In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

The goal of this paper is to set the stage for a conversation that brings tantric studies into dialogue with emerging theoretical research on religious experience in social context. But how should scholars of tantric studies speak about the category “experience,” given the vexed reception of the term religious studies scholarship in recent years? In light of these critiques, this first paper begins by disambiguating the aims of the panel, raising questions for further interdisciplinary research. Outlining key examples of how the category “experience” has been conceptualized in premodern tantric traditions, the paper explores how tantric studies can offer emic vocabulary relevant to understanding the social, political, and embodied impact of experience across cultures. In particular, the paper explores tantric theorizations of the relationship between language and experience, and the role of “training” in regularizing experiential phenomena in social context.

In the Tantrāloka, Abhinavagupta offers a unique portrayal of the yoginīmelaka, a collective ritual that goes by many names and involves the ritual invocation of deities, an array of aesthetic elements, and the formation of a “circle” (cakra) of advanced female and male initiates culminating in spontaneous erotic revelry. This paper considers why Abhinavagupta’s description of the rite eschews essential details, and instead portrays the phenomenological unfolding of a charged intersubjective field of experience from the viewpoint of a participant. It will also consider what Abhinavagupta’s experiential account of the ritual might tell us about the kind of knowledge it is intended to generate, in light of parallel depictions of the yoginīmelaka in Vajrayāna and Śākta sources.

This paper argues that Pāñcarātra texts complicate the notion that the “limited subjectivity” of a practitioner must be experientially expanded through tantric sādhana to the point that it becomes synonymous with the subjectivity of one’s target deity. I argue that texts including the Jayākhya Saṃhitā, Ahirbudhnya Saṃhitā, and Parama Saṃhitā articulate an enduring relationship of service (kaiṅkarya) between devotee and Viṣṇu as superseding other types of ritual concerns, especially the adoption of divine identity. I argue that these texts respectively demonstrate how such relationship is integrated into: (1) ritual practice such as bhūta-śuddhi; (2) cosmology and creation (sṛṣṭi), especially concerning Viṣṇu’s realm Vaikuṇṭha where specific classes of beings including former tantric practitioners reside; and (3) daily contemplative practices that cultivate serviceful affection to Viṣṇu over other ritual aims. I conclude that such examples present dynamic and embodied devotion as the ultimate religious experience that is coterminous from Earth to Vaikuṇṭha.

This paper challenges the assumption that religious experience is necessarily private and individual by examining mid-thirteenth century tantric Buddhist rituals in Tibet. It analyzes how the Tibetan visionary Guru Chöwang (1212–1270) orchestrated large-scale communal rituals centered on relic pills purportedly incorporating the bodily flesh of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara to elicit a range of shared experiences. Focusing on two vignettes from Guru Chöwang’s Maṇi Kabum, the paper argues that producing in crowds the sensations of heightened energy, bodily purging, and vulnerability was central to these ceremonies. Applying the kinship theories of Carsten and Sahlins, it interprets the shared sensations generated by the pills and their associated rituals to foster a sense of kindred belonging thought capable of indexing rebirth in a pure land and addressing social fragmentation, epidemic, military threat, and other collective crises of a “degenerate age.”

An incised stone fragment excavated from the Leifeng Pagoda ruins depicts a multi-story pagoda elevation densely inscribed with repeated Buddha figures. Previous scholarship has proposed that it records Leifeng Pagoda's initial appearance completed in 977. Yet no sources describing the pagoda's exterior attest to such a program of repeated Buddha figures at the site. This study argues that the fragment can be approached simultaneously as a visualization of Leifeng Pagoda's miraculous efficacy and as evidence for an actual built program of repeated Buddha imagery on exterior architectural surfaces, a practice shared across multiple Wuyue pagoda sites and extended beyond Wuyue in later centuries. Rather than competing interpretations, these two readings reinforce each other: the repeated Buddha imagery on exterior pagoda surfaces, while representing the numinous claims of the Wuyue court, reflects a material and spatial program that local Buddhist communities had already established at pagoda sites across the region.

Amid the geopolitical volatility of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, the Aśoka stūpa became an unusually adaptable relic technology for securing Buddhist efficacy across coastal East Asia. This paper traces the form’s spatial and material localization from the Wuyue kingdom to the Fujian littoral, then to Goryeo Korea and Kamakura Japan. In tenth-century Wuyue, state patrons mass-produced miniature metal stupas to project universal Buddhist kingship. In later centuries, coastal communities and local lineages appropriated and enlarged the same visual grammar to authorize local power and stabilize mobility, recasting the stupa in durable stone and public siting. Following the form’s further translation into Korea’s Bohyeopin seoktap and Japan’s Hōkyōintō, widely used as outdoor mortuary monuments, I show how sacred objects were recalibrated in medium, scale, and function to anchor memory and engineer karmic futures along a maritime frontier.

Mazu 媽祖 was a Fujianese shamaness who achieved apotheosis and whose cult subsequently spread posthumously across southern China. This paper engages with the earliest account of the cult's propagation outside Mazu’s hometown, titled Record of the Rebuilding of the Temple of Harmonious Deliverance or Ancestral Temple of Sacred Mound 聖墩祖廟重建順濟廟記, dated to 1150 in the coastal locality of Ninghai 寧海. I postulate that the primary purpose of Mazu's advocacy was to appropriate a non-local deity to legitimize a local merchant lineage. Foremost, I will demonstrate that the Record established the goddess Mazu as more efficacious than the original local deities. Then, I will showcase that the Record’s purposeful insertion of miracles and Confucian references to reinforce Mazu’s religious efficacy and further elevation. Finally, I demonstrate how ascribing Mazu with a regional identity bolsters the legitimacy of a plausible local merchant lineage or community based in Ninghai.

This paper examines geomantic (fengshui) burial practices in southeastern China during the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), focusing on water as an emergent environmental problem. While geomantic theory long predated the Song, it was during this period that substantial archaeological and textual evidence for burial planning became available. In Northern Song practice, water rarely posed a serious technical concern. However, following the southward shift of political and demographic centers, Southern Song literati increasingly confronted saturated soils, high water tables, and flood-prone landscapes.Through three burial case studies—one archaeological and two textual—I analyze how elites implemented practical adjustments to mitigate hydrological risk while preserving geomantic legitimacy. I further show how repeated encounters with water-related constraints prompted subtle reinterpretations of geomantic doctrine. By historicizing “water” as a practical rather than purely cosmological category, this study illuminates the interaction between ritual theory, environmental condition, and social transformation in medieval China.

An incised stone fragment excavated from the Leifeng Pagoda ruins depicts a multi-story pagoda elevation densely inscribed with repeated Buddha figures. Previous scholarship has proposed that it records Leifeng Pagoda's initial appearance completed in 977. Yet no sources describing the pagoda's exterior attest to such a program of repeated Buddha figures at the site. This study argues that the fragment can be approached simultaneously as a visualization of Leifeng Pagoda's miraculous efficacy and as evidence for an actual built program of repeated Buddha imagery on exterior architectural surfaces, a practice shared across multiple Wuyue pagoda sites and extended beyond Wuyue in later centuries. Rather than competing interpretations, these two readings reinforce each other: the repeated Buddha imagery on exterior pagoda surfaces, while representing the numinous claims of the Wuyue court, reflects a material and spatial program that local Buddhist communities had already established at pagoda sites across the region.

Amid the geopolitical volatility of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, the Aśoka stūpa became an unusually adaptable relic technology for securing Buddhist efficacy across coastal East Asia. This paper traces the form’s spatial and material localization from the Wuyue kingdom to the Fujian littoral, then to Goryeo Korea and Kamakura Japan. In tenth-century Wuyue, state patrons mass-produced miniature metal stupas to project universal Buddhist kingship. In later centuries, coastal communities and local lineages appropriated and enlarged the same visual grammar to authorize local power and stabilize mobility, recasting the stupa in durable stone and public siting. Following the form’s further translation into Korea’s Bohyeopin seoktap and Japan’s Hōkyōintō, widely used as outdoor mortuary monuments, I show how sacred objects were recalibrated in medium, scale, and function to anchor memory and engineer karmic futures along a maritime frontier.

Mazu 媽祖 was a Fujianese shamaness who achieved apotheosis and whose cult subsequently spread posthumously across southern China. This paper engages with the earliest account of the cult's propagation outside Mazu’s hometown, titled Record of the Rebuilding of the Temple of Harmonious Deliverance or Ancestral Temple of Sacred Mound 聖墩祖廟重建順濟廟記, dated to 1150 in the coastal locality of Ninghai 寧海. I postulate that the primary purpose of Mazu's advocacy was to appropriate a non-local deity to legitimize a local merchant lineage. Foremost, I will demonstrate that the Record established the goddess Mazu as more efficacious than the original local deities. Then, I will showcase that the Record’s purposeful insertion of miracles and Confucian references to reinforce Mazu’s religious efficacy and further elevation. Finally, I demonstrate how ascribing Mazu with a regional identity bolsters the legitimacy of a plausible local merchant lineage or community based in Ninghai.

This paper examines geomantic (fengshui) burial practices in southeastern China during the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), focusing on water as an emergent environmental problem. While geomantic theory long predated the Song, it was during this period that substantial archaeological and textual evidence for burial planning became available. In Northern Song practice, water rarely posed a serious technical concern. However, following the southward shift of political and demographic centers, Southern Song literati increasingly confronted saturated soils, high water tables, and flood-prone landscapes.Through three burial case studies—one archaeological and two textual—I analyze how elites implemented practical adjustments to mitigate hydrological risk while preserving geomantic legitimacy. I further show how repeated encounters with water-related constraints prompted subtle reinterpretations of geomantic doctrine. By historicizing “water” as a practical rather than purely cosmological category, this study illuminates the interaction between ritual theory, environmental condition, and social transformation in medieval China.

Trauma is frequently framed as an individual psychological event, obscuring its collective, historical, and political dimensions. Focusing on the legacies of Japanese colonization and the Korean War, this paper theorizes collective trauma as a communal and postcolonial formation that exceeds individual models such as PTSD. Drawing on sociological accounts of social and cultural trauma, I argue that collective memory is politically curated yet also persists in more fluid, unsettled forms. To describe these dynamics, I integrate the concepts of spectrality and fractality. Spectrality names the haunting return of unresolved pasts that demand ethical response, while fractality provides a probabilistic model for understanding how such hauntings recur across generations without determinism. Grounded in phenomenological interviews with two intergenerational cohorts of Korean and Korean American Christians, this study demonstrates how historical trauma resurfaces within diasporic and reconstruction-era contexts, generating both disruption and the possibility of renewed theological imagination.

This paper explores the relationships between law, liberty, and security in the context of United States governance and its self-articulation. By reading the Declaration of Independence through the lenses of political theology, legal theory, Black Studies, and Indigenous Studies, this paper interrogates the “givenness” of the law in national discourse and what this default way of organizing thought and social life might have to do with questions of empire and/as faith.

This project brings into focus the inheritance of the Book of Revelation in the narrative structuring of Western military imperialism. I weave genealogies of apocalyptic imaginaries— from Christopher Columbus’ Book of Prophecies into the nuclear age—to contextualize the end times imaginary of the present. As state leaders, military officials, and venture capitalists speak the terms of the Euro-Christian apocalypse to justify war, genocide, and settler-colonialism, they also fortell redemption through a technologically perfected future. I argue that the Book of Revelations and its interpreters provide a formula out of which the national security doctrine makes and withholds personhood; this redemptive campaign characterizes the longue durée Euro-Christian empire, resulting in a necropolitical, technologically driven scheme framed through both moral and divine purposes. 

This paper uses Wael Hallaq’s Restating Orientalism to radically restate David Arnold’s concept of tropicality i.e. the application of Saidian Orientalism to ecologies through a tropic-temperate binary. Much as Hallaq examines the secular-modern-scientific epistemological roots underlying Saidian Orientalism, I propose a deconstruction of tropicality in the hopes of creating the foundations for a deep critique of tropicality discourse and a novel path to healing our damaged planet in the Anthropocene; I envision tropicality as a means of rediscovering an older, ethical-ecological way of life, a tool for the cultivators of tropical landscapes to educate the modern temperate individual. I problematize modern scientific ecology as inadequate, and call for an ethical cosmology of repair in what I term the Temperate-ocene. I suggest an approach that combines the re-ethicization of ecology with degrowth political economy, using geopoetics to transform geographies and geopolitics, as a means of transcending the modern Temperate-ocene in toto.

This paper, will contrast the use of apocalyptic and its relation to imperialism between recent Christian theological works on the one hand and writing from Indigenous and

majority world thinkers on the other—the latter being those most adversely affected by

colonial modernity and Christian mission. By turning to post-colonial science fiction, I will show the apocalyptic position of western theory and religion to be ongoing colonial standpoint, an ongoing failure to analyze the complex, global conditions we face. Furthe, I will show that post-colonial science fiction can help us face the loss of our mythical totality, or the god’s eye-view of the world.  Turning to such literature can in fact animate religions discourse  and offer the genuine possibility of a radical break in thinking, a new theological language for the apocalypse, an apocalypse that has abandoned the colonial project and the discourse that has travelled with it. 

Pope Francis’s 2015 Laudato Si’ inspired commentators to wonder about the relationship between the Catholic Church and socio-ecological justice. Such queries reflected a broader growing interest in the hypothesized “greening of religions.” Intellectuals working within and beyond the Catholic Church began reflecting on the potential for socio-ecologically conscious Catholicism. Yet despite such increased concern, few studies have empirically assessed Catholicism’s socio-ecological entanglements. I aim to address this gap by examining Nazareth Farm, a Catholic intentional community located in north-central West Virginia and long committed to justice as envisioned through Catholic Social Teaching. However, since unconventional natural gas extraction began to boom, the intentional community has struggled to materially advance socio-ecological justice. This paper examines how Nazareth Farm sought, in practice, to negotiate natural gas’s growing hegemony. In so doing, it also reflects on the obstacles hampering those who imagine just futures encounter while trying to make their visions take place.

One finding of recent scholarship on urban religious communities and food insecurity is a shift from security and charitable models toward community-led food systems development. This paper examines how urban Christian churches transition from operating traditional food pantries and supporting corporate for-profit solutions to building self-determined food systems. Using a case study of FAITH CDC in Gary, Indiana—a non-profit affiliated with a historic Black Baptist church in “Steel City”—this research analyzes the move from a food security framework to one of “food sovereignty.” Drawing on preliminary fieldwork and existing literature on religion, race, and food justice, this paper explores how FAITH CDC integrates what they call “good F-words”—Faith, Farming, Finance, and the Field of science—to counteract an extractive food system. It argues that their holistic model—typified by their redefinition of “soul food”—represents a transformative strategy that prioritizes community agency over “solutions” that sustain the status quo.

This paper analyzes environmental justice campaigns in Data Center Alley in Northern Virginia as sites of counter-apocalyptic imagination. Over 300 data centers host an estimated 70% of the world’s internet traffic in the suburbs of Washington, DC near Ashburn, Virginia. Interfaith organizations and faith communities have resisted the further development of such centers by simultaneously critiquing the future imaginations manifest in the material, technological, and economic processes of techno-utopians and proposing alternative futures rooted in visions of wisdom. I argue that these sites of local resistance are crucibles for counter-apocalyptic praxis. By engaging in the practice of communal imagination, these communities make space for difficult conversations that enable hard and courageous choices to enable a shared, intergenerational future.

One of the greatest ecological catastrophes in the history of modern mining came to light in Minas Gerais, in Brazil's southeastern region: the collapse of the iron ore tailings dam known as Fundão. From within this catastrophe, an indigenous philosophy of the future emerges—engaged in producing spiritual repertoires to postpone the end of the world (Krenak 2019).

In this paper, drawing on the ecological, ontological, and agential force of the cosmological kinship between the Krenak people and the Doce River, I intend to explore an epistemological confluence between Ailton Krenak’s indigenous philosophy, material post/inhuman ecologies, and methodological strategies derived from the Religion and Ecology’s field of study to investigate how the ancestral future(s) already present in the watery roots of the Krenak's experience can inspire and teach us to produce relevant knowledge on and collective interventions in response to current planetary crises. 

The Christian tradition is called to develop more robust and sensitive ways to approach evil as an enduring locus of theological indefinition and inadequacy. This essay takes up this task by reading of Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, which depicts human cruelty without clarifying whether these representations function within a larger thematic structure; most scholars interpret the novel as amoral or nihilistic. I demonstrate the inverse: that Blood Meridian’s profound moral-theological vision is founded upon its commitment to evil’s illegibility. By highlighting its close intertextual relationship with the Book of Job, and the performative function of the novel’s interpretive difficulty as a mirror of the ethical-spiritual struggle for an orientation towards evil amidst divine absence, I argue that McCarthy follows Job in affirming that theodicy cannot be realized as a rational proposition, but it can be literally realized, made real, in practice. 

Martial imagery appears to favor the language of fighting evil, resisting evil, and defeating evil, but arguably the focus of Christianity is the transformation of evil. The present paper aims to recover the language of martial metaphors for the purpose of transforming evil by examining the spirituality of Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) and Chen Weiming (陳微明 1881-1958), two fighters intent on spiritual development. The comparison yields a fresh look at martial training as a means for the transformation of evil. A comparative reading of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises with Chen’s martial practice serves to revive Loyola’s martial tradition in Christian spirituality. Far from proposing a recipe for Christian triumphalism or militarism, the reading demonstrates that the transformation of evil in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises can be deepened through martial practice.

This paper offers possibilities for a baptismal ecospirituality that reclaims baptized persons as earth creatures, submerges them in the suffering of all creation (human and more than human), and equips them to recognize and articulate diverse forms of evil as a way of practicing resistance. 

This paper investigates the “Paradox of Friction”: the tension between the necessity of struggle for moral formation and the traditional ideal of a "frictionless" teleological end. While the virtue tradition, beginning with Aristotle’s notion of enkrateia, often frames friction as a temporary instrument to be outgrown, this paper challenges the desirability of a totally frictionless state. By re-examining the “rest” of the heavenly beatific vision, through the lens of a New Creation, I argue for an eschatological ideal defined not by the absence of resistance, but by a “friction without suffering.” In this view, friction is not a sign of imperfection to be bypassed, but a constitutive element of finite creaturely life, even in its glorified state.

Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985) is a speculative ethnography of the Kesh, a place-bound, multispecies community whose ceremonial life, ecology, and non-linear temporality enact what this paper calls "earthbound wisdom." Drawing on Le Guin's lifelong engagement with the Tao Te Ching (Le Guin's preferred transliteration), the book performs what Donna Haraway calls an autremondialisation, a bringing of other liveable worlds into existence. This paper uses Haraway’s string figuring method to pass threads between several key thinkers (Deborah Bird Rose, Bruno Latour, James Clifford, and Kim Stanley Robinson), asking what wisdom the Kesh might offer to those Latour calls the Earthbound, those gathered in response to an Earth that is acting now. Rather than advocating for a new religion, the paper concludes by wrestling with the inherited categories of religion and the secular themselves, asking how they might be refigured in the Chthulucene.

Gene Wolfe (1931-2019) remains one of speculative fiction's most theologically sophisticated—and critically under-discussed—voices. His magnum opus, the "Solar Cycle," draws upon Jewish angelology, Christianity, Greco-Roman polytheism, Western hermeticism, and Neoplatonism to project what future faiths might look like in a far-future dying earth. Whether in the Book of the New Sun's figures of the Increate and Conciliator, which refract Christian theology through a temporally complex loop, or in the computerized pantheon of the Book of the Long Sun, Wolfe uses science fiction's imaginative power to explore how religions emerge, mutate, and persist across vast stretches of time. These future faiths, this paper contends, are central to Wolfe's sustained meditation on time, technology, and transcendence—one that invites meaningful conversation with two fellow mid-century Catholic visionaries: the poet-artist David Jones and the priest-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

This paper analyzes themes of disposability, sacrifice, and moral agency in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2019 novel Klara and the Sun. What are the ethical implications of programming AI agents behave in servile, self-effacing ways? To what extent does this AI programming reinforce existing forms of social programming that relegate certain groups of people to lives of undervalued service work and disposability, and what forms of moral agency are available within this social order? I argue that critical reevaluations of Christian ethical frameworks—which, in my reading, play a subtle but significant role in shaping the novel’s moral imagination—provide conceptual resources to analyze issues of structural harm and moral agency that have arisen in the secondary literature. In my analysis, the novel resists straightforwardly optimistic or pessimistic prophecies while offering resources for hope and resilience in the face of our potentially bleak future.

The paper reads Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale alongside Agustina Bazterrica’s Las indignas (The Unworthy). In each book, religion has a complicated relationship with gender and specifically womanhood. The first two novels are often discussed side by side in the context of the future of gender, particularly in dystopian settings. In Atwood’s Gilead, gender norms are dogmatically enforced by religious leaders. In Butler’s Earthseed, Lauren establishes a religious community where change is divine, allowing for societal roles assigned not by gender but by capacity. Newcomer to the discussion, Bazterrica’s Sacred Sisterhood offers a deeper critique of a religion’s strict gender roles, exposes a monstrous future for gender, and reinforces—more than Atwood and Butler—gender’s performative nature. The paper then reads these three works of speculative fiction to highlight how practice, theology, and ecology factor into the future of gender.