In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Colonial courts have treated Hindu deities as legal persons since the mid-nineteenth century: the deity was seen as a non-human beneficiary of its wealth, and human caretakers could act as its agents to make decisions on its behalf and exercise its “divine will.” Until the mid 1900s, the deity was represented by shebaits and caretakers whose proximity to the deity was sanctioned by the scriptures. However, as corruption allegations against shebaits became commonplace, courts allowed the deity to be represented by any worshipper, termed the “disinterested next friend,” who could appear in Court claiming to represent the deity’s will. This paper examines the increasing importance of the “next friend” in temple property disputes. Drawing on case laws and secondary scholarship on Anglo-Hindu Law, I show how the birth and evolution of this category of “next friend” was a political maneuver, which found resonance in neither  English law nor Hindu scriptures. 

Village deities in the Western Himalaya agentively participate in the everyday lives of their devotees. A primary form in which they do so is through their raths—portable wooden palanquins carried on the shoulders of male devotees. The raths are understood to embody the deities and manifest their will, which, devotees report, is communicated through the palanquins’ autonomous movement, to which the carriers’ bodies respond. In this paper, I explore the embodied socialization process through which male community members are trained and gradually integrated into this ritual performance. Drawing on scholarship on material religion and on two decades of ethnographic research in the region, I illustrate how this process unfolds in gradual stages—from early childhood games to full adult performative integration—during which practitioners learn to transform their bodies from active producers of choreographed movement to responsive conduits of what is experienced as divine agency.

Drummer-priests called pampaikkārar mediate divine presence across diverse vernacular Hindu ritual performances in Tamil-speaking South India. Through expressive and aesthetic practices (i.e., lyrical and material alaṅkāram), they invite deities and ancestors to take up residence in oil lamps and the bodies of human hosts. Central to the drummers’ divine mediation is their musical and ritual virtuosity and their aesthetic artistry. Ritual participants who embody and give voice to the divine must also evince certain qualities and characteristics. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, this paper centers divine agency as the crucial factor in whether the deities and the dead will manifest and speak, if the ritual will proceed, and whether it will meet its goals. Entreaties and offerings from participating devotees and the musicians’ percussive skill and creative ritual interventions notwithstanding, it is a matter of divine will whether these entities respond to the exertions of their human mediators.

In the suburb of RC Puram, Hyderabad city, the “non-existent” village of Mandumoola is reconstituted through the annual Mallanna jatara. Organized by the Kuruma caste association of displaced Kuruma caste members, the festival serves as a space for nostalgic recuperation of an ancestral lifeworld lost to state land acquisition and physical displacement. This paper analyzes a pivotal ritual innovation of the annual festival: a Poturaju (guardian-deity) sheep sacrifice performed at a sacred space disputed between the members of Kuruma and the Vaddera castes. I argue that the “possessed” body of the Ogguvandlu ritual specialist functions as a ritual arbiter, mediating and representing a “divine will” to resolve claims over sacrality and space. By situating this agency within broader caste-informed notions of the nature of the divine and local representative politics, I demonstrate how claims of representing and enacting “divine will” enable the Kurumas to claim disputed space through ritual action.

Is spirit possession a form of darśan? Does multisensory embodiment intensify the idea of contact inherent in darśan? Does it collapse the distance between the seer and the seen and the distinction between seeing and becoming? In this paper, I draw on fieldwork among Indo-Caribbean Madrasi healers in Guyana and New York to 1) situate spirit possession within the field of Hindu visuality and 2) propose a multisensory theory of darśan. The Madrasis are a religious minority within the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. They cohere around south Indian ancestral deities and practice spirit possession, drumming, and healing rituals. Smoke, drums, neem, and water allow Madrasi healers to “see through the eyes” of the deity. Possession is mediated through the senses. The Madrasis’ multisensory rituals of possession urge us to review and revise ocularcentric interpretations of Hindu ways of perceiving the world (pratyakṣa), entering bodies (āveśa), and seeing and being seen (darśan). 

Colonial courts have treated Hindu deities as legal persons since the mid-nineteenth century: the deity was seen as a non-human beneficiary of its wealth, and human caretakers could act as its agents to make decisions on its behalf and exercise its “divine will.” Until the mid 1900s, the deity was represented by shebaits and caretakers whose proximity to the deity was sanctioned by the scriptures. However, as corruption allegations against shebaits became commonplace, courts allowed the deity to be represented by any worshipper, termed the “disinterested next friend,” who could appear in Court claiming to represent the deity’s will. This paper examines the increasing importance of the “next friend” in temple property disputes. Drawing on case laws and secondary scholarship on Anglo-Hindu Law, I show how the birth and evolution of this category of “next friend” was a political maneuver, which found resonance in neither  English law nor Hindu scriptures. 

Village deities in the Western Himalaya agentively participate in the everyday lives of their devotees. A primary form in which they do so is through their raths—portable wooden palanquins carried on the shoulders of male devotees. The raths are understood to embody the deities and manifest their will, which, devotees report, is communicated through the palanquins’ autonomous movement, to which the carriers’ bodies respond. In this paper, I explore the embodied socialization process through which male community members are trained and gradually integrated into this ritual performance. Drawing on scholarship on material religion and on two decades of ethnographic research in the region, I illustrate how this process unfolds in gradual stages—from early childhood games to full adult performative integration—during which practitioners learn to transform their bodies from active producers of choreographed movement to responsive conduits of what is experienced as divine agency.

Drummer-priests called pampaikkārar mediate divine presence across diverse vernacular Hindu ritual performances in Tamil-speaking South India. Through expressive and aesthetic practices (i.e., lyrical and material alaṅkāram), they invite deities and ancestors to take up residence in oil lamps and the bodies of human hosts. Central to the drummers’ divine mediation is their musical and ritual virtuosity and their aesthetic artistry. Ritual participants who embody and give voice to the divine must also evince certain qualities and characteristics. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, this paper centers divine agency as the crucial factor in whether the deities and the dead will manifest and speak, if the ritual will proceed, and whether it will meet its goals. Entreaties and offerings from participating devotees and the musicians’ percussive skill and creative ritual interventions notwithstanding, it is a matter of divine will whether these entities respond to the exertions of their human mediators.

In the suburb of RC Puram, Hyderabad city, the “non-existent” village of Mandumoola is reconstituted through the annual Mallanna jatara. Organized by the Kuruma caste association of displaced Kuruma caste members, the festival serves as a space for nostalgic recuperation of an ancestral lifeworld lost to state land acquisition and physical displacement. This paper analyzes a pivotal ritual innovation of the annual festival: a Poturaju (guardian-deity) sheep sacrifice performed at a sacred space disputed between the members of Kuruma and the Vaddera castes. I argue that the “possessed” body of the Ogguvandlu ritual specialist functions as a ritual arbiter, mediating and representing a “divine will” to resolve claims over sacrality and space. By situating this agency within broader caste-informed notions of the nature of the divine and local representative politics, I demonstrate how claims of representing and enacting “divine will” enable the Kurumas to claim disputed space through ritual action.

Is spirit possession a form of darśan? Does multisensory embodiment intensify the idea of contact inherent in darśan? Does it collapse the distance between the seer and the seen and the distinction between seeing and becoming? In this paper, I draw on fieldwork among Indo-Caribbean Madrasi healers in Guyana and New York to 1) situate spirit possession within the field of Hindu visuality and 2) propose a multisensory theory of darśan. The Madrasis are a religious minority within the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. They cohere around south Indian ancestral deities and practice spirit possession, drumming, and healing rituals. Smoke, drums, neem, and water allow Madrasi healers to “see through the eyes” of the deity. Possession is mediated through the senses. The Madrasis’ multisensory rituals of possession urge us to review and revise ocularcentric interpretations of Hindu ways of perceiving the world (pratyakṣa), entering bodies (āveśa), and seeing and being seen (darśan). 

At least five factors kept British Methodists connected in the century after the death of John Wesley. Four were intentional: doctrine, discipline, polity, and praxis. Methodist preachers, itinerant and local, were expected to believe and preach ‘our doctrines’, uphold ‘our discipline’, endorse and engage with the polity of Methodism, and follow the rhythms and norms of Methodist spirituality. A fifth factor was severely practical: the provision of a station, a stipend, and a house. The effectiveness of these factors and their evolution over time will be explored, giving particular attention to those who did not remain within the Connexion, to see how the five marks did, or did not, help to keep British Methodists connected.

Russ Richey produced a distinctively US American understanding of connectionalism that focused on the “machinery” of Methodism: conferences, doctrines, discipline (especially the Book of Discipline), the episcopacy, and clergy. Richey’s understanding of connectionalism was deeply rooted in the experiences of US American United Methodists and their predecessors and shaped by distinctively US American discourses on denominations and Methodism’s place in national theology and historiography. Scholars should expand on Richey’s insights to build a broader understanding of connectionalism by widening our geographic and denominational focus to incorporate more data from Methodist traditions around the world and beyond The United Methodist Church and by diversifying our tools of analysis beyond primarily structural ones, especially incorporating relational and spiritual understandings of connectionalism. Taking these steps can help us not only broaden but deepen our understanding of connectionalism and present a fuller Methodist ecclesiology.

Russell E. Richey’s work on Methodist connectionalism reshaped the study of Methodist history by demonstrating how conference structures, shared discipline, and common mission formed the ecclesial identity of Methodism. Yet Methodist history also reveals persistent tensions within this ideal, as connectional unity has repeatedly been challenged by division, exclusion, and institutional fracture. This paper revisits Richey’s interpretation of Methodist connectionalism and asks how his framework might be extended in light of contemporary experiences of disconnection. It proposes belonging as a constructive lens for understanding the future of Methodist connectionalism. While Methodist polity established structures intended to bind communities together, connectional life has always depended on practices that cultivate recognition, participation, and mutual responsibility among the baptized. Reframing connectionalism as a practice of belonging highlights the relational and experiential dimensions of Methodist ecclesiology and offers a way to interpret connectionalism not only as governance but as a shared form of ecclesial life.

This project examines drought and rainmaking rituals in Qing China and treats these rituals as a site where religious authority, political responsibility, and communal obligation intersected. Drawing on missionary records, Qing judicial archives, and local gazetteers, I reconstruct episodes of drought and religious responses between the late seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, when environmental crises brought officials, villagers, and Christian missionaries into direct competition over divine power. I argue that rainmaking functioned both as a political performance and as a communal practice, and that encounters between missionaries and local communities through rainmaking practices produced recurring tensions over ritual participation and communal obligation within village society. Through the lens of rainmaking, this study traces a longer genealogy of religious conflict surrounding natural disasters and reinterprets early modern religious encounters in China as a process rooted in local ritual practice and the rural moral economy.

The paper investigates the calamity-pacifying ceremonies 息災法會 conducted by Tibetan esoteric Buddhists in Chinese cities from the 1920s to the 1940s. It examines a series of ceremonies conducted by Lama Bai Puren 白普仁 (1870 –1929), who conducted the Dharma Ceremony of Golden Light 金光明法會 in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hubei, and Hunan as these regions endured natural disasters and wars between 1916 and 1927. In particular, it focuses on his performing ceremonies to cope with a severe drought in Hunan in 1926. Drawing from influential newspapers and Buddhist periodicals, the paper suggests that these ceremonies played a crucial role in the dissemination of Tibetan esoteric Buddhism in Chinese Buddhist communities. It also argues that the popularity of esoteric rituals in Chinese cities in the first decades of the twentieth century challenges the common assumptions of de-ritualization and demythologization in Buddhist modernity.

This project investigates the relationship between natural disasters and religion, examining how disasters catalyze the transformation of religious symbols. Moving beyond traditional iconography, the study adopts a social-contextual approach to analyze Harada Naojirō’s 1890 painting, Guanyin Riding the Dragon. While its Japanese origins have vanished from Taiwanese memory, the image became a ubiquitous icon of “Efficacy” following the devastating August 7 of 1959.
The research argues that this dissemination was driven by the interplay between the flood's collective memory and the influx of mainland Chinese Buddhist monastics and lay devotees in the 1950s, who integrated miracle tales with the image. By using black-and-white photography blurring original painting, the icon became embedded in everyday life—from temple ornaments to medicine jars. Ultimately, the study posits that modern religious transmission is rooted not only in technological progress, but in the nexus of collective experience, textual representation, and environmental crisis.
 

Recent work in historical and political theology has recognized the complex set of questions our contemporary contexts present as well the resources present within Reformational and post-Reformational for our common life. This paper seeks to explore the role that the theological interpretation of Scripture and the motif of covenant play in Philippe de Mornay's Vindiciae, contra tyrannos's reformulation and redistribution of political judgment. In it, I argue that Vindiciae’s construal of political judgment is founded upon a series of theological readings of the Old Testament and the appropriation of resources intrinsic to Reformed theology. Together, these two resources provide the stimulus for reconceptualizing and redistributing political authority around the central motif of covenant, a move that empowers the ecclesial community to participate in the act of exercising political judgment, insofar as its members share in the validation and authorization of political authority, and provides grounds for protesting its abuses.

It has been a query in recent scholarship about how distinctive the political witness of the Church community is in Oliver O'Donovan's political theology.

In this paper, I argue that this ambivalence arises from O’Donovan’s insistence on the existence of two overlapping societies, civitas terrena and civitas Dei, in every political act. While most paid attention to his magnum opus, Desire and Judgment, and tend to focus primarily on discussing his understanding of the State or government and its activities, I take a different approach by starting from Entering into Rest, in which O’Donovan defines judgment as privatio, as opposed to the public communication of truth. Whereas civitas terrena is characterised by ‘judging’, civitas Dei points to an eschatological society which ‘judges not’. Hence, the political witness of the Church, as a sign of contradiction, signifies a true communication of the final judgment, which contradicts all partial and untrue communication.

This paper argues that within American cultural identity the gun functions as a mythic instrument of final judgment, authorizing moral and existential agency through violent force. Against this, Christian eschatological identity rejects the narrative coherence of guns. Employing narrative identity theory and narrative theology, the paper offers an applied theological assessment of firearms in American life. Part One draws on Paul Ricoeur, to show how identity-forming stories construct guns as guarantors of autonomy and justice. These narratives grant firearms an implicit eschatological status within the American imagination. Part Two turns to postliberal readings of Karl Barth and the biblical metanarrative, framed by Eden and the new creation, to argue that tools of lethal violence have no place in Christian eschatological hope. Whatever use guns have in the present is due to the conditions of sin. There is no final eschatological value for guns in the Christian story. 

Studies of the self in Renaissance scholarship have long explored the way individuals negotiated their self-identity within the confines of external forces. Some scholars have probed further, seeking to reclaim more individual agency, especially for women in Renaissance England. This paper will explore how English Calvinists in the Post-Reformation sought to guard against the individual falling into disengaged autonomy on the one hand and submergence within communal identities on the other. It identifies a turn from the reigning paradigm of elite self-fashioning to a sophisticated process of self-adjudication, from weighing various testimonies through ecclesiastical and civil jurisprudence to the application of these deliberative practices across different courts and contexts, extending upwards to synods and downwards to local society, including to the self within the courtroom of the individual conscience.

A polar bear stands on ice the size of a kitchen table. Her cubs trail behind, ribs showing. The platform her species hunted from for 40,000 years is vanishing. She is not failing. She is mismatched. This paper argues that congregations facing the climate crisis are standing on the same vanishing ice, experiencing evolutionary mismatch, the gap between the neural hardware humanity evolved for and the radically altered ecological world we now inhabit. Drawing on neurotheology, the more-than-human world, and creation-centered Open and Relational Theology, this paper proposes that preaching must evolve from transferring cognitive doctrine to facilitating neurobiological adaptation. Neurobiology shapes rhetoric entirely. And consciously participating in our own rapid adaptive evolution is not a supplement to spiritual practice. It is spiritual practice itself. This session will be facilitated as a spiraled, interactive, non-linear experience, inviting participants into embodied shared discovery in real time

Preaching in times of ecological crisis requires more than new sermon topics; it calls for a transformation of the homiletical imagination itself. This paper explores ecological preaching as an embodied and relational practice that begins with attentiveness to place and the more-than-human world. Drawing on the article “How Does Creation Speak? Interwoven Preaching Between Mindfulness and Resistance,” it proposes preaching as a movement shaped by mindfulness, resistance, and relational listening rather than primarily rhetorical proclamation. The presentation also introduces a pedagogical experiment developed in the intensive seminar “Earth as Text, Earth as Pulpit,” where students engage in practices such as walking meditation, ecological observation, and collaborative sermon experiments. These practices function as a laboratory for ecological homiletics in which attentiveness, authority, and proclamation are rethought together. The paper argues that ecological preaching emerges where theological speech is grounded in embodied listening, relational accountability, and the lived realities of particular places.

This paper develops the notion of eco-autobiography, as articulated by Melanie L. Harris in Ecowomanism, in conversation with Howard Thurman, a preacher-theologian shaped by interfaith encounters and deep ecological spirituality. By reading Thurman’s life through the lens of eco-autobiography, I demonstrate how Thurman’s ethic of nonviolence, inspired by Mohandas Gandhi, is intertwined with eco-spirituality. In this sense, nonviolence becomes not only an ethical commitment but also an ethical responsibility to nurture the web of interconnected relationships that sustain all living organisms. This interreligious eco-autobiographical approach highlights the multiplicity of voices—Christians, non-Christians, and non-humans—that shape our interconnected being, resisting dominant Christian metanarratives that silence non-Christian and non-human stories. Lastly, by introducing a spirituality of interconnectedness from Daoism as a third component, I propose an eco-homiletical theology of interconnectedness, emphasizing pluralistic, relational, and hybrid practices that recognize non-Christian and non-human companions as co-participants in theological reflection and the practice of preaching.

Current preaching often avoids the climate crisis or offers inadequate "creation care" rhetoric. This proposal offers a framework for homiletical growth through three critical practices: cultivating ecological relationality, developing futurist orientations in our preaching, and engaging in trauma-informed homiletical praxis. By dismantling the "resource" mindset in relation to the earth in favor of a web-of-life relationality, preachers can foster deeper kinship among congregations with the more-than-human world. By cultivating anticipatory views of potential futures, sermons can move beyond mere diagnosis toward cultivating communal courage and risk-taking toward those futures. Finally, by embracing and making generative space for eco-emotions — grief, anger,  fear, and even despair — as elements of a practiced hope, faith communities can navigate catastrophe with a sense of resistance to the forces behind that catastrophe and the collective efficacy of communal engagement with the realities that the catastrophe is bringing into our lives and planetary community. 

Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial theory of hybridity, the paper proposes the concept of a “virtual-sacred hybridity” to argue that Indian tarot channels on YouTube exemplify a hybridity at multiple levels: a) sacred hybridity where Tarot readers incorporate and synthesize elements from different religions and spiritual traditions, b) linguistic hybridity as seen in Tarot channels that combine different languages and cultural idioms, and c) spatial hybridity where online Tarot functions within a liminal, virtual space between the analog and the transcendental space. Based on case study and content analysis, the paper further contends that the hybridity of online Tarot remains embedded in queerness just as queerness embraces hybridity by challenging heteronormative binaries. The online blending of Tarot and Tantra offers insights into how digital platforms allow space for non-majoritarian, spiritual practices even though content creators remain governed by the market logic of algorithm, revenue production, and consumption

There is a substantial gap when looking for religious research about the micro-blogging social media site Tumblr and its unique communities. This is especially true for supposedly “new age” spiritual practices and beliefs like those associated with witches, mystics, crystal girlies, druids, Wicca, and other related practices. Yet Tumblr’s affordances have empowered Neopaganism to spread on the site and provided a new spiritual home for many users who have been harmed by or feel negatively about mainstream religions. Thus, by studying the nuances of how Neopaganism functions on Tumblr, and how Tumblr’s own affordances empower it to flourish, the papers offers insights into how scholars of religion can gain new information that queers established conceptions of what is or is not “religion” while presenting effective ways for mainstream religions like Christianity to readdress themselves in the future by embracing the nonhierarchical values that vulnerable populations find and appreciate in Neopaganism.

The paper explores ideas of future reclamation of the witch as a feminine symbol of power and uses Florence Welch as a case study of witchcraft as power, activism, and search for a better more just future. Through the exploration of lyrics and imagery in music videos, discussion of Welch’s activism, and embracing of the unconventional, this presentation will argue for Florence Welch as an example of witchcraft unlike the stories of the past. By critically reading Mariam Kaba, Kelly Hayes, other activists on the ground, the paper compares witchcraft as a modern-day movement of collective power. It further addresses the themes of wildness and reclamation of ancient traditions in the movement to embrace a historical witch as inherently powerful and feminine. The paper approaches “the witch” as a queer figure that rejects the heteronormative values of patriarchy and childbearing to instill a sense of independence in a postmodern world.  

The religious use of hallucinogenic mushrooms has been around for centuries, yet upon the “discovery” of the Americas these Indigenous practices were erased from history; but some survived underground where they eventually become incorporated into US mushroom/psychedelic churches. Through the use of textual and literary analysis, the paper examines the history of mushrooms in Mexico by comparing scholars that study sacraments in religious spaces. It further dives into the emergence of two mushroom churches in the US: The Divine Assembly and Psanctuary. The paper then discusses the role of mushrooms in each church and ends with the legal implications of the use of mushrooms in these churches. The paper argues that despite these churches’ attempt to subvert Eurochristianity, their use of mushrooms as sacraments fits in with neoshamanism which is the appropriation of Indigenous rituals and ought to be avoided when queering religion in the future.

Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial theory of hybridity, the paper proposes the concept of a “virtual-sacred hybridity” to argue that Indian tarot channels on YouTube exemplify a hybridity at multiple levels: a) sacred hybridity where Tarot readers incorporate and synthesize elements from different religions and spiritual traditions, b) linguistic hybridity as seen in Tarot channels that combine different languages and cultural idioms, and c) spatial hybridity where online Tarot functions within a liminal, virtual space between the analog and the transcendental space. Based on case study and content analysis, the paper further contends that the hybridity of online Tarot remains embedded in queerness just as queerness embraces hybridity by challenging heteronormative binaries. The online blending of Tarot and Tantra offers insights into how digital platforms allow space for non-majoritarian, spiritual practices even though content creators remain governed by the market logic of algorithm, revenue production, and consumption

There is a substantial gap when looking for religious research about the micro-blogging social media site Tumblr and its unique communities. This is especially true for supposedly “new age” spiritual practices and beliefs like those associated with witches, mystics, crystal girlies, druids, Wicca, and other related practices. Yet Tumblr’s affordances have empowered Neopaganism to spread on the site and provided a new spiritual home for many users who have been harmed by or feel negatively about mainstream religions. Thus, by studying the nuances of how Neopaganism functions on Tumblr, and how Tumblr’s own affordances empower it to flourish, the papers offers insights into how scholars of religion can gain new information that queers established conceptions of what is or is not “religion” while presenting effective ways for mainstream religions like Christianity to readdress themselves in the future by embracing the nonhierarchical values that vulnerable populations find and appreciate in Neopaganism.

The paper explores ideas of future reclamation of the witch as a feminine symbol of power and uses Florence Welch as a case study of witchcraft as power, activism, and search for a better more just future. Through the exploration of lyrics and imagery in music videos, discussion of Welch’s activism, and embracing of the unconventional, this presentation will argue for Florence Welch as an example of witchcraft unlike the stories of the past. By critically reading Mariam Kaba, Kelly Hayes, other activists on the ground, the paper compares witchcraft as a modern-day movement of collective power. It further addresses the themes of wildness and reclamation of ancient traditions in the movement to embrace a historical witch as inherently powerful and feminine. The paper approaches “the witch” as a queer figure that rejects the heteronormative values of patriarchy and childbearing to instill a sense of independence in a postmodern world.  

The religious use of hallucinogenic mushrooms has been around for centuries, yet upon the “discovery” of the Americas these Indigenous practices were erased from history; but some survived underground where they eventually become incorporated into US mushroom/psychedelic churches. Through the use of textual and literary analysis, the paper examines the history of mushrooms in Mexico by comparing scholars that study sacraments in religious spaces. It further dives into the emergence of two mushroom churches in the US: The Divine Assembly and Psanctuary. The paper then discusses the role of mushrooms in each church and ends with the legal implications of the use of mushrooms in these churches. The paper argues that despite these churches’ attempt to subvert Eurochristianity, their use of mushrooms as sacraments fits in with neoshamanism which is the appropriation of Indigenous rituals and ought to be avoided when queering religion in the future.