In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

In contemporary Bangkok, flowers are instrumental to religious life. Buddhists daily offer fresh garlands to temples to accrue merit and to ask deities for blessings. But over the past fifty years, the craftspeople who make these garlands have been forcibly removed from the city, deemed an aesthetic “blight” to the modern landscape. What is the future of these workers in a city that at once needs them and discards them? I answer this question by analyzing a fresh flower chandelier installation created by my interlocutor, a queer Thai flower artist, which premiered in 2025 at Singapore’s international art fair. Lowering the chandelier to the ground, the garlands on the bottom break, providing a soft bed for the more expensive garlands; lower-class workers are breaking under the weight of class inequality. The future is not hopeless. Through developing more intimate relationships with flowers, Bangkokians can cultivate greater movements of class solidarity.

This study interrogates the assumption that hyper-diverse global cities naturally achieve religious pluralism. Utilizing a dual methodology of historical analysis and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among scholars, professionals, and faith leaders, the research argues that the realization of Mumbai's unifying civic ideal is a highly contested, continuous process. Rather than a seamless byproduct of demographic proximity, everyday interreligious engagement is actively complicated by spatial segregation, majoritarian political climates, and the lingering trauma of historical ruptures, requiring calculated, spatialized labor to navigate a deeply layered metropolis.

This paper examines the relationship between finance-dominated capitalism and the built environment in Seoul, South Korea, by analyzing two distinct urban spaces: the city’s slums, known as moon villages (dal-dongnae), and high-rise apartments. During rapid industrialization, war refugees, rural migrants, and evicted residents settled on Seoul’s peripheries, forming what are known as “moon villages (dal-dongnae).” The term dal-dongnae conjures an image of a village built on a hill, as if it might touch the moon in the night sky. Dal-dongnae is not merely illegal housing; they are structural products that emerge when marginalized groups, excluded from housing policies and land markets, have no alternatives. This paper explores how Seoul’s cultural narratives portray class spatialization, progressing from “moon villages” to “apartments” to “penthouses,” highlighting how residential segregation shapes perceptions of class. Ultimately, as moon villages are demolished, a question arises: “How can Christian theology preserve collective memory, community, and housing rights?”

Between 1469 and 1708, Sikh, Hindu, and Sufi communities in Mughal Panjab developed three incompatible answers to the same question: what makes political authority legitimate? This paper identifies each as a distinct constitutional logic. Sikh foundational sovereignty, rooted in Guru Nanak's critique of Babur and consolidated through two centuries of scriptural and institutional development, rejected imperial legitimacy outright. Hindu monastic centers at Pindori and Jakhbar pursued negotiated autonomy, accumulating Mughal farmāns as trans-dynastic legal precedent. Sufi spiritual jurisdiction, drawing on Ibn ʿArabī's Hidden Caliphate, claimed ontological superiority over temporal rule precisely by refusing to document it. These were not different tactics for the same game but structurally incommensurable frameworks—each community's founding commitments ruled out the political paths available to the others. Drawing on Persian, Panjabi, Brajbhasha, and Sanskrit sources, the paper recovers these competing political imaginations.

This paper argues that the Technocene provides a more philosophically rigorous framework than the Anthropocene for understanding the contemporary epoch, identifying modern technology as the primary geological and spiritual force. By critiquing the Anthropocene’s assumption of universal human agency, the study situates our current crisis within the planetary dominance of Heideggerian "Western humankind." Central to this inquiry is the existential tension faced by the Sikh community: the necessity of adopting modern technology for survival versus the subsequent transformation of their spiritual praxis.

The investigation explores three dimensions: the introduction of a "technological way of thinking" following the 1849 fall of the Sikh Empire; the resulting secularization and Westernization that severed traditional bonds with land and language; and the historical resilience of Sikhs against rationalization. Finally, the paper assesses how Artificial Intelligence—as an intensification of calculative logic—tests the endurance of Sikh spiritual resilience in a technologically conditioned global landscape.

In this paper, I examine the tensions between pluralism and religious nationalism in the US looking at how they have both shaped the Sikh experience. Religious nationalism is on the rise globally, and the US is no exception. Christian nationalism has only become more influential in recent years. Simultaneously, the ideology of pluralism is increasingly subject to critique. Studying pluralism and religious nationalism by drawing on the Sikh case has the potential to shed light on religious nationalism generally, theories of immigrant integration, and the Sikh response to religious nationalism. 

Science fiction author Philip K. Dick spent the final 8 years of his life writing an “Exegesis,” a handwritten theological journal attempting to understand a series of visionary experiences he underwent in 1974. As with in fictional works like The Game-Players of Titan, Dick drew on images of games and play throughout his theological writing, viewing God’s creation of the universe as a playful act and religious responses to it as a form of play. Ultimately, the “Exegesis” itself is a form of theological play, an effort not to establish a definitive truth but rather to devise compelling and unusual hypotheses. This paper will explore Dick’s use of playful imagery in the “Exegesis” and its place in his developing self-conception.

Philip K. Dick’s February 1974 “pink beam” experience was triggered by a vision of a pink beam of light containing information from on high, triggered by his seeing an icthys necklace. This marked a decisive shift in his sense of self and reality. Following this event, Dick claimed access to hidden knowledge, described the world as a “Black Iron Prison,” and began composing the sprawling theological journal known as the Exegesis. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience accounts of decentering, I argue that these experiences can be understood as a redistribution of epistemic authority beyond the stable narrative self, producing both ontological destabilization and sustained attempts at reintegration.

This paper asks how informational objects can exhibit properties of living intelligence. Focusing on Philip K. Dick’s concept of plasmate in VALIS and the Exegesis, it rereads this mythologized “living information” through Bernard Stiegler’s theory of tertiary memory and N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of unthought. Rather than psychologizing or mystifying Dick’s late writings, the paper argues that plasmate anticipates contemporary concerns about informational agency in the age of AI. Stiegler explains plasmate’s temporal persistence as exteriorized technical memory that shapes thought across generations, while Hayles accounts for its nonconscious cognitive operations. At their intersection, plasmate appears as tertiary memory imagined as alive and unthought experienced as revelation—offering a speculative grammar for understanding distributed intelligence beyond the human.

In Nick Bostrom’s formulation of the “orthogonality thesis” in Superintelligence, he restricts the scope of “intelligence” to “something like skill at prediction, planning, and means-end reasoning in general.” I argue that Bostrom’s claims about “intelligence” are much better understood as claims about deinotēs, or “cleverness,” a trait which Aristotle identified as a capacity “to be able to do the actions that tend to promote whatever goal is assumed and to attain them.” Using the theistic ethical framework outlined by Robert Merrihew Adams in Finite and Infinite Goods, I argue that cleverness is an “impure excellence” (i.e. an excellence bound up with a deficiency) which cannot be properly attributed to God. Therefore, efforts to enhance human cleverness (whether by digital or biological means) result in human beings becoming “caricatures” of God, distorting the imago Dei by exaggerating certain features of God at the expense of others.

Ectogenesis—the process whereby humans are artificially gestated outside of the womb—may be around the corner. In recent years, researchers have made inroads toward such a breakthrough. In this paper, I explore the implications of ectogenesis for contemporary debates in bioethics. I also identify a serious danger ectogenesis poses: it may allow us to overlook the integral work that makes possible the birthing and raising of human beings. Being gestated artificially, in isolation from other humans, may reinforce the widespread illusion of humans’ fundamental separation from one another, traced in numerous state-of-nature theories of politics and justice. This is not an insuperable danger, however. We already stand in great need of a greater appreciation for humans’ interdependence. The possibility of ectogenesis, which may be just over the horizon, gives us an even stronger mandate for underscoring the interdependent nature of human beings. Religious traditions are uniquely positioned to do precisely that.

Within the dialogue between religion and transhumanism, transhumanists tend to focus on the objections that are raised against a given technology in order to overcome objections to technological development. However, this means that transhumanists can minimize the importance of philosophical and theological questions that are raised by their advocacy. For example, new advances in artificial intelligence such as large language models show signs of reasoning, but are they truly intelligent? Transhumanists tend to minimize these questions because they may undermine future technological development. Given the tendency of LLMs to hallucinate, philosopher Shannon Vallor suggests that it is better to understand our current rendition of AI as a mirror, rather than as a mind, as is the default within AI research. The dialogue between religion and transhumanism depends on the ability of critics to confront and resolve the fundamental questions that naturally arise from technological development.