In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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.

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.

This paper examines the occasional comparisons between non-speaking autism, intellectual disability, and religious states of self-renunciation in the writings of Fernand Deligny, an experimental educator, writer, and social worker who worked in alternative residential programs for autistic children in 1950s-80s France. His careful, unsentimental reflections on the resemblance between physical states associated with mysticism, such as prostration, kneeling, rocking, and gazing, and the autonomous wandering of non-speaking children in safe, adaptive settings allowed Deligny to illustrate with sensitivity what subjectivities not mediated by language might look and feel like, to safeguard disabled and neurodivergent lives, and to provoke an expansion of the concept of the human. Through an analysis of the intertwined histories of religion and disability in modern Europe that make this comparison possible, I explore the constructive potential of his theories for disabled thought and worldmaking, building on his concepts of the “wander line” and the “a-conscious.”

I argue in this paper  Piepzna-Samarasinha’s reading of the character Laura Olamina, in Octavia Butler’s novel The Parable of the Sower, as a Black, genderqueer, disabled person who leads her community with the help of her disablity to a restored community is emblemic of Jesus Christ, when seen through the lens of Black and Disability theologies, as a Black, disabled risen Lord, promises an end to this world and birth of a new creation or a New Heaven and a new Earth. 

Using the futural longings of Marcella Althaus-Reid, M. Shawn Copeland, Lisa Powell, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this presentation re-envisions bodily resurrection as “indecent.” Althaus-Reid’s work on “decency” captures how disability is entangled with other harmful colonial ideological constructs. Copeland’s theology creates an account of discipleship that incarnates God’s Reign through solidarity with marginalized bodies. Powell envisions disabled resurrected bodies as vulnerable, rejecting any idea of self-sufficiency. Piepzna-Samarasinha reflects on a future for disabled intimacies for Mad and neurodiverse bodies. The image of an “indecent” resurrected bodies incites the Christian moral imagination to advocate for those marked for harm by empire(s), reject autonomous individuality, and promote an ethos of vulnerability, care, and interdependence for neurodivergent and Mad sexuality.

Naming the human as somasarx attends to the fullness of ourselves, lineages, and future/s, by intervening in the medical, theological, and religious constructions that seek to divide, parse, and make intelligible our enfleshed, messy selves. We contend that available Christian theological anthropology is incomplete at best and harmful at worst, and must be re-oriented towards and grounded in crip-mad studies. 

The authors work from self-embodied realities (mad-crip-able-disabled) to produce together an anthropology that is a practice of what it suggests. Somasarx as mad-crip theological anthropology forwards: 1) creation as ongoing process, not event, 2) enfleshed ties of the body to the body politic, 3) deep belovedness within vulnerable future/s, and 4) disruption as salvific, ethical demand. Somasarx as a theological anthropology is co-constitutive with the work of justice. As such, the paper concludes with the potential lived forms of a somasarx inspired by the work of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. 

As disability becomes increasingly normative, this paper argues that nonspeaking autistic people offer a vital lens for imagining the disabled future of religious communities. Drawing on Leah Lakshmi Piepzna‑Samarasinha, Alice Wong, and Lennard Davis it frames disability as a fluid, shared human reality that will shape the spiritual and demographic landscape of congregations. Engaging the insights of Nancy Eiesland, Grant Macaskill, Erin Raffety, and Phil Letizia, the paper outlines the theological and communal paradigms needed for faith communities to receive nonspeakers as full participants. It highlights the liturgical, relational, sensory, and spatial shifts necessary for an ecclesial future in which nonspeaking and other disabled people fully belong. The paper concludes with John Swinton’s apophatic theology, suggesting that the mystery of both God and disability, mirrored in the often unknown inner worlds of nonspeakers, calls religious communities to humility, a presumption of competence, and deeper forms of belonging.

This presentation draws on the largest study of Buddhist buildings in England to examine how diaspora Buddhist communities move from provisional, improvised worship spaces to permanent, symbolically meaningful sacred architecture (Tomalin & Starkey 2016). Most Buddhist groups begin in private homes, rented rooms, or adaptively reused buildings such as houses, shops, libraries, churches, and warehouses. As communities grow, some develop purpose‑built temples that blend traditional Asian architectural forms with British materials and planning requirements. These architectural transformations reshape religious experience: renovated interiors, dedicated shrine rooms, and culturally significant design elements create places that practitioners describe as spiritually uplifting and identity‑affirming. Renovation itself becomes a form of Buddhist practice and community‑building. The presentation argues that these shifting material forms—whether adapted or purpose-built—mark an evolving civic presence, as Buddhist centres become visible landmarks and heritage sites. This evolution parallels broader Asian diasporic patterns and highlights how built form actively shapes sacred experience.

This paper examines how temple architecture functions as a material strategy of continuity within the American Jain diaspora. Focusing on the Jain Center of Southern California (JCSC), I ask: how does the transition from provisional domestic worship spaces to purpose-built temple complexes reshape religious pedagogy, sectarian negotiation, and communal identity? Drawing on ethnographic research, including interviews and participant observation, I trace the movement from early home-based religious education—conducted in living rooms and garages by first-generation migrants—to institutional temple environments modeled after Indian marble temples (derāsars). I argue that architectural consolidation reorganizes not only ritual practice but also educational programming, authority structures, and generational transmission. Purpose-built temples incorporate classrooms inspired by American institutions while also enabling ecumenical worship that softens sectarian distinctions between Digambara and Śvetāmbara communities. Engaging scholarship in material religion and diaspora studies, this paper demonstrates that built space does not merely contain the sacred; it actively produces religious subjectivity and communal belonging. In the Jain case, architecture becomes a medium through which minority identity is stabilized, pedagogical innovation is institutionalized, and continuity is materially imagined for future generations.

My contribution to this panel will examine the religious spaces created by South Asian Muslims in North America over the past half-century. The first purpose built mosque in the US was built by Albanian immigrants in Biddeford, Maine. The first such mosque in Canada was built by Lebanese Muslims in Edmonton, Alberta. In Toronto, as in Maine, the first mosque was also established by Albanian Muslims. With changes to immigration laws in both countries in the 1960s, South Asians began to be the largest Muslim community, replacing the larger Arab community and those from the Ottoman Empire. They are the largest in Canada, and may well be the second-largest in the US after African Americans. Canada, being part of the British Commonwealth, had a more direct path for South Asian Muslims. After a brief history of these communities and the mosques that they created, I will turn to the South Asian mosque spaces created by Sunni, Shi’a, Ahmadiyya, and Ismaili communities in North America. Particular attention will be given to the work of architect Gulzar Haider, as one of the key South Asian Muslim mosque architects.

On Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., sits Sikh Gurdwara D.C. It hosts regular worship services and langar and claims “civic space” (Tweed 2011) for Sikhs in the nation’s capital alongside other religions. It seeks to complicate a religious landscape primarily defined by White Christianity (Promey 2024). (Its front door is less than three hundred yards from the front door of Washington National Cathedral.) The building illustrates Sikh priorities and the difficulties of erecting a monumental structure in an American city, particularly the nation’s capital. While the building’s founders were among the first Sikhs in the capital, it was completed long after several, larger, suburban gurdwaras. Domes that would crown the building sit in front of it waiting for adequate funding and civic support. The building’s history reveals tensions in the American Sikh community between monumental claims and practical functions. Its structure illustrates the adaptable simplicity of Sikh architecture.

When religious communities erect monumental buildings in urban settings, how those structures are seen matters, shaping scholarship, planning policy, media representation, and public reception. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the BAPS Swaminarayan Mandir in Neasden, London, this paper takes as its case study a building described on the temple's own website as ‘Europe's first Traditional Hindu Temple’ and widely recognised as one of the most prominent religious buildings in Britain. The paper argues that seeing religious architecture should engage what it terms a ‘depth structure’: the theological, historical, and architectural genealogies from which material form arises. At Neasden, the depth structure reveals that architectural form is oriented not only toward what the building communicates but toward what it does: cultivating affective dispositions in those who enter it and securing the conditions for theological preservation across generations. In doing so, the paper offers new ways of thinking about religious materiality, particularly sacred architecture that is visibly different in the urban landscape.

In Appalachian serpent handling congregations, time rarely flows linearly. Services stretch into the night, danger slows perception, and the promise of the end lingers just out of reach. Drawing on fieldwork in Appalachian Pentecostal communities, this paper examines how faith is lived in a rhythm of waiting: for the Spirit, for deliverance, for the end itself. Within these sanctuaries, time accelerates in song and testimony, then stills as a handler lifts a snake, producing a temporal experience that is simultaneously urgent, cyclical, and suspenseful.

These practices enact a form of worldbuilding through nostalgic apocalypticism, in which longing for the past coexists with anticipation of the world’s completion. Through attention to pacing, repetition, and the ethnographer’s own shifting sense of duration, this paper traces how handlers inhabit a time that is both promised and perpetually delayed. Their worship offers an anthropology of temporality in which memory, anticipation, and embodiment are inseparable.

Situated within cultural anthropology, this paper speaks to young Muslim women's aspirations of securing government jobs in Patna, India. Drawing on ethnographic research, I demonstrate how women reimagine aspirations as a form of pious practice, cultivating ethical subjectivity in holding kismat (divine will/predetermined future) and mehnat (human labor) in productive tension throughout their aspirational trajectories. Thinking of destiny as something to be made, women focus on hard work as pious labor bracketing conversations around destiny in their tayyari or preparation phase. When examination attempts prove unsuccessful, women distinguish kismat from badkismati (circumstantial ill-fortune), striving to imagine alternative futures that remain open and unknown. By centering aspiration as pious practice, I extend anthropological attention of everyday Islam into the domain of futurity, where futures are simultaneously open and predetermined. 

Muslims who experience forced migration face difficult decisions as they contemplate death. Many Muslim immigrants wish to be returned to their homeland for burial, but what if exile precludes that option? This paper examines this quandary from the perspective of Turkish Muslim exiles in the U.S. The experience of the spatial dislocation of exile has led some immigrants to reimagine their positions and trajectory in a sacred timescape. Some look to sacred history to the Prophet, who suffered exile and was buried in the land of migration. Some look to the Sufi idea that human existence in the physical world is itself a form of exile, since separation from the divine is an endemic aspect of life, one that will be soothed in (future) death. That is, the immigrants reinterpret the sacred past and future to make sense of their experience of exile and death in a foreign land. 

Guides for interreligious dialogue tend to avoid specifically interracial dynamics. Similarly, guides for anti-racism avoid interreligious dynamics. Race and religion are simultaneously interwoven social constructions and lived realities that impact dialogue together. Building on the work of Khyati Joshi, who focuses on the systemic contexts of white Christian privilege, this interactive discussion will introduce relevant research and articulate three problematic postures of "centering," "othering," and "misrelating" that white Christians often bring to specifically interreligious interactions. Through a practical exercise scrutinizing current interreligious policy, participants will build skills for attending to the unique ways white privilege and Christian privilege converge to impede substantive interreligious progress and how to make realignments. 

This interactive workshop will discuss core aspects of Resisting Anti-Judaism: Practices of Christian Solidarity (Fortress, 2026). The fundamental argument of this book is that while Christians in the post-Shoah era have done significant work in rejecting the most odious elements of bias against Jews, there still remains many structural elements of anti-Judaism within Christian thought and practices. In order to deal with these difficult remainders, it is necessary for Christians to advance new paradigms for thinking about and engaging with Jews and Judaism. This workshop will focus on three core ideas from this book, anti-supersessionism, covenantal imagination, and solidarity, and provide concrete illustration of their implementation.

Interreligious Studies is increasingly charged with developing new models of formation and professional preparation amid shifting religious demographics, rising nonreligion, and intensifying pressures on higher education and adjacent professional fields. This paper reports results from a comprehensive MDiv Effectiveness Assessment at a Divinity School attached to a Research University that is intentionally multireligious and multi-vocational. Ministry formation (inside and beyond congregational settings) requires interreligious competence as a baseline professional capacity, not an elective specialization. Using a pragmatic, mixed-methods design (institutional data analysis; qualitative analysis of direct measures of student work; stakeholder surveys, interviews, and focus groups), we identify what most strongly predict vocational readiness for interreligious practice and teaching. Findings highlight transferable competencies cultivated through multireligious cohort learning, practice-facing pedagogy, and field-based formation where religious difference is operational. We offer grounded implications for curriculum design, faculty development, and evaluation strategies for formation for applied interreligious leadership.

I am developing a preliminary model of studying religious boundary-work that I wish to discuss at the interactive workshop. It proposes five areas of investigation: the location of the boundary; the Interpretation of the postulated difference; the means by which boundaries are expressed, interpreted, and possibly enforced; the motives for drawing boundaries, and the agents involved in boundary-work. I would love to have a critical conversation with colleagues in the field about how this model might be useful in the analysis of interreligious situations.

The panel advances a model of teaching that bridges scholarship and lived experience without collapsing one into the other. It argues that death and dying, far from being marginal topics, provide a generative lens for interreligious learning and ethical formation. By integrating comparative ritual study, practitioner insight, reflective practice, and critical theory, educators can transform how mortality is addressed in higher education, healthcare institutions and congregations.

This session will be of interest to scholars of religion, theology, pastoral care, medical humanities, and related fields seeking pedagogical approaches that are intellectually rigorous, interreligiously literate, and responsive to the existential realities shaping students’ lives.

This interactive workshop roundtable introduces a new edited volume, Beyond Dialogue: New Paradigms in Interfaith Discourse (SUNY Press, 2026). Given the most recent rise in religious extremism, and the suppression of free speech that has targeted dissenting voices and marginalized communities, we have felt it both urgent and important to critically approach the possibilities and limitations of interfaith discourse, in our communities and through our scholarship. Contributors blend academic analysis with activist praxis, employing diverse methodologies spanning theology, history, sociology, and anthropology. Through case studies from North America and beyond, close textual readings, and theoretical interventions––featuring  underrepresented voices including Pagan, Baha'i, and "nones" perspectives often absent from interreligious scholarship––we ask: beyond dialogue, toward what? Brief presentations from editors and contributors on the volume will introduce critical frameworks including "Beyond Interfaith Settlerhood" and "Engaged Buddhism as Engaged Community.”We offer brief remarks before opening to a larger conversation, inviting collaboration with fellow scholar-practitioners. 

Campus interfaith work is often structured around professional staff designing programs for students. This presentation proposes a different model, more at home in student affairs, wherein students are the primary architects of interfaith encounter, and reflects on three years of implementation at a mid-size university. Several student office worker lines were reconceived as an "Interfaith Fellows" program, tasking students with designing programming rooted in their own identities and communities. One fellow's hosting of Ganesh Chaturthi revealed significant unmet demand for Hindu religious life that institutional structures had not previously addressed. A partnership with the student-led Dialogue Society produced monthly interfaith dinners averaging thirty attendees, centering structured conversation across religious difference in a format students shaped and sustained. This presentation reflects on what the model requires institutionally, what it makes possible pedagogically, and what it suggests about student agency and genuine interfaith encounter.

This paper addresses the impact of Hindu college students’ interreligious engagement upon their overall sense of belonging in the context of student clubs/organizations. Data was gathered using interviews and photo-elicitation, and the research method was thematic analysis informed by descriptive phenomenology. Educational researchers have commonly focused on institutionally-sponsored clubs and events as sites of belonging for religiously minoritized students, but these sites were heavily problematized in this study. Because interfaith events typically have an educational focus, they center non-Hindu students while Hindu students assume the labor of religious literacy-building for their peers. Hindu students also experienced religious coercion related to non-Hindu student organizations. Positive experiences of interreligious engagement in group settings were significant but not institutionally-coordinated. Overall, this study provides insight into the role of Christian privilege in interfaith programming and its potential impact upon Hindu students. 

This paper proposes a new framework to rectify Western-based bias in academic interreligious studies by suggesting the inculturation theology of religious diversity—focusing on the common theme of inculturation among different religions. It examines how various religious traditions have adapted their theologies of belonging and community through the process of inculturation. Specifically, this paper analyzes two key examples: Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian vision of local education and World Christianity’s vision of a new Christendom. By examining these cases, this paper shows the mechanics of inculturation at both theoretical and practical levels. Ultimately, it demonstrate how the process of inculturation fosters mutual transformation and develops new religious phenomena. By offering a phenomenological approach rather than a philosophical imposition, the paper shows how different religions reconcile differences and blur their boundaries through continuous communication within the process of inculturation. Based on this, the paper also attempts to illuminate the future of interreligious dialogue/theology.

This presentation has two goals. First, I will define the term ‘covenantal pluralism,’ a task complicated both by the relative newness of the literature—leaving the term at times underdetermined—and by the fact that the term encompasses multiple components. Second, I will examine some of the theoretical challenges and underlying assumptions of the term. Ultimately, although covenantal pluralism offers a robust form of religious pluralism, I will argue that the term requires further clarification if it is to serve as a useful framework for addressing some of our present-day religiously charged conflicts. 

This paper examines the Buddhist "Walk for Peace" sponsored by the Hương Đạo Vipassana Bhavana Center in Ft. Worth, Texas.  From October 2025 through February 2026,  19 monks walked across several southern states on a 2,300 mile pilgrimage to Washington DC.   We'll consider how the Walk allowed for interreligious dialogue both as language and collective, embodied experience.   By examining the monks' voluntary suffering and daily "peace talks" hosted by civic groups, public schools, and churches, we'll see how audiences-- in-person and virtual--recognized a shared purpose and expressed an organic curiosity about Buddhist philosophy and rituals.   Finally, we'll imagine how shared embodied experiences might help establish interfaith understanding at a time when many white Christian Nationalists consider themselves under assault.