In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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.

Karl Barth’s critique of German Christian nationalism is well known, but some American Christian nationalists have drawn on the theology of Barth and Barmen to justify and support their agenda—notably John MacArthur’s Grace Church during the COVID-19 crisis, the masterminds behind Project 2025, Kevin Roberts and Russell Vought, and antiabortion activist Katelyn Walls Shelton. This paper argues that Barth’s political writings in the 1930s evince a characteristic weakness—an overly abstract notion of Christian freedom and an overly sanguine confidence in the self-evidence of the Bible’s witness against Christian nationalism. Both points may have made sense within the context of Germany, but they have translated poorly in the American context. Those committed to Barth’s intentions must recover elements of his earlier theology from the first Romans commentary and his more overtly socialist writings as a necessary supplement and corrective to his later work.

This paper explores how a doctrine of sin drawn from resources found in Karl Barth might contribute to theological reflection on nationhood, nationalism, and patriotism. Focusing on my own Scottish and British context while engaging broader theoretical questions, I argue that attentiveness to sin provides an essential tool for Christian engagement with the modern nation-state. Rather than offering any prescriptive political conclusion, the paper proposes that a robust doctrine of sin, developed in conversation with Barth, can help to reframe discussions of nationalism within churches in ways that are both chastening and constructive. I argue that a well-constructed hamartiology based on a critical and appreciative reading of Barth illuminates the dynamics of (self) deception, the insidious functioning of ideology, and the potential of all states and nations to become “at least a little Leviathan,” whilst also preserving the possibility of responsible, hopeful political discernment with regard to the nation.