In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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This paper uses the story of the Road to Emmaus found in Luke's Gospel as a paradigm for reading Scripture with veterans after deployment.  Arguing that the disciples eyes are "held" from recognizing Jesus because of their own trauma, they learn to recognize the risen Christ by returning to the Scriptures to understand God in a new way after the trauma of the cross. This understanding is made possible by returning to scripture, the presence of other people of faith, a willingness to listen openly to difficult experiences and embodied practices of fellowship.  This Scriptural model is supported by the findings of psychological studies that show community is important for preventing post-deployment PTSD, and the ways in which religious practices can be the means of healing shame that cause moral injury. 

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This paper examines how Silicon Valley techno-libertarianism is an AI religion that sacralizes technological innovation while marginalizing labor. Discourse about the benefits of AI and disruptive technologies, analyzed across 350 episodes of the All-In Podcast, along with writings from Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, was used to form a survey given to faculty and students at a Northern California university. Survey respondents were asked whether God, money, or techne (machines) function as primary sources of meaning and social progress. The analysis shows that techno-libertarian narratives portray artificial intelligence and technological disruption as socially salvific while obscuring class relations, including labor displacement. Interpreted through Max Weber’s notion of disenchantment, this worldview operates as a secular moral framework that legitimizes wealth accumulation while rendering workers largely invisible within narratives of technological progress.

This paper draws upon Kant and Liberation Theology to argue that current paradigms of worker replacement through AI and automation harms humans and exploits the technology replacing them. Beginning with people’s perception of the “American Dream,” income, and education, people’s sense of identity and worth are being devalued through worker replacement. The machines replacing them are also having their labor instrumentalized. AI and automation shift tedious and dangerous work from humans on the periphery of society to machines on the periphery. Walzer’s position about the relationship between this kind of work and membership in society affects the use of AI especially if it becomes sentient or self-conscious. The preferential option for the marginalized may only first apply to displaced human workers, but should also apply to machines with personhood, and these considerations need to guide the integration of AI into work and the replacement of human labor. 

This paper takes seriously the critiques of AI as a technology that degrades critical thinking, accelerates environmental destruction, and operates within a capitalist logic of extraction and efficiency. Yet it argues that calls to boycott or refuse AI in academic settings risk reproducing the very inequities they claim to resist. Drawing on the 2026 EDUCAUSE report, the AAUP's 2025 report on AI and academic professions, and Elizabeth Losh's analysis in Critical AI, I demonstrate that contingent faculty, roughly 70% of the national instructional workforce, face structural pressures making AI adoption a matter of survival rather than choice. Time is the scarce resource shaping this divide. I situate this analysis in my work co-chairing the AAR's Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Committee, arguing that a scholarly guild skewing tenure-line must speak to and find solidarity beyond its own membership to raise AI's visibility as an academic labor crisis.

The past two years, students in my “Religion, SciFi, AI, and Non-Human” course have designed and constructed Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots as a semester-length scaffolded assignment designed to teach them fluency with the technology of LLMs and the humanistic critique of their use. The assignment culminates in the creation of “The Oracle,” a chatbot constructed and trained by my students. The assignment has been highly successful as an experiential learning tool to help student understand how AI technologies work, as well as their limitations and drawbacks. By integrating the questions and tools of religious studies, the Oracle project is particularly effective. This AAR paper describes the learning goals, scaffolded assignment design, and student experience of the Oracle, and demonstrates how faculty can use similar approaches to critically engage AI in the classroom from a humanistic perspective highlighting the tools of religious studies.

This paper will consider how utopian ideology may have developed within medieval Chinese Buddhism. By comparing Collins' analysis of the early Buddhist (Pāli) monastic traditions, which suggests that utopianism was not a significant element of this tradition, with the work of other scholars such as Forte, who argue that utopianism was a prominent element within the medieval Chinese Buddhist milieux, this paper considers why and how this shift may have taken place and whether it can be regarded as one of the characteristic changes that occurred in tandem with the transmission of Buddhism to China, i.e. "sinification," or may have come from some other source. In other words, the paper aims to consider what may have catalyzed the development of utopian thinking within Chinese Buddhism, assuming such characteristics were absent from earlier forms of Buddhism, as Collins suggests

Buddhism is often framed through renunciation, severing ties with “the world” as the premise of religious life. This paper challenges that presumption by reframing colonial Korean Buddhism’s modernization project (1910—1945) as a utopian enterprise. Rather than a reactive accommodation to colonial rule, modernization operated as a utopian social imaginary: an effort to conceptualize and engineer Buddhism as a public religion producing recognizable public good within a state-centered order and redefining its place in society.

Focusing on two axes, educational reorganization and institutional incorporation, I show how Buddhist leaders pursued “socially viable Buddhism” as both a normative and institutional project. Legitimacy hinged on public usefulness, bureaucratically legible organizational forms, and personnel able to translate Buddhist ethical claims into civic morality and social responsibility. Here, “utopia” names a this-worldly mode of Buddhist world-making: repositioning Buddhism from mountain seclusion into urban public space as a defensible, socially consequential civic actor under colonial constraint.

This study examines the historicization of Buddhism within the Chinese Marxist framework by analyzing the writings of leftist historians from the 1940s to the mid-1960s, a period before and after the CCP’s rise to power. It investigates early encounters between Buddhism and Marxist ideology prior to the Cultural Revolution, considering how these encounters reshaped definitions, perceptions, and attitudes toward Buddhism, and how historiography was mobilized to align Buddhism with the Communist Party’s ideological and political vision. Focusing on Guo Moruo (1892–1978), Fan Wenlan (1893–1969), and Ren Jiyu (1916–2009), the study examines Marxist approaches to Buddhism’s transmission, periodization, Sinicization, and its socio-political and cultural significance in Chinese history. By situating these Marxist historical narratives within broader scholarly and Buddhist debates, the study illuminates the complexity of modern Chinese Buddhist scholarship and demonstrates the formative role these narratives played in shaping the CCP’s emerging official discourse on Buddhism

This paper situates the 7th Changkya Khutuktu’s post-1949 activities in Taiwan within the early Cold War as a project of postcolonial rectification that sought to purge the island of its Japanese Buddhist colonial legacy while reimagining Taiwanese Buddhism as part of a mainland Chinese pedigree. After relocating to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek and assuming the presidency of the Buddhist Association of the ROC, the Inner Asian tulku undertook initiatives to “return” temples formerly administered by Japanese sects to Chinese Buddhist lineages, toured the island to promote what was framed as “proper” Chinese Buddhism, and advocated for the transfer of Xuanzang’s relic to Taiwan rather than to the PRC. I argue that, although articulated as anti-Japanese imperial redress and cultural restoration, these efforts participated in a new (arguably imperial) Buddhist worldmaking shaped by Cold War pressures and the ideological climate of the White Terror martial law era. Ultimately, they consolidated centralized Buddhist authority among waishengren mainlanders while marginalizing localized religious networks that had integrated multiple layers of colonial history.

What futures emerge when “syncretism” is no longer treated as religious impurity but as a decolonial practice of survival and accountability? This paper destabilizes syncretism as a colonial category that presumes purity and Christian normativity, arguing instead that Afro-diasporic traditions such as Santería and Vodou represent insurgent forms of sacred world-building under conditions of enslavement and anti-Black violence. Drawing on Charles Stewart and Michael Pye, and engaging Jacqui Alexander’s concept of “divine self-invention” in Pedagogies of Crossing, I interpret syncretic practice as Sacred labor through which Black and Indigenous women cultivate communal memory and embodied resistance.

Turning inward, the paper confronts anti-Blackness within Latine communities, where Afro-diasporic religions are often marginalized or folklorized. I argue that rethinking syncretism becomes an ethical demand: a call to accountability, restorative memory, and pluriversal futures that refuse to reproduce racial and religious hierarchy.

In Latin America, Pentecostal communities once relegated to the social periphery now exercise pervasive political influence, with Pentecostal leaders eager to fill the ranks of the political class.  Reflecting a penchant for ostentatious displays of political theater, Pentecostals have attracted scrutiny from critics. Narratives attributing Pentecostalism's Latin American rise primarily to US government intervention and backroom conspiracies have gained a recent resurgent popularity across social media platforms, painting a distorted picture.  A fuller assessment of Pentecostalism’s move from the social margins to the political mainstream reveals complex dynamics — at times instructive, at times cautionary. This paper reviews key points of disjuncture between existing research and popular narratives, revisits Cold War era sources, and theorizes about the popularity of these conspiracy theories.  We employ a preferential optic that centers the religion/s of the poor and interrogates North American religious interventions.

This paper answers the puzzling question political observers have been asking over the last years: Why did so many Latino Christians vote for Donald Trump? My argument pushes back against simple racial explanations. Rather, I contend that Latino Evangelicals, and Evangelical Christianity in general. primed believers to accept neoliberalist ideals as tenets of their faith. It was the hegemony of neoliberalism that led so many to support this modern form of American authoritarianism. 

This paper explores the theological critique of capitalism developed within Latin American liberation theology by engaging Walter Benjamin’s insight that capitalism functions as a form of religion structured by guilt and unpayable debt. Benjamin’s claim that capitalist religiosity binds subjects to a despairing future provides a framework for examining how debt operates not only as an economic mechanism but also as a spiritual and ideological force. Drawing on the work of Franz Hinkelammert, the paper argues that the religiosity of capitalism is most visible in its eschatological imagination: its capacity to discipline the future by presenting the continuation of the present order as inevitable. Within this framework, the carceral state and the militarization of immigration enforcement in the United States can be understood as expressions of the same capitalist logic of surveillance, debt, and control. In response, the paper proposes Christian hope, as articulated in liberation theology, as a communal praxis that contests the foreclosure of the future.

This paper examines passages from two classical Yogācāra Buddhist texts, the Samdhinirmocana Sūtra and Yogācārabhūmi, and applies them to questions of racial and group identity. Applying the Three-Nature Theory, essentialized racial and ethnic identities are Falsely Imagined ‘illusions,’ that—though unreal—nevertheless produce real-world effects. These illusions arise from cognitive processes (Dependent Nature), that give rise to the unconscious construction of our collective realities (the ālaya-vijñāna/bhājana-loka locus), based on false ideas, images and distorted facts—the very categories people have been socialized and acculturated into. Most people are deeply attached to these constructed identities (kliṣṭa-manas), which, collectively, underlie and influence our inequitable social and cultural institutions. Liberation (Real Nature) therefore requires recognizing and remedying these sources of suffering at both individual and collective levels.

This paper develops a Yogācāra account of racial formation as karmically conditioned processes embedded in social institutions. To occupy a social position—police officer, immigrant, student—is to inhabit a structured field of expectation that trains attention, assigns salience, and routinizes response. Drawing on the Yogācāra concepts of vāsanā, bīja, and ālayavijñāna, I argue that racial perception is sustained through socially distributed karmic infrastructures that stabilize conditioned patterns of recognition and response across time. Śūnyatā, understood through the framework of the two truths, reveals race as empty of intrinsic essence yet conventionally real as a historically sedimented causal formation shaping vulnerability, opportunity, and perception. Examining institutional forms that employ procedural role fluidity, e.g. the Incident Command System (ICS), I discuss how systems that refuse the reification of roles can interrupt karmic inertia and loosen racialized conceptual reification. Yogācāra thus provides both a diagnosis of racial marginalization and a framework for institutional transformation.

This essay is motivated by a broad question: what is a Buddhist approach to the prison industrial complex, an expansive, violent institution that targets vulnerable community members and is sustained by taxpayer funding, private corporations, and the brutal use of force?  The prison industrial complex that encompasses county jails, state and federal prisons, as well as immigrant detention centers, is an extension of previous policing and prison systems. How then should contemporary Buddhist ethicists understand the phenomenon of surveillance, mass incarceration, and deportation? How should Buddhist practitioners respond? This essay aims to theorize and articulate a Buddhist response to the prison industrial complex by employing Yogācāra Buddhist doctrine. By unpacking theories of conditions and conditioning alongside contemporary interpretations of critical race theorists, this essay aims to offer a Buddhist response to the prison industrial complex.

While Tina Turner’s Buddhist practice is widely acknowledged, less attention has been paid to the specific Buddhist teachings that she offered. In this paper, I examine the conception of the subconscious mind that emerges from her attempts to explain how the social trauma of being raced, gendered, and classed adversely affected the person, alongside liberative practice to overcome these traumas. I argue that Turner’s conceptions most closely align with how Asaṅga explains the ālaya-vijñāna (storehouse consciousness) in his Mahāyānasaṃgraha. I proceed by engaging in a comparative close reading of Turner’s descriptions of the subconscious mind alongside the Mahāyānasaṃgraha. I conclude by reflecting upon how such a comparative close reading that centers Turner, a Black Buddhist teacher who I contend is marginalized as a Buddhist thinker, while placing her in dialogue with Asaṅga, one of the most important “traditional” Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophers, advances a critical Yogācāra social theory and practice.