In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper argues that John Wesley stands within the patristic tradition of deification exemplified by Gregory of Nyssa. In both late antiquity and early industrial England, bodies were rendered vulnerable within hierarchical and economic regimes that disciplined and exhausted embodied life. I contend that Nyssen’s theosis and Wesley’s sanctification share a participatory grammar in which salvation is understood as transformative participation in divine life that reconfigures mortal embodiment. Under industrial modernity, Wesley reformulates this patristic vision as an embodied holiness capable of resisting the reduction of the body to labor utility. By centering embodiment, this study reframes deification as a counter-formation of embodied existence rather than a purely metaphysical doctrine. It further suggests that this participatory logic bears implications for contemporary regimes of racialized vulnerability, where socially imperiled bodies remain sites of theological and political struggle.

The great Byzantine saint Gregory Palamas (1296-1357) explicitly rejected the Platonic idea of the World Soul. I argue, however, that certain structural features of the World Soul remain in the superstructure of Palamas's accounts of the creation and deification of the sensible world through the human soul. I thus argue that through its rational movements in cooperation with the activities of the divine Nous, Logos, and Eros the human soul becomes a functional World Soul in Palamas's thought.

Zizioulas’ landmark work Remembering the Future articulates a powerful vision of eschatology as a central ontological category for Christian theology. Zizioulas' interest in eschatological ontology, however, begins earlier in his career. Already in Being as Communion, he interprets Maximus' triad of genesis–movement–rest as comprehensible only "from the end" rather than organically unfolding "towards the end" (96). In this position we find the seeds of Zizioulas' later more sustained treatment of the question of eschatological ontology in Remembering the Future. In this paper, one element of this discussion will be examined, namely Zizioulas' hard separation of the notion of teleology (captured by the phrase "towards the end") from that of eschatology ("from the end"). This division between teleology understood in a negative light and eschatology understood in a positive light, is discussed at some length in Remembering the Future, 101–109, and will form the basis for this paper's exploration. 

Since the early twentieth century, Konkōkyō, a Sect Shinto new religious movement, has conducted war memorials and spirit pacification rituals (ireisai) on behalf of Japan’s civilian and military war dead. I trace the development of Konkōkyō ireisai from the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) through the present to demonstrate how marginalized religions utilize memorial rituals to mediate their position in wartime and postwar society. Konkōkyō’s ireisai evoke the group’s history of service to the wartime Japanese state while reifying its postwar pacifist identity. I examine continuities and shifts in Konkōkyō ireisai to show how rhetorics of peace and war coexist in spirit pacification rituals across time. Postwar Konkōkyō relies on local bodies rather than the national organization to conduct these rituals, avoiding nationwide attention and controversy. Konkōkyō postwar ireisai transform the institution’s wartime activities into an ongoing pacifist mission, seeking to pacify the war dead and war responsibility tensions.

In 1938, Prince Demchugdongrub, a descendant of Chinggis Khan and leader of a Japanese-backed Pan-Mongolist movement, stood on Shika Island in Kyushu to honor Mongol soldiers slain there during the thirteenth-century invasions of Japan. The site, once feared as a “Mongol mound” marking the execution of captured invaders, had been transformed by the Nichiren priest Takanabe Nittō into the Great Memorial Stūpa for the Mongol Army, dedicated to the war dead of both sides under the ideal of onshin byōdō (equality of friend and foe). This paper examines how medieval memory was reframed in 1920s-30s Japan to align with impartial Buddhist compassion with imperial Pan-Asianism. Through textual analysis and attention to Mongol and Chinese responses, the paper argues that the monument functioned as a hinge between pacification and expansion and reveals how Buddhist ritual became a contested medium of transnational diplomacy on the eve of total war. 

My paper takes up the shifting meanings of Kyoto’s “ear mound” (mimizuka) over the course of the modern and contemporary periods, particularly as it is articulated in relation to other sites of commemoration organized around the entombing of bodily remains. The ear mound is understood to contain not ears but noses, taken from Korean and Chinese soldiers and civilians killed during the failed Japanese invasions of Korea in the late sixteenth century and brought back to Japan as trophies. The burial mound seems to have operated during the early modern period both within a framework of spectacle and one of spirit pacification. In the paper, I explore how ritual pacification becomes connected to post-war rhetorics of “peace.” I am interested especially in how the ear mound and places like it become sites of cathexis for competing national interests and thus sites of contestation. 

This presentation examines contemporary rituals dedicated to Koreans who died as a result of colonial mobilization during World War II. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it analyzes ceremonies performed either by ritual specialists—Buddhist monks or mudang (Korean shamans)—or by non-specialists drawing on the model of Confucian-inspired ancestral offering rites (chesa). It shows how the ritual's aim of appeasing the dead becomes articulated with broader political and social issues, including claims for historical justice, the division of the Korean peninsula, and relations—at both grassroots and diplomatic levels—between South Korea and Japan.