In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper explores the long tradition of Christian–Muslim solidarity in Palestine and considers how this history can inform contemporary solidarity efforts in the United States and beyond. Palestinian Christians and Muslims have often worked together in shared political, social, and cultural struggles. Drawing from this history, this paper argues that the Palestinian experience offers an important model for strengthening relationships between Muslim and Christian communities with solidarity for Palestine as their focus. Such partnerships can deepen interfaith engagement and strengthen faith-based advocacy for justice and human dignity.

 At the beginning of his sixth of seven “sessions” (majālis) with Abbasid vizier ‘Ali al-Maghrebi (d. 1027), Church of the East metropolitan Elias of Nisibis (d. 1046) declares his intention to show that the Syriac language is “better, more useful, and of greater merit” than Arabic. In response to various questions posed by his Muslim counterpart, Elias enters into an analysis of grammar, handwriting, and speech that reflects his awareness of not only foundational principles of Arabic grammar, but also of contemporaneous debates among Islamic grammarians regarding the interpretation of the Qur’an. Following a 2009 study of David Bertaina, this paper will place Elias’ linguistic analysis within its broader Islamic intellectual context, thereby demonstrating that the dialogue might best be read as a Christian theological critique of the Islamic conception of revelation, ultimately occasioned by Christian concern about the increasing prevalence of Arabic over Syriac in the medieval Middle East. 

Palestinian Orthodox Christians, the largest Christian population in historic Palestine, have formed, sustained, and long been affiliated with the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, tracing their origins to the apostles and the leadership of James the Just. Since the Ottoman period, the patriarchate’s clerical hierarchy has been dominated by foreign Greek nationals, producing persistent tensions between church leadership and the indigenous laity. This paper examines how Palestinian Orthodox Christians navigated authority, representation, and communal identity from the nineteenth century to the present. It situates the community within its historical and religious context, analyzes the establishment of a Greek ecclesiastical monopoly over the patriarchate, and explores the consequences of this structure. Drawing on fragmentary historical sources and community accounts, it argues that Palestinian Orthodox Christians have experienced overlapping structures of spiritual, cultural, and political domination—through ecclesiastical hierarchy and colonial governance—shaping both their identity and the broader dynamics of Middle Eastern Christian communities.

In 2018, Janelle Monáe released the album and film “Dirty Computer” to critical acclaim. The work features themes of gender, sexuality, sex, racism, conformity, totalitarianism, technology, and brutality in an Afrofuturist setting. This paper analyzes both the album and the film through a womanist theological lens, drawing on the works of womanist and black feminist scholars and theologians. By interpreting the soteriological implications and religious imagery of “Dirty Computer,” this paper demonstrates how the work provides a vision of salvation relevant to the experiences and imaginations of queer black women. Continuing the tradition of Afrofuturism as a tool for communicating theology, Monáe promises her audience a model of thriving achievable through relationship and self-actualization, even in the most apocalyptic of circumstances, through her story of queer androids and a memory-erasing police state.

This article develops an interpretive method for reading worship music as the material infrastructure of ideological fantasy rather than a neutral vehicle for theological meaning. Through a parallax analysis of the Cantonese worship conference Raw Harmony Worship Live (Hong Kong, 2026), this study demonstrates how a radically consistent "Wall of Sound" generates non-overlapping economies of enjoyment depending on the orchestration of the subject's fantasy space. The parallax gap thus disclosed reveals the libidinal infrastructure of contemporary therapeutic religion, where the same technical hardware functions alternately as ecstatic fullness and a contemplative void. Both assemblages perform a similar structural operation by translating socio-economic trauma into manageable interiority, a process that forecloses political questions by converting structural conditions into therapeutic occasions. The article concludes by asking whether worship music might traverse rather than merely service the fantasy, offering a methodology that repositioned musical arrangements as ideology's hardware rather than its decorative surface. 

This paper proposes Dal pedagogy as an intersectional pedagogical framework rooted in the historical experiences of Dalit communities in India. The Sanskrit word dal  means "broken," "split," or "crushed," reflecting the structural marginalization of Dalits within the caste system. Emerging outside the academy, Dal pedaogy draws upon the wisdom of Dalit ancestors whose conversion to Christianity is a site of imagination, protest, and resistance against caste-based dehumanization. Yet, contemporary political developments, including Hindu nationalist movements and campaigns such as Ghar Wapsi, complicate Dalit Christian identity by reinforcing Dalit Christians to negotiate their caste and religious identities. Engaging intersectionality and Dalit feminist scholarship, this paper examines how Dal pedagogy continues to generate imagination, protest, and resistance in contemporary India. 

A multicultural theological classroom is increasingly part of the visible future of theological education, especially in the U.S. context. Drawing on personal experience, this presentation proposes a pedagogy centered on decentering, decolonial awareness, inclusivity, and critical reflection. Using preaching courses as a case study, it illustrates how such practices cultivate students’ attentiveness to foster equitable, belonging-oriented communities and shape future ministers’ theological imagination. These classroom practices may extend beyond the academy, influencing students’ work in congregations, academic institutions, and broader social contexts.

This paper presents teaching using the circle-keeping process as not only a restorative and critical pedagogical approach, but a returning to Indigenous and ancestral wisdom that promotes alternative decolonial futures inside the theological academy. The first section briefly traces the history circle-keeping in public schools and the steps for holding circles recommended by restorative justice practitioners like Kay Pranis. The next section highlights the similarities between various Indigenous principles that inform circle practice and proposes that embracing those values reframes the goal of theological education from individual to mutual flourishing. The next section posits this reframing as a process of deconstruction and reconstruction for decolonial futuring in theological education as proposed by interreligious theological educator Christine Hong. The paper concludes with an application of the circle-keeping process to a hybrid-synchronous ministry class about the socio-political implications of the sacraments.

In times when the future of the humanities within the academy feels increasingly uncertain, this paper proposes the concept of “feminist chains of transmission” as a framework for understanding how women scholars sustain intellectual traditions and illuminate scholarly futures. Drawing on traditions of scholarly lineage within Judaism and Shiʿi Islam—particularly the concepts of shoshelet and isnād—this paper examines how knowledge is transmitted through relational networks of mentorship, care, and intellectual responsibility. While religious studies has often emphasized texts, institutions, and canonical authorities, this study argues that mentorship itself functions as a central site of intellectual transmission. Through feminist and decolonial perspectives, the paper highlights how women scholars, especially those working within minority religious traditions, cultivate networks of mentorship that sustain emerging generations of scholars. In doing so, these mentors act as beacons of light within the academy, illuminating pathways through which future scholars carry forward traditions of knowledge while imagining more inclusive scholarly futures.

Before the advent of cartography, maps in the form of topographic lists were utilized by the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations to convey a religiously based understanding of the world. Texts, such as Akkadian and Egyptian campaign texts, elucidate land taken by a king on behalf of their deity, and thereby understood as created and owned by said deity. Other texts, such as those in the Hebrew Bible and Greek genealogical texts, display mythic elements interwoven into an understanding of the land as divinely given, and, in some cases, then requiring it to be reclaimed from other deities. This paper will summarize the religious ideology displayed in geographic lists before the advent of cartography as the first “maps,” and then analyze how their theology was maintained and shaped in the development of their maps as cosmological depictions of the divine realm.

This paper argues that apocalypticism is best understood not as a historically confined literary genre but as a recurring cross-traditional strategy for organizing religious futurity. Through a comparative analysis of Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, and contemporary East Asian redemptive movements, it identifies what I term “apocalyptic grammar”: a patterned set of operations that compress time, intensify moral polarity, consolidate remnant identity, and recalibrate expectation under conditions of delay. Rather than assuming genealogical transmission, the study focuses on structural correspondences that emerge when communities confront crisis and deferred hope. Close textual attention demonstrates how anticipated endings are reinterpreted without abandoning expectation. By foregrounding conceptual tools and methodological transparency, the paper contributes to Comparative Studies in Religion by showing how disciplined structural comparison can illuminate recurring strategies for inhabiting uncertainty. Apocalyptic grammar thus emerges as a durable architecture of religious futures rather than a relic of ancient sectarianism.

This paper blurs the lines demarcating the categories of Hebrew prophet and Chinese sage. By analyzing the political situations of Confucius and Jeremiah during the Axial Age, this paper will demonstrate that both were forced to confront corruption among rulers in political climates where they were often personally in danger. Both used wisdom traditions unique to their own traditions but similar in sapiential tactics to hold kings accountable to a higher divine order and construct a vision of a renewed society. It will note seven points of intersection, among them: a sense of internal compulsion from Heaven/God, a reliance on an idealized kingship from the past to judge the present, and the transmission of this subversive, future-oriented hope through a band of disciples. Confucius uses China’s golden age as a model to repristinate the present to create an ideal future. Jeremiah’s vision points forward to a new eschatological day.

How can social-scientific inquiry and systematic ecclesiology be brought into constructive dialogue? This paper explores the relationship between lived Ecclesial imagination and theological models of the Church by placing empirical research into conversation with classical ecclesiology. Drawing on mixed quantitative and qualitative methods—including a congregational survey and follow-up interviews in a Taiwanese church—the study identifies “the church as home” as a dominant lived Ecclesial image shaping belonging, care, worship, and communal identity. Engaging Avery Dulles’s Models of the Church as a theological framework, the paper argues that classical ecclesiology has tended to privilege institutional and corporate metaphors while under-theologizing domestic and relational dimensions of ecclesial life. The findings demonstrate how empirical research can function not merely as illustration but as a generative partner in ecclesiology, prompting the refinement of theological models by attending to operative ecclesial imaginaries within lived Christian communities.

The 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada identified ongoing structures that continue to enforce oppression against Indigenous peoples across Canada and deform the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Scholars in the Americas describe these structures as coloniality and recognize their overt and subtle embeddedness within Western culture. As a part of a larger research project investigating coloniality in Canadian Anglican liturgy, this paper focuses on one ethnographic tool to reveal the subtle manifestations of coloniality: drawing. While the drawings were initially used as a starting point for interviews, they emerged as a source of data themselves, demonstrating the unconscious ways participants conceived of Anglican worship. This research analyzes selected drawings to demonstrate the ways in which they manifest domination, Eurocentric liturgical practices, and binary classifications, showing that coloniality remains a subtle and pervasive force in liturgical practice.

This paper explores ongoing research that examines the intersections of trauma, theology, and creative writing within the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver (DTES). Grounded in trauma theory, ethnographic, and practical theological methods, this paper recognizes the ways in which collective and individual trauma impacts theological imagination and faith practices and explores the role that spirituality can play in survival and meaning-making post trauma. At the same time, it takes seriously the potential of creative writing—not merely as a method, but as a practice of resistance and healing. This research aims to understand how theological meaning emerges in and through trauma, and how creative writing functions as a site of theological reflection. Its aim is to bring more voices into theological conversations about trauma, and in doing so, open a wider scope of how theology is constructed, the settings that shape it, and whose voices are recognized and amplified.

This paper will explore how coffee culture and yoga intersect in anglophone postural yoga with reference to the lineage of the formative guru T. Krishnamacharya (1888-1989) and his disciples B.K.S. Iyengar (1918-2014) and K. Pattabhi Jois (1915-2009). Iyengar’s Light on Yoga (1966) famously recommends drinking coffee—even on an empty stomach—before practicing yoga postures (āsana), and Jois is famously quoted as having said “no coffee, no prāṇa (life energy).” These attitudes are reflective of the shifting social and cultural ethos that modern yoga was situated within and of deeper Indian philosophical conceptions regarding the use of herbs (oṣadhi) as an exogenous adjunct to the endogenous self-discipline of yoga. This duality is evident in the late 20th century embrace of postural yoga by coffee-friendly upwardly mobile North Americans and in the framing of coffee as an invigorating āyurveda-like herb (oṣadhi) providing a remedy to physical dispositions antagonistic to yoga practice.

From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, poets, physicians, historians, and jurists writing in Arabic devoted literary efforts to the new psychoactive drug, cannabis. In these texts, the Sufis, orders of Islamic mystics, are closely associated with weed, both in its origin story and in its spread westward. Their enthusiasm for eating cannabis – it wasn’t yet typically smoked – was contagious, and out from Khorasan it becomes a well-known mind-altering edible.

In this paper, part of a larger project on weed texts in Arabic, I will draw on texts in both prose and verse, for the most part never translated before, to offer a survey of Sufis and weed in these texts. I will investigate questions such as the role of Sufis in the discovery of weed as a psychoactive drug, the characterization of weed as a Sufi drug, and weed’s effect on dhikr (remembrance of God).

This paper examines the convergence of two late-twentieth-century moral panics, the War on Drugs and the Satanic Panic, arguing that they functioned as a symbiotic project to police American consciousness. While the 1980s "Just Say No" campaign is often viewed as a secular public health initiative, this paper demonstrates how the Religious Right weaponized anti-drug rhetoric to validate theological fears of demonic infiltration. Drawing on the history of occult drug use (from Aleister Crowley to the psychedelic era), I analyze how the "drug-fueled occultist" became the central villain of 1980s folklore, exemplified by the Ricky Kasso case and D. Corydon Hammond’s conspiracy theories. I argue that for the Reagan-era Religious Right, the War on Drugs was a form of spiritual warfare: a crusade to sanctify sobriety and criminalize altered states as inherently demonic, reframing the drug war as a contest over the legitimacy of religious experience.

This paper examines the role of entheogenic substances in Zoroastrian ritual, literature, and visionary theology. While the tradition is often framed primarily in ethical and doctrinal terms, textual and ritual evidence reveal a history of altered states associated with sacred plants and narcotic preparations. Focusing on the ritual use of haoma, references to intoxicants such as bang, and visionary narratives like the Arda Wirāz Nāmag, the paper explores how these substances functioned as ritual technologies enabling spiritual perception and otherworldly travel. These practices are analyzed alongside broader traditions of visionary intermediaries in Zoroastrian literature and interpreted through ritual theory and the anthropology of religious experience. By situating entheogenic practice within Zoroastrian cosmology and esoteric discourse, the paper argues that such experiences are understood in Zoroastrianism as legitimate means of accessing divine knowledge and perceiving the spiritual realities underlying the material world.

In the lived experience of Bhutanese Vajrayana Buddhism, karma is understood as the inescapable law of cause and consequence through which each intentional act leaves a moral residue that affects the prospects for a positive rebirth. As all sentient beings cycle through the six realms of existence depicted on the Wheel of Life, often depicted in the entryways of temples, people have a vested interest in caring for other living beings, any one of which could have been one’s mother. Based on ethnographic work conducted in Bhutan over the past two decades and engaging with concepts from the field of religion and ecology, this paper explores the ecological implications of the Bhutanese doctrine of karma for generating flourishing human and more-than-human futures.

Discussions of karma in both popular and scholarly discourse overwhelmingly interpret it as an individual moral mechanism linking personal action to personal consequence. This paper challenges that assumption by arguing that classical and modern Indic traditions preserve conceptual resources for understanding karma as fundamentally collective, relational, and distributed across shared fields of experience. Drawing on Advaita Vedānta and Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, the paper develops a comparative account of karma as relational becoming rather than individualized retribution. 

This paper extends Joanna Macy's integration of general systems theory and Buddhist philosophy by incorporating contemporary models from dynamical systems to address a persistent challenge to Buddhist ethics: how can radical emptiness sustain ethical possessiveness without collapsing into relativism or nihilism? Building on Macy's description of 'mutual causality,' I argue that strange attractors—infinite patterns governing complex systems—model a "groundless teleology" where purposiveness emerges naturally from codependent processes that lack fixed ends. This framework illuminates the interdependent, systems-oriented basis for Macy's engaged praxis: Buddhist ethical conduct presupposes no final redemption or end-point with some essential nature (viz., a 'final cause') other than reorienting collective action to further the cultivation of skillful responsiveness suffering. A half-century after her first essay and one year after her passing, I show that Macy's legacy continues to inspire philosophical possibilities for rationally validating ethical practice in a world of radical interdependence.

In its message of 1985 to the peoples of the world, the Universal House of Justice declared that world peace is "not only possible but inevitable," yet insisted that whether it arrives through unimaginable suffering or through consultative will is the choice before all of humanity. The apparent tension between inevitability and choice dissolves once we recognize how the Promise of World Peace rejects three historical orientations that Timothy Snyder identifies as presently infecting our politics. These are the politics of eternity, which traps us in a mythical past; the politics of inevitability, which traps us in a complacent present; and the politics of catastrophe, which forecloses the future through despair. Each is rooted in two pervasive habits of mind—the proclivity to totalize reality and the proclivity to fragment it. The Promise counters these by grounding hope and action in an inclusive historical consciousness that understands humanity as inevitably maturing toward oneness—a destiny that is assured, but whose cost depends entirely on our consultative will.

This paper examines a covenantal understanding of sin and moral obligation in Bahá’í theology. While the Bahá’í Faith presents the revelation of Bahá’u’lláh as the divine guidance for the present age, Bahá’ís do not seek to impose their moral laws on others. This paper argues that this apparent tension is resolved through a covenantal framework in which moral accountability arises within specific relationships to divine revelation. Drawing on the writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and recent Bahá’í institutional guidance, the paper proposes that sin is best understood as misalignment with divine guidance within a recognized covenant rather than as the violation of a universalized moral code. Situating this framework alongside covenantal approaches in contemporary Christian theology, the paper explores how layered forms of moral accountability across religious communities may offer a coherent model for comparative theological reflection on sin and ethical responsibility.

The Baha’i relationship to science is usually presented, in both primary and secondary literature, as straightforwardly positive: Baha’is are said to embrace the “harmony of science and religion,” in which science and religion are two separate but complementary systems that reveal greater knowledge about the world. However, looking at authoritative Baha’i writings on same-gender relationships demonstrates that this is too simple a picture. As the dominant medical views on sexual diversity have shifted, Baha’i authorities have gone from embracing the idea that being gay or lesbian was a medical condition subject to cure, thus treating religion and science as partners in making moral claims, to disputing the scientific findings on sexual orientation, then finally downplaying the relevance of medicine to understandings of sexual morality. This pattern suggests that the ways in which Baha’i institutions use the language and authority of scientific findings is dependent on the content of those findings.

The challenge of addressing climate change is not merely technical or political, but a crisis of orientation. As the consequences of a warming planet grow increasingly clear, a core question is not simply "what" to do, but how to reconcile the many approaches and perspectives of a deeply concerned and fragmented humanity. This paper takes the debate surrounding An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015) as a window into this problem, reading the exchange between the manifesto's techno-optimist vision and its degrowth critics as symptomatic of a broader pathology in climate discourse: fragmentation, ideological entrenchment, and the treatment of other perspectives as obstacles rather than interlocutors. Drawing on the conceptual framework of the Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity, a research organization inspired by the Bahá'í Faith, the paper takes initial steps toward articulating a "coherent yet evolving" orientation capable of guiding diverse forms of action toward shared ends.

Can a woman voluntarily imitate the suffering of Christ, and therefore enter into Christianity while yet living in a social context where the aims of feminism are not yet fully victorious? A recent interpreter of Kierkegaard has argued that women and all marginalized people are unable to imitate Christ’s self-giving love and therefore enter into Christianity. This paper challenges such an interpretation by engaging with Kierkegaard’s concept of the “double danger,” his understanding of what it means to be a human being, and the role of faith in becoming a particular individual in relationship to Christ/Love. It then engages with Emilie M. Townes womanist ethics as a case study that exemplifies a way that women may enter into the “double danger” of Christ.

Patriarchal names of God as the father, king, and lord have long been viewed as harmful in feminist, womanist, and queer theologies, due to their perceived legitimation of coercive hierarchy. However, when paired with Kierkegaard’s understanding of Jesus as the absolute paradox—as the incomprehensible union of the finite and the infinite, or omnipotence and abject powerlessness on the cross—these much-maligned names of the divine turn out to be liberating, because they render prophetic judgment on the power-mongering patriarchs today. That is, they call today’s patriarchs to imitate God’s self-emptying by resisting the temptation to wield as much power and control as possible. This is because, for Kierkegaard, Jesus represents the incarnation of infinite love that breaks into the finite world, disrupting the assumed boundary between the creator and creatures. Then the patriarchy of the kenotic God shatters the existing coercive hierarchy rather than reinforcing it.

This paper argues that Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Repetition together disclose a structure of human agency grounded in the resurrectional logic of faith. In Fear and Trembling, Abraham reveals faith as a paradoxical activity that suspends the ethical and transcends the limits of reason through a dialectic of loss and restoration. Repetition, Kierkegaard’s companion text, extends this dialectic into the existential sphere, reimagining repetition as the lived form of this same resurrectional logic: the death and renewal of the self through freedom/choice and memory. The first part of the paper argues that Fear and Trembling presents Abraham as an ideal model of human agency to be esteemed but not emulated. In the second part of the paper, I will argue that Repetition provides a model for emulation. What is lost and recovered in repetition is the subject itself. Through a dialectic of freedom and memory. 

This talk examines how traditional Tibetan understandings of, and practices with, mountains as Territorial Sovereigns inform contemporary Tibetan discourses on climate change and environmental crisis. Drawing on ritual texts, poetic evocations, ethnographic observations, and contemporary Tibetan literature, I explore how Tibetans observe, understand, and articulate the thoughts, moods, and visions of the mountains as essential agents in their world and cosmologies. I place these diverse sources in conversation with each other to consider how Tibetan mountain sovereigns think, experience, and debate about the recent climate and environmental crises. I analyze two short stories— “Snow” and “The Conference of Lhanyen Mountains” —which extend longstanding Tibetan protocols of listening to and engaging with mountains while reflecting on contemporary environmental crises and extractive relations. I argue that Tibetan stories are vital intellectual vessels, offering generative space for reflecting on the possibilities and challenges of understanding places in their fuller being and senses.

Drawing on previously untranslated biographical, ritual, and narrative materials from the Chokling Tersar, this paper examines treasure revelation as an ongoing practice of ecological mediation between land, territorial deities, human communities, and the Buddhadharma. Through close analysis of Chokgyur Lingpa's (Mchog gyur gling pa, 1829–1870) encounters with territorial deities across multiple biographical episodes—and the ritual texts that codify these engagements—I argue that the treasure revealer's ability to navigate these relationships is not incidental to but constitutive of their identity as Padmasambhava's heirs. Foundational narratives of imperial conversion established a relational contract with the land's non-human inhabitants that required periodic reassertion; the treasure revealer, as ecological mediator, is precisely the agent qualified to do so. y propitiating, commanding, and binding territorial deities—and ensuring that each extraction is answered by a substitute that maintains the land's fertility—the treasure revealer simultaneously revitalizes the Buddhadharma for their age and renews the ecological bonds on which its transmission depends.

This paper seeks to explore the more-than-human elements of the Tibetan Treasure tradition (gter ma), specifically the ways in which the Treasure tradition is based on an ethic of exchange between humans and the Tibetan land. The paper will explore three specific dimensions of this ethic of exchange, namely 1) the revelation process as one in which Treasure revealers extract Treasures and deposit Treasure substitutes (gter tshab), 2) the ways in which the Treasure tradition incorporates Indigenous Tibetan land-based presences in the form of Treasure guardians (gter srung), and 3) the expression “samaya bond between sacred land and guest” (gnas mgron gyi dam tshig) as a meaningful expression of a Tibetan ethics of hospitality between the agentic earth and its human guests. 

When Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel (1594–1651), the founder of the Bhutanese state, emerged from retreat in 1625 and announced his establishment of a new polity in the Himalayas, he dispatched an edict to power places throughout the natural world, commanding local deities, earth lords, and spirits of the region to submit to his rule and take their place as protectors of the Buddhist teachings. This paper takes this founding act seriously as a political gesture, asking what conception of political community it implies and what it means for a polity to include non-human forces as members with standing rather than as backdrop or metaphor. Reading Tsang Khenchen Jamyang Palden Gyatso's Song of the Great Dharma Cloud as a founding document of the Bhutanese state, it recovers a framework in which the natural world is not a resource to be governed but an agent that participates in governance.