In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

In Nick Bostrom’s formulation of the “orthogonality thesis” in Superintelligence, he restricts the scope of “intelligence” to “something like skill at prediction, planning, and means-end reasoning in general.” I argue that Bostrom’s claims about “intelligence” are much better understood as claims about deinotēs, or “cleverness,” a trait which Aristotle identified as a capacity “to be able to do the actions that tend to promote whatever goal is assumed and to attain them.” Using the theistic ethical framework outlined by Robert Merrihew Adams in Finite and Infinite Goods, I argue that cleverness is an “impure excellence” (i.e. an excellence bound up with a deficiency) which cannot be properly attributed to God. Therefore, efforts to enhance human cleverness (whether by digital or biological means) result in human beings becoming “caricatures” of God, distorting the imago Dei by exaggerating certain features of God at the expense of others.

Ectogenesis—the process whereby humans are artificially gestated outside of the womb—may be around the corner. In recent years, researchers have made inroads toward such a breakthrough. In this paper, I explore the implications of ectogenesis for contemporary debates in bioethics. I also identify a serious danger ectogenesis poses: it may allow us to overlook the integral work that makes possible the birthing and raising of human beings. Being gestated artificially, in isolation from other humans, may reinforce the widespread illusion of humans’ fundamental separation from one another, traced in numerous state-of-nature theories of politics and justice. This is not an insuperable danger, however. We already stand in great need of a greater appreciation for humans’ interdependence. The possibility of ectogenesis, which may be just over the horizon, gives us an even stronger mandate for underscoring the interdependent nature of human beings. Religious traditions are uniquely positioned to do precisely that.

Within the dialogue between religion and transhumanism, transhumanists tend to focus on the objections that are raised against a given technology in order to overcome objections to technological development. However, this means that transhumanists can minimize the importance of philosophical and theological questions that are raised by their advocacy. For example, new advances in artificial intelligence such as large language models show signs of reasoning, but are they truly intelligent? Transhumanists tend to minimize these questions because they may undermine future technological development. Given the tendency of LLMs to hallucinate, philosopher Shannon Vallor suggests that it is better to understand our current rendition of AI as a mirror, rather than as a mind, as is the default within AI research. The dialogue between religion and transhumanism depends on the ability of critics to confront and resolve the fundamental questions that naturally arise from technological development. 

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The dominant narrative within migration studies often focuses on the linear journey toward a final destination, often overlooking the liminal existence of transit migrants—those who are stuck in an unfamiliar place with nowhere to go and no possibility of returning home. Drawing from Homi Bhabha’s concept of sly civility and James Scott’s notion of hidden transcripts, I argue that transit migrants are not passive victims but agents of resistance. This paper explores how transit migrants negotiate power and enact resistance within a liminal temporality. Their existence, and their split identity, offer a vivid challenge to the system that renders them invisible. Aware of their powerlessness, their resistance often takes subtle forms. These indirect acts of resistance become vehicles of critique used by the powerless while allowing them to remain anonymous.

This paper examines how Ghanaian Pentecostal migrants in Sydney generate transcultural religious discourses that negotiate belonging, contest racialized marginalization, and reframe their presence in Australia as spiritually purposeful. Drawing on long‑term ethnographic fieldwork (2014–2023) with the Sydney branch of the Church of Pentecost International Australia Incorporated (CoPIAI), the paper argues that migration catalyzes new cultural and religious formations that exceed national, ethnic, and doctrinal boundaries. Through discursive strategies such as interpreting crises as “Signs of God,” adapting witchcraft narratives to Australian sociopolitical realities, and reconfiguring local Pentecostal prophecies of national revival, migrants construct hybrid identities that bridge Ghanaian cosmologies and Australian contexts. Engaging transcultural theory, discourse analysis, and reverse discourse, the paper demonstrates how migrants creatively retool homeland idioms and hostland imaginaries to produce new moral worlds, ritual practices, and forms of belonging. This case illuminates transculturalism as a lived, embodied process central to African diasporic religious life.

Pentecostalism in Africa has legitimized mass youth emigration from sub-Saharan Africa to the West through special prayer rituals and a triumphalist narrative of reverse mission and kingdom expansion, spiritualizing departure as divine vocation. This paper argues that such a vision reflects a failure of moral-theological formation on a continent whose burgeoning youth demography is the fundamental determinant of its future. Drawing on Nietzsche's critique of Christianity as a "religion of pity" in The Antichrist and Katongole's call for a new Christian social imagination, it contends that Pentecostalism's sanctification of the japa phenomenon dulls the instinct for presence and willful resistance to forces militating against collective flourishing on the African continent. In response, the paper proposes a moral-theological framework that foregrounds the "will to flourish," reclaiming Africa's youth not merely as missionaries elsewhere but as protagonists of an African future: present, resistant, and transformative.

Transculturalism has been discussed mainly from specific cultural, ethnic, and sociopolitical perspectives. This essay will enrich the current discussion by exploring a philosophical theory of transculturality. The essay argues that recognition theory provides a comprehensive framework to further explain the ‘mechanism’ by which the transcultural process shapes migrant identities. Recognition theory assists us in evaluating what might be considered as a positive or successful, rather than a negative or unsuccessful, transcultural process. In addition to exploring the theoretical basis transculturalism, statistical data and lived examples from Canadian immigrant churches are used to show how the proposed theory aligns with actual lived experience. 

Research pertaining to the quest for Daoist transcendence or xian-hood has raised vital questions about the intersections between religion, pharmacology, and the body in China. Informed by but departing from studies of xian-hood and adjacent medical and soteriological pursuits, this paper delves into vernacular methods and techniques for anti-aging and healthy hair. Focusing on both excavated and transmitted recipes that target the loss or whitening of hair, I query how and why people in medieval China—potentially both religious practitioners and non-specialist users—used animal, vegetal, and mineral substances to create hair care products either through ingestion, topical application, or hair-combing. By paying attention to the technical knowledge undergirding the creation of these products, this paper explores the religious and somatic dimensions of possessing healthy hair and thus becoming spiritually potent.

This paper examines how contemporary incense associations at Mount Tai vernacularize religious knowledge through narrative techniques amid contestations over orthodoxy. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2025, it argues that incense association’s leaders increasingly emphasis storytelling over formal ritual to transmit beliefs surrounding Bixia Yuanjun and the “Four Great Spirit Animals” (fox, weasel, snake, hedgehog). In a context where certain ritual practices are labeled as superstition, storytelling becomes a practical technique through which mediums reinterpret beliefs, and align them with contemporary ethical norms, and further embed them in specific mountain sites. By retelling myths at temples, caves, and scenic markers, they transform sacred spaces into the “lieux de mémoire” and produce embodied, shareable religious knowledge. In this way, pilgrimage is not only a ritual journey but also a process of producing collective memory and vernacular religious knowledge in contemporary China.

This paper examines everyday practices concerning beasts in medieval Chinese religious life. I focus on talismans and divination manuals related to the household or residence (zhai 宅), particularly those from Dunhuang and relevant Daoist scriptures. I begin by clarifying the mechanisms of talismans and divination, emphasizing their efficacy through divine signs and the techniques through which such signs are produced and interpreted. The paper then analyzes three modes of beasts in religious tools: as individual signs, as components of astrological systems, and as (natural) phenomena. Through these three interpretive modes, I demonstrate the distributive agency of beasts across cosmological systems and the interpretations historical actors granted them, highlighting a reciprocal relationship between beasts and humans. I argue that these three modes reflect the role of the beasts channeling the supernormal, divine systems of religious power into the household, rendering complex cosmological knowledge operable for non-specialist users in everyday life. 

Confucian ethics idealized both public and private separation of adults, but in reality, even the most devoted Confucian scholars could not avoid encountering women, and the temptations aroused by such contact. This paper explores a small set of Qing morality tales which specifically admonish against illicit sexual encounters, not from a Buddhist or Daoist perspective, but with explicitly Confucian framings, even as they mimic tales of karmic consequence (yinguo). Preface writers, including the original compiler, endorse these stories of Heaven-sent illness, exam failure, and death resulting from violating sexual ethics as bringing to life the abstractions of earlier philosophers’ pronouncements about desire. Through these collections, the paper explores popular Confucian sexual morality, extending beyond ritual abstention in mourning and medical recommendations for restraint to consider how a morally upright man might practically navigate the sea of desire that engulfed him every time he stepped outside his study.

If we follow the “idealist” understanding of the Yogācāra system, everything, including the body and the external world, arises from the seeds (bīja) retained in ālayavijñāna. In this model, the cardinal element seems to be ālayavijñāna, and the body is only secondary. This, however, is not the whole picture. According to the Yogācārabhūmi, one of the earliest extant sources of ālayavijñāna, ālayavijñāna stays in the body and keeps it alive. In this paper, I shall reexamine the significance of the body from the following four perspectives. (1) The exact relationship between ālayavijñāna and the body. (2) The relationship between bīja and the body. (3) The significance of ālayavijñāna as a bridge between the body and the mind in the context of transformation through meditative practice. (4) Comparison between the Yogācāra model of multi-layered consciousness and the multi-layered structure of the human nervous system taught by modern science.

“Categorization is a consequence of how we are embodied” (Lakoff, Johnson). Classical Yogācāra texts argue that our lived-worlds are based on our embodied sense faculties, which are structured by embedded categories (vikalpa). This departs from the later focus on Yogācāra as ‘mind-only’ (citta-mātra), as if ‘mind’ alone could account for perception of objects—a disembodied process that all but ignores our embodied sense faculties. But Yogācāra is also called vijñāna-vāda—cognitivism. Vijñāna (cognitive awareness) is classically analyzed in terms of the dynamic interaction (sparśa) between our embodied and categorically (vikalpa) structured sense faculties (indriya) and their respective stimuli. In short: without bodies, no perception, no objects. We will first examine the role of the sense faculties in early Buddhist analyses, in dialogue with findings in contemporary cognitive science, and then apply this approach to developed Yogācāra theories—providing a more embodied and parsimonious understanding of classical Yogācāra cognitive teachings.

In this paper, I address the relationship of body and mind through the work of a thirteenth-century Tibetan author exploring embodiment and appearances in tandem. Jetsün Drakpa Gyaltsen’s Commentary on the Inseparability of Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa exemplifies the unique convergence of ritual and philosophical approaches characterizing the Lamdré or “Path and Fruit”— an esoteric system preserved by the Sakya tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. In guiding his reader to realize that all phenomena are included in both body and mind, Drakpa Gyaltsen grapples with the somewhat paradoxical way in which the body is both a product of the mind and its support. I illuminate ways in which his formulations of āśraya [Tib. rten] and ālaya [Tib. kun gzhi] are not only informed by tantric ritual and physiology but also converge with and diverge from Yogācāra approaches in significant ways, with attention to dynamics of reliance, pervasion and inclusion. 

If we follow the “idealist” understanding of the Yogācāra system, everything, including the body and the external world, arises from the seeds (bīja) retained in ālayavijñāna. In this model, the cardinal element seems to be ālayavijñāna, and the body is only secondary. This, however, is not the whole picture. According to the Yogācārabhūmi, one of the earliest extant sources of ālayavijñāna, ālayavijñāna stays in the body and keeps it alive. In this paper, I shall reexamine the significance of the body from the following four perspectives. (1) The exact relationship between ālayavijñāna and the body. (2) The relationship between bīja and the body. (3) The significance of ālayavijñāna as a bridge between the body and the mind in the context of transformation through meditative practice. (4) Comparison between the Yogācāra model of multi-layered consciousness and the multi-layered structure of the human nervous system taught by modern science.

“Categorization is a consequence of how we are embodied” (Lakoff, Johnson). Classical Yogācāra texts argue that our lived-worlds are based on our embodied sense faculties, which are structured by embedded categories (vikalpa). This departs from the later focus on Yogācāra as ‘mind-only’ (citta-mātra), as if ‘mind’ alone could account for perception of objects—a disembodied process that all but ignores our embodied sense faculties. But Yogācāra is also called vijñāna-vāda—cognitivism. Vijñāna (cognitive awareness) is classically analyzed in terms of the dynamic interaction (sparśa) between our embodied and categorically (vikalpa) structured sense faculties (indriya) and their respective stimuli. In short: without bodies, no perception, no objects. We will first examine the role of the sense faculties in early Buddhist analyses, in dialogue with findings in contemporary cognitive science, and then apply this approach to developed Yogācāra theories—providing a more embodied and parsimonious understanding of classical Yogācāra cognitive teachings.

In this paper, I address the relationship of body and mind through the work of a thirteenth-century Tibetan author exploring embodiment and appearances in tandem. Jetsün Drakpa Gyaltsen’s Commentary on the Inseparability of Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa exemplifies the unique convergence of ritual and philosophical approaches characterizing the Lamdré or “Path and Fruit”— an esoteric system preserved by the Sakya tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. In guiding his reader to realize that all phenomena are included in both body and mind, Drakpa Gyaltsen grapples with the somewhat paradoxical way in which the body is both a product of the mind and its support. I illuminate ways in which his formulations of āśraya [Tib. rten] and ālaya [Tib. kun gzhi] are not only informed by tantric ritual and physiology but also converge with and diverge from Yogācāra approaches in significant ways, with attention to dynamics of reliance, pervasion and inclusion.