, it analyzes the siege scenes in 2 Kings 6:24–31 and Lamentations 2:20 and 4:10. Taken together, these perspectives demonstrate how the Hebrew Bible depicts famine as a devastating collapse of maternal provision and human dignity.

This paper analyzes the United States government’s reliance on Christian patriarchy in restructuring twentieth-century dairy farming. It argues that the state positioned dairy cows as mothers through religious logics of cisheteropatriarchy and agribusiness, conceptualizing both the role of cattle and human motherhood as mechanically extracted resources on the family farm. Milk’s historical trajectory from a dangerous beverage to “nature’s perfect food” relied on religious productions of cows as suffering mothers who labored for and nourished their Christlike human husbands, masculinizing milk as extracted by men from women. Just as twentieth-century home economics sought to industrialize housewives’s unpaid domestic labor as the home’s spiritual core, cows similarly became mechanized and spiritual mothers. Analyzing state reports and propaganda pieces, this paper argues that American family farmers conceptualized cows as mothers only in relation to themselves as patriarchal fathers petitioned by God to violently, yet affectionately, oversee their multispecies family.

In this paper, I explore everyday food practices in a rural Ethiopian Orthodox community in northwestern Ethiopia, focusing on women preparing and sharing bread and coffee for a day dedicated to St. Mary during a fasting (ts’om) period. In the afternoon, when eating resumes, neighbors gather. The food is not extraordinary, nor does the occasion produce intense emotion, yet a modest joy is shared. Children watch, sometimes help, and join the meal, gradually internalizing modes of reverence through bodily and sensory experience rather than formal instruction. While studies on religion and food often highlight abstention or ritual meals, this paper turns to cooking and eating in ordinary time and space—practices not always explicitly recognized as religious—while attending to the balance between fasting and feasting. Women’s labor quietly mediates this balance, unfolding alongside ecclesiastical structures and sustaining religious life in ways rarely articulated but vital to the community’s ongoing devotion.

How do religious and cultural practices shape food needs, and how might thoughtful people and organizations better respond to food scarcity, including using the lived experience of mothers to better provide food for households? This paper takes up one organization as a case study, situating it in the larger landscape of the urban agriculture and food access ecosystem of a mid-sized Midwestern American city. The garden analyzed in this case study is a robust, interreligious, multicultural volunteer-run donation garden that provides fresh produce for a wide variety of recipient organizations. The principles it relies upon include attention to providing culturally and religiously appropriate food for recipients, and employing skills developed through maternal care in caring for the community.

Semyon Frank (1877–1950) is considered by Vasily Zenkovsky to be Russia’s greatest philosopher and played an important role in introducing Friedrich Schleiermacher to Russia by translating his work Über die Religion. Although Frank’s ties to Eastern Orthodoxy and German Idealism are important for understanding his anthropology, his intellectual connection with Schleiermacher is essential for grasping certain aspects of his thought. This paper argues that Frank’s later works show significant intellectual links with Schleiermacher’s theological anthropology. His Russian translation of Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion influenced his later ideas about human identity, religious consciousness, and aesthetics—elements he saw as vital to understanding the core of humanity. This paper aims to explore the flow of ideas from the West to the East, particularly those originating from German theologians such as Schleiermacher.

This paper examines the reception of Friedrich Nietzsche in the Russian religious philosophy of S. L. Frank, arguing that the Christian theological transformation of Nietzschean themes—such as individual freedom, heroism, self-overcoming, and moral creativity—played a formative role in Frank's account of bogochelovechestvo (Godmanhood) and its function in constituting human personality. Building on existing scholarship on Nietzsche’s reception by Russian thinkers such as Berdyaev, the paper traces how Frank’s thought Christianized Nietzsche’s Übermensch and incorporated it into a Solovievan metaphysics of divine-human communion, giving the idea new spiritual significance in relation to the Orthodox doctrine of deification/theosis. The paper argues that recovering this Nietzschean current in Frank’s thought offers resources for developing a more robustly individualist Orthodox personalism and linking individual agency to deification. 

The nineteenth century witnessed a renewed turn toward ecclesiology in both Roman Catholic and Orthodox theology. In this shift, the Church was understood not as one aspect of Christian life but as the primary locus of Christian existence and theological tradition. This paper places Alexei Khomiakov and Johann Adam Möhler in dialogue. I highlight their shared conviction that the Church is an organism of living unity rather than a rational mechanism. Through Khomiakov’s sobornost and Möhler’s Einheit, both theologians ground ecclesiology christologically and present the Church as the living union of Christ’s Body. I examine their account of the relationship between the Church’s historical visibility and its participation in the Mystical Body, noting their distinction—without separation—between visible and invisible expressions. I argue that their parallel visions anticipate ressourcement ecclesiology, while also exhibiting romantic and universalizing tendencies that shape their legacy in later thinkers such as Florovsky and de Lubac.

This paper investigates the relationship between Schelling’s philosophy and Russian personalism. By examining Pavel Florensky’s formulation of personhood, I will demonstrate how the language of Orthodox spirituality, with particular focus on asceticism, was key for the critical appropriation of Schelling’s thought. Both Schelling and his Orthodox readers were keen to uphold an account of the person as irreducible to the thing-like categories of concepts. But, I argue, Florensky dramatically reconfigured Schelling’s positive solutions by appealing to a theological conception of God’s essence as love and an understanding of asceticism as the practice by which one comes to appropriate this loving essence as the very content of one’s own life. By tightly identifying this kind of ascetic practitioner with the “restrainers of rationality,” Florensky transposed Schelling’s personalist insights into an Orthodox Christian key. 

This paper considers the possibility of AI being employed to improve moral character from the perspective of an account of virtues that is psychologically realistic and informed by a Christian agapeic ethic oriented toward creaturely well-being goods that ground right action. While Part I briefly presents such an account of the virtues, Part II explores three ways that advancing AI may impact virtue formation, each of which is conceivable but has significant limitations and drawbacks. Part III argues that recognizing the social character of virtue formation requires recognizing the importance of extending the rule of law to AI. The effectiveness of rule of law in the face of advancing AI, however, will depend on Niebuhrian virtues of moral vigilance that recognize the ease with which the loftily stated ideals sometimes associated with AI coexist with other aims.

 As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly pervasive in healthcare, the incentives for technical innovation and financial gain driving efficient AI healthcare automation often interfere with patient care and increase health inequity. However, bio- and AI ethical frameworks remain inadequate for guiding this transformation, especially at the speed and scale in which autonomous decision-making is embedded within healthcare. Incorporating compassionate care into AI systems focuses moral attention onto patient suffering and flourishing (eudemonic well-being), translating ethical insights into an AI framework that can be operationalized within current and near-term AI system development. I argue that compassionate AI in healthcare requites modeling multiple dimensions of human suffering and health agency in support of phronetic attention and compassionate response, and that eldercare provides both a rich context and urgent test case.

Artificial intelligence and augmented reality are transforming healthcare technologies, including the development of virtual autopsy systems that reconstruct the human body using high-resolution imaging and three-dimensional visualization. While these technologies may reduce the need for invasive postmortem examinations, they also introduce new bioethical questions concerning bodily integrity, digital representation, and the moral status of postmortem data. This paper examines how religious ethical traditions—including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Shamanism—interpret emerging technological practices surrounding death investigation. Some religious communities may view virtual autopsy technologies as more acceptable alternatives to invasive procedures because they preserve bodily integrity. However, AI-generated digital reconstructions of the deceased body raise new ethical concerns about postmortem dignity, privacy, and the governance of digital bodily data. Drawing on perspectives from religious bioethics, this paper argues that religious traditions provide important ethical resources for addressing emerging questions about death, technology, and the future of healthcare.