In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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.

This paper examines Crusader imagery on social media to show how creators are deploying the Crusader knight in new ways. By drawing on a shared image of traditional masculinity, the Crusader knight draws affinities between users from a variety of religious and national backgrounds. After a brief look at the history of the internet cultures that inform it, the second half of this paper analyzes widely viewed knight edits on TikTok, taking into account the captions, tags, and comments to get a better sense of how the Crusades have been memeified, communicating affect and vibe more than alignment with a particular religious historical narrative. Ultimately, I show that Crusader content is shaped just as much by internet culture as by the religio-political groups that deploy it. 

What is an ideal man? I explore this question through early Muslim depictions of the beard. Discourses on the appearance, treatment, quality or absence of beards reveal much about the underlying concerns surrounding the masculine roles and identities that were required to enact proper belief, righteous behavior, social status and communal care. Part 1 examines the beard as metonymy for male genitalia, and bearded men as essential begetters of life, patres familias, conductors of ritual, sources of wisdom, or warriors. Part 2 examines cases where facial hair or its absence troubled established associations between beards and men, which clouded patriarchal roles, gendered binaries, and ritual fulfillment. The conclusion suggests how fracturing traditional masculinities enabled men to express fragility, pain or grief, and proffered the revelatory message of care and inclusion to bodies on the margins, including the impotent, castrated or effeminate. 

Can a man be a mystic and a good father? The orthodox obligation to marry and have children meant Muslim men often had to navigate the equally weighty demands of fatherhood and mystical life. Hagiographies of medieval Sufi men have a curious tension: they often praise men who abandoned and ignored their children in pursuit of mystical insight, but also show vast Sufi family networks and discuss in-home Sufi education. While it seems that wayward fathers were idealized, the lived reality indicates that many “ordinary” Sufi men were likely quite active in attending to their children’s spiritual, emotional, and financial needs. Drawing on Sufi manuals, hagiographies, ethical, and legal texts, I begin to trace the major questions of the relationship between mystical fatherhood, saintly narrative, and how an “ordinary” father’s mystical achievement can be recovered and elevated for scholarly consideration.

The year 1526 was an important one for Luther’s liturgical reforms, with the publication of both the Deutsche Messe (German Mass) and the newly revised Taufbüchlein (Baptismal Booklet). Both these texts deal with ritual practices that incarnate and externalize Luther’s neighbourly theology (the move from freedom to service, which are the ethical implications of Luther’s Christology) by (1) prioritizing contextualization that prevents imposing uniformity, (2) making practices accessible to people across the spectrum of faith development, and (3) seeking unity and familiarity when they are done in love. This paper investigates how Luther’s liturgical reforms are concrete examples of Luther’s neighbourly theology and can continue to impact the proclamation of the gospel today. Embodying Luther’s neighbourly theology may mean expanding liturgical practices beyond inherited practices, keeping Luther's concerns in mind, so that freedom, unity, and love are held together in practice – “to the glory of God and the neighbor’s good.”

In his 1530 writing “On Translation: An Open Letter,” Martin Luther offers a theologically and morally rich account of translating the Gospel. Faithful translation concerns the accurate rendering of words into new languages, but it includes more. For Luther, faithful translation is also grounded in a theological commitment to Jesus as the Word made flesh and in a moral commitment in which the translator seeks life together with those to whom she translates. Taken together, these commitments result in Gospel speaking that is faithful, understandable, and lively.  This form of translation is evident in Luther’s sermons and biblical commentaries. It is also evident in the 20th century preaching of Helmut Thielicke and the contemporary liturgical poetry of Meta Herrick Carlson. 

This paper examines contemporary debates about the use of vernacular languages for worship in Adivasi (indigenous) Lutheran churches in North India, attending to the material implications of linguistic diversity for ecclesial unity and evangelism. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the material investments required to support vernacular language use in multilingual contexts strengthen churches and create unity through a shared imagination of reproducible vitality.

bA Scandalous Ethics: Foucault’s Cynics, Sojourner Truth, and Parrhesia in the Flesh 

Not Light, but Fire: Frederick Douglass, St. Perpetua, and Reorientation

In the account of the martyrdom of Perpetua, a series of scenes maintains a steady insistence on manifesting the truth as a central claim and posture of the text – both for Perpetua before Rome and the text before its reader. This paper examines the mechanics and stakes of this posture of truth-telling through the analytic of Michel Foucault, to argue that the martyr account not only helps to illuminate questions Foucault asks of early Christian practices of truth telling, but that the text is also a site through which to configure the relationship between the early part of Foucault’s genealogical work on power, late work on ethics, and the role of Christianity in his critical project. This paper also raises the role of Perpetua’s pain, and the relationship between body, rhetoric, and text, to pose additional critical questions for religious studies and the contemporary afterlives of martyrdom. 

This paper returns to an old question—“Is critique secular?”—in order to ask a new one: “Is the post-critical turn post-secular?” The famous 2007 symposium on the question of secular critique imagined a shared affective posture between secularism and critique itself: relentless skepticism towards perceived reality, and an equally relentless hunger to unveil the worldly constructions masquerading as metaphysical Absolutes. Almost 20 years later, “post” critical and “post” secular both gesture vaguely towards a revisionist mood that hungers for more hopeful, more horizontal, more constructive, and more ethically responsible paradigms of interpretation. By reading Sedgwick’s description of reparative reading alongside Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, I take stock of the post-secular’s strange critical posture, one as uninvested in distinguishing between representation and the real as it is invested in affect as an interpretative apparatus.

Scholars invested in the so-called “post-secular turn” often argue that critically deconstructing the religion-secular binary and interrogating the modernist assertion that the political and legal spheres should remain epistemologically “secular” will promote religious pluralism and respect for religious difference. As this paper seeks to demonstrate, however, the very same theoretical claims underlying notions of the “post-secular” are also, ironically, being exploited with increasing frequency by the American conservative legal movement (CLM) to advance Christian supremacy. Through a critical examination of the language, structure, and organizing logics of recent Supreme Court decisions, I elucidate a significant and problematic inconsistency pervading majority opinions that aids in this work: whereas recent non-establishment holdings deconstruct the religion-secular binary into a nullity so that state actions may countenance distinctly Christian practices, symbols, and truth claims, concurrent free exercise rulings reify the binary in order to posit “secular” state animus toward conservative Christian beliefs.

This paper intervenes into the debate on the secular and the postsecular by offering a decolonial interpretation of the postsecular that does not entail a regressive process of “desecularization,” as Walter Mignolo has argued for. Following a reflexively dialectical account of the historical process of secularization, I argue that the “post” in the “postsecular” ought to be understood as a shifting self-consciousness of secularity that makes possible the re-constitution of an ongoing process of secularization. So rather than expecting to jettison “the secular” in its entirety, there is room for a decolonial rebuilding of secularity that critically re-draws the boundaries between the secular and the religious without necessarily endorsing the well-known Eurocentrism of conventional postsecular positions. This dynamic is illustrated by way of the transmodern proposal developed by Enrique Dussel, which aims to systematize what it means to think “beyond the assumptions of modernity, capitalism, Eurocentrism, and colonialism.”

How should scholars of religion take supernatural phenomena seriously without abandoning critical explanation? This paper revisits that question--long important to the cultural history of the study of religion--through the late nineteenth-century writings of Mary Baker Eddy and other Christian Science practitioners. We argue that supernatural healings became experientially real through practitioners’ disciplined religious labor and their engagements with texts, bodies, and objects, while also remaining shadowed by doubt, failure, and dispute. We further posit that the Christian Science case exposes limits in approaches associated with the “ontological turn,” on the rise in religious studies today, which posits multiple incommensurable worlds and insulates religious claims from analysis. Against this trend, we propose a method grounded in ontological realism (the claim that all actors inhabit a shared world structured by common constraints and resources), which treats Christian Science healing as a creative but contestable composition of our shared world. 

Abstract 

Why did slaveholding persist among members of the Religious Society of Friends long after biblical arguments against slavery were already circulating within the community? This paper argues that the delay cannot be explained by moral blindness alone. From the early eighteenth century onward, Quaker critics developed increasingly sophisticated scriptural critiques of slavery, drawing on texts such as Acts 17:26, Matthew 7:12, Isaiah chapter 58, and the commercial imagery Chapter 18 of Book of Revelation. Yet these arguments met a specific institutional obstacle: from 1718 onward, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's Overseers of the Press reviewed manuscripts for anything likely to raise contention, and by the 1740s at least five of the committee's seven members were themselves enslavers. This paper traces the friction between expanding scriptural critique and editorial suppression, arguing that what delayed Quaker abolitionism was less the weakness of the arguments than the organizational power arrayed against their circulation.

This paper analyzes the transition from seventeenth-century Puritan theocracy to the modern architecture of religious liberty through the lens of early Quaker persecution. It examines the experiences of Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson to argue that the violence towards the Quakers was a foundational disruption of sacrificial logic. It shows how the failure of Puritan scapegoating catalyzed a move toward a theological friendship and religious freedom.  By tracing the development from William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” to the twentieth-century contributions of the American, John Courtney Murray to Vatican II teaching on religious freedom, this paper demonstrates how the Quaker experience and theology anticipated modern religious toleration and the institutionalization of the right to exist.

Proposal

Abstract

In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, seven decades of crude oil extraction have produced severe environmental toxicity, yet residents continue to reshape their realities through meaning-making processes that generate diverse, entangled relationships with oil. Tracing these relationships to the integration of crude oil into indigenous environmental worldviews, this paper highlights the centrality of oil in everyday spirituality, arguing that beyond its status as a capitalist commodity, crude oil deeply informs extractive and healing ritual practices.

Keywords: Oily Lifeworlds, Everyday Spirituality, Extractivism, Niger Delta. 

This paper interrogates the dominance of techno-utopian imaginaries in contemporary ecological discourse. While climate transitions are often framed as technical problems solvable through renewable expansion and innovation, such visions frequently leave intact the colonial logics that produced extractivism. Drawing on Ronnie D. Lipschutz and Laurence Davis, I argue that eco-utopian futures can reproduce injustice when progress is equated with technological mastery and endless growth. The work of Imre Szeman, Mary-Jane Rubenstein in Astrotopia, and Terra Schwerin Rowe in Of Modern Extraction exposes the extractive imaginaries that underwrite such futurisms.

In response, I draw on Davis’s concept of grounded utopia and the decolonial intervention of the relational philosophy of Buen Vivir to argue that futures beyond extractivism must emerge from situated struggles, embodied practices, and decolonial cosmologies. Religion, I contend, is a crucial site for both sustaining and transforming ecological imaginaries.

What kind of subject can inhabit a post-extractivist world? Degrowth scholarship critiques growth not merely as economic policy but as a structuring ontology, yet it rarely articulates the alternative subjectivity its vision requires. This paper argues that Haitian Vodou's multi-soul philosophy and modular personhood (Strongman 2008, 2019; Daniels 2021) offers a practicable, politically actionable model of non-sovereign selfhood that directly challenges the liberal-productivist subject underwriting extractive regimes. Taking Clayton Crockett's "renewable materialism" (2022) as a point of departure, I show that ontological reframings of energy remain inadequate without confronting growth as an organizing metaphysics (Kallis 2018; Martinez-Alier et al. 2010). Vodou's ritually enacted counter-ontology, forged inside plantation extraction and the Haitian Revolution, provides what abstract philosophical frameworks cannot: a living tradition of collective, non-possessive personhood already practicing what degrowth theorizes. These are the "emergent lifeworlds" (Berlant 2020) materializing beyond extractivism.

For this panel I will draw on my recent book, Spirits of Empire: How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion, to offer cautionary tales about the hazards of “religion” as a frame for building heterotopian futures. I argue that the category of religion (and, by implication, the discipline of religious studies) has historically served to (re)inscribe a series of binaries and distinctions characteristic of colonial modernity—religion/politics, religion/science, religion/superstition, etc.—that continue to enable economies of extraction. As a provocation to the field, I want to further suggest that both the category of religion and its most determined critics have operated within the logics of what I call settler secularism to ridicule, condemn, or render illegible Indigenous and other non-extractive ways of doing and being in the world. 

Jewish thought has long been animated by two symbolic poles: the book and the sword, representing the ethical traditions that sustain Jewish life on one hand and military power on the other. This paper examines the tensions between these two poles in the contemporary moment, when Jewish identity is often conflated with Zionism and Israeli state violence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper analyzes three contemporary expressions of Jewish nonviolence: (1) Israeli conscientious objectors; (2) “safety through solidarity” initiatives in American Jewish communities seeking alternatives to armed security; and (3) Jewish activists engaged in protective presence and co-resistance in the West Bank. Framed through the dual legacy of the Warsaw Ghetto represented by the Ghetto uprising and the Oneg Shabbos archives, the paper argues that Jewish nonviolence is both a necessary strategy and an urgent ethical response to the political crises of our time rooted in Jewish traditions.

In May 2025, the Korea-Israel Bible Institute, one of the oldest Christian Zionist groups in South Korea, inaugurated the Holocaust Museum in Paju, a border city next to North Korea. The city is marked by Korea’s collective trauma from Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, and the division of North and South Korea. This paper investigates the theo-political objectives of South Korea's Holocaust Museum—the first such museum opened in Asia outside Israel: to commemorate Jewish suffering as exemplified by the Nazi genocide of six million Jews; to combat antisemitism globally; and to honor the Jewish sacrifices made for South Koreans during the Korean War. This analysis shows how the Holocaust Museum of Korea serves to localize Christian Zionism and disseminate its theo-political visions for the future, reflecting a complex interplay of religious and political narratives with historical remembrance.

Taking its cue from Edward Said’s essay, “Permission to Narrate,” this paper seeks to understand how the power of narrative, and the power to narrate, have impacted Palestinians in Gaza. It situates the violence in Gaza within an international security paradigm, demonstrating how the construction of the “terrorist” as an enemy-Other enables discursive and narrative strategies that reinforce binaries and serve as moral cover for political violence. Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac’s 2023 sermon “Christ in the Rubble” and the critical responses it elicited provide a valuable case study for deconstructing the innocent versus guilty binary by examining Jesus the (innocent) Christ child and Jesus the (guilty) insurrectionist. Read alongside the work of James H. Cone and Richard A. Horsley, I argue that decolonial and liberation theologies offer resources to deconstruct and resist these authoritarian doctrines of international security.

This paper highlights the intersection between Israeli forces’ sexual torture of Palestinian men and queer politics of sexuality. While violence against Palestinian women is frequently reported in the Gaza Genocide, a hallmark of this genocide is an inversion of the womanist framework of sexual shame: rights agencies have cited that Palestinian men were overwhelmingly subjected to sexual abuse through “specific persecutory acts” by Israeli forces, including forced undressing, battery on genitals, sexualized religious slurs, and rape during detention. The use of sexuality as torture modality by empire, aimed at emasculation through flouting of religious values and personal conscience of Muslim victims has precedence in Iraq, Syria, and former Yugoslavia. Feminist and de-colonial readings of wartime sexual torture against Muslim men speak of it as a physical culmination of Orientalist sex tropes of peacetime: Muslim men as homophobic, and thus immune to imperial tenets of emancipatory sexuality. This paper highlights the fluctuating moral emphasis of queer politics by Israeli forces – the dangerous and repressive deployment of queer acts against Palestinian men – and the overall problematization of the savage-civilized binary as thrown into relief by such a discourse. 

In the standard Platonic use of the concept of participation there is a dominant interest in fulfilling formulas of unity such that the wilder side of entering into formations of life, unprogrammed creation and association with other worldly beings, goes unappreciated. This paper proposes to correct this ontological bias and do justice to our richer ordinary sense of meaningful engagement by partnering the centering ideal of participation with the extending ideal of involvement, illustrating this move with a significant transition in Western art history. Raphael's High Renaissance Transfiguration shows a convincing domination of physical nature by eternal form, while Caravaggio's Baroque Calling of St. Matthew shows a meaning-determining materiality, contingency, and "horizontality" in similar subject matter. Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin can be read as an icon for the union of participation and involvement.

Raphael’s fresco cycle in the Stanza della Segnatura offers a poetic and participatory definition of Platonism at the birth of modernity. Rather than focusing on a Platonism of specific doctrines, I propose that Raphael articulates the essence of Platonism visually through two interrelated principles: a henological commitment to the One as ontological ground and a psychological orientation in which the soul mediates between unity and plurality. Read as a whole, beyond the iconic The School of Athens, the room presents philosophy, theology, poetry, and justice as interdependent modes of participation in a unified cosmos. The unrepresented One and the centrally positioned observer function as absent presences structuring the composition. Raphael’s poetics thus renders participatory metaphysics experientially accessible, demonstrating how artistic creation itself can enact and communicate the Platonic tradition’s vision of reality.

In one of his notebooks, the Romantic poet and theologian Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote that superstition was "the Giant Shadow of Humanity with its back to the setting Sun of True Religion." This paper uses Coleridge as a lens to explore the role of superstition in a metaphysics of participation, wherein a combination of ignorance, wonder, and myth serve as the starting point of philosophy. This exploration will then link participation and poetics in two ways. The first is the role of the preternatural in Coleridge's poetry and philosophy, where the unknown in nature manifests in poetry as ambiguous spiritual forces. The second is the vulnerability of the person to supernatural forces beyond explanation, a participatory metaphysic that travels both ways, as expressed by Coleridge in his notebooks and poetry on dreams and nightmares.

Poiēsis and participatory metaphysics exist in an irreconcilable tension between ascension to the Forms and descension to representation. Yet, two well-known 20th century Platonists, Simone Weil and Irish Murdoch, identify this tension as a generative site of poetics. Taking a cue from these thinkers and the work of Kevin Hart, and Jean-Luc Marion, I attempt to show that the tension between poiēsis and participation is a guise of the problem of onto-theology: can one participate in metaphysical theism without thereby rendering God an idol? Transcribing the poiēsis/participation tension into a theological register will enable us to better understand Weil and Murdoch’s reappraisal of Plato, and will suggest that the poiēsis/participation tension can only be navigated via an appeal to a transcendent divinity, which wills to render itself accessible through sacramental signs. To test this hypothesis, I turn to the poetics of Seamus Heaney.