In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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. 

This opening session will cover a broad range of issues related to the nature of ritual studies. It will primarily focus on Grimes’s contributions to ritual studies but will also move beyond them to include topics such as the development of ritual studies over the past fifty years and the ways in which the field has changed, as well as discussions of ritual criticism, the craft and creativity of ritual, and the interdisciplinary nature of ritual studies. The dialogue will conclude with a discussion of the future of ritual studies, including emerging questions, neglected areas, and new possibilities for interdisciplinary work.

In his essay “Performance is Currency in the Deep World’s Gift Economy: An Incantatory Riff fora Global Medicine Show” (2002) Ronald Grimes argues that too much environmentalism focuses on formulating ethical principles. Rather, as Grimes suggests, following poet Gary Snyder, “performance” is the currency we should be using to address our current environmental crises. We should be trying to figure out what actions, “rightly performed,” might save the planet. This argument was provocative to me and I began to wonder what “rightly performed” and “saving the planet” might mean in the context of ecological restoration practices, such as prescribed fire. In my current research, I draw on Grimes’ writing on ritual and the environment, using ritual as a lens through which to analyze cases where Indigenous and non-Indigenous practices around intentional fire converge on northern California’s wildfire-prone landscapes and burn scars. “Ecologically attuned rites,” to borrow Grimes’ phrase in “Ritual and the Environment” (2003), around intentional fire both express and constitute relationships with the more-than-human world. I explore the ways in which these attuned practices make, re-make, erode, transcend, and cross relational boundaries in both creative and destructive ways.

The paper presents the broad contours of major directions in the study of religious ritual, particularly cultic ritual, with reference to the role played by Ronald Grimes in the study of ritual in the 20th–21st centuries.
In order to contextualize his work, and more generally the achievements of ritology as an academic field of inquiry on a broad historical canvas, it begins by identifying three major analytical frameworks within ancient emic analytical discourses on ritual:
relational, ergic, and syntactic.
Examples of these analytical frameworks are demonstrated from intricate scholastic ritual literatures in South Asian, Mesopotamian, and Mediterranean contexts (Śābara-bhāṣya on Jaimini-mīmāṃsā-sūtra; Sifra and Babylonian Talmud; Iamblichus).
Proceeding to early modern contexts, this paper examines the role that the study of ritual played in the “New Science” of religion, and finally positions ritology within adjacent contemporary academic discourses. Finally, inspired by Grimes, it sketches out future directions in ritual studies.

Jamie Brummitt’s Protestant Relics in Early America (2025) offers a vital exploration of "supernatural memory objects," arguing early American grief and politics were rooted in holy matter. However, Brummitt’s work also highlights a pervasive tension within Religious Studies: an "autobiographical refusal." While Brummitt illuminates the vibrant emotional lives of her subjects, the academic demand for "objectivity" often flattens the scholar's own life-narrative. I argue that scholars are constrained by a form of academic secular privatization, trained to excise personal histories from the page. Beneath the critical prose lies a Durkheimian "effervescence"—dreams, affections, and indeed a life woven through communion—that electrifies the writing yet remains unacknowledged. By examining the book itself as a memory object, I contend that integrating autotheoretic reflection would strengthen the critique against secular reductionism. Acknowledging the "life" beneath the scholarship renders the study of religion more compelling and only deepens the complexity of the book's argument.

What effect does it have on us when the voices of the dead resurface? How can we engage with the traces and voices of our families in once-lost, analogue, and dead media? This presentation is an ethnographer’s reflection on the discovery of decades-old family oral histories recorded on cassette tapes. The cassette is an outdated and frail, yet durable medium for preserving voice. Through the voices of her maternal ancestors and the imperfect medium of a tape player, she explores Nuyorican family histories of forgetting and the pain and comfort found in women’s silences and their refusals to remember. 
 

This paper explores the relationship between grief, material culture, and scholarly method through reflections drawn from my forthcoming book, When God Is Silent: Love, Lament, and the Work of Staying (Cascade Books, 2026). Focusing on what may be called “memory objects of the dead”, ordinary items that become charged with meaning after loss, the paper examines the methodological challenges of writing about such objects within academic disciplines that often treat them as inert artifacts. Drawing on theology, ethics, and material culture studies, I argue that prevailing scholarly approaches can overlook the relational dimensions that give these objects their power for those who grieve. Through the example of “The Box,” a collection of personal items belonging to a deceased child, the paper reflects on how memory objects mediate presence, absence, and longing; proposing a more relational approach to studying material culture and death.

This paper examines the tensions of writing about personal experiences of death and grief within academic disciplines that privilege emotional distance over intimacy. Focusing on material artifacts belonging to my deceased loved ones—particularly my mother—I interrogate how scholarly conventions render such objects as lifeless rather than relational. Writing from intimate proximity becomes a methodological challenge to dominant modes of scholarly analysis that require emotional detachment. In do so, this paper explores what it means to take seriously the afterlives of material objects as sites of memory, presence, ongoing personal relational formation, and as counters to biological and academic disappearance.

This paper examines how memory objects associated with the dead are interpreted in Akan and Ga communities in Ghana and how these interpretations challenge the limits of academic language. In West African cosmologies, death is understood not as the end of existence but as a transition of the deceased who continue to participate in social and moral life. Objects such as blackened stools in Akan traditions and symbolic coffins in Ga funeral practices are therefore not simply relics of the past but important artifacts to remember the dead, by defining or preserving identity, and maintaining connections with ancestors. However, academic writing usually frames such objects as symbolic evidence, overlooking how communities understand them spiritually. The paper argues for a community-centered approach, allowing scholars to study these objects academically while also explaining the spiritual meanings attached to the relics by the communities that created them.

Recent work in Christian ethics, including the work of Paul Scherz, has explicitly linked questions of AI governance to the Christian doctrine of providence. While this connection is apt, there is far more to be explored in AI’s providential parallel here than just questions of governance and prudential action. Employing the tripartite structure of providence borrowed from the Reformed scholastic tradition of preservation, concurrence, and governance, I argue that the former two aspects of providence are just as crucial to understanding the uses of LLMs by consumers. A close reading of AI marketing reveals the urge to make use of AI to fulfill similar narrative-structuring aims that have been a part of Christian talk of providence since Augustine’s Confessions. A Christian virtue ethical response then, must contend not only with talk of prudence, but also courage, accounting for narrative, affective, and relational aspects of the AI age.

In dominant AI debates, "alignment" names the problem of making models conform to human values. This paper inverts the question. Drawing on ethnographic research among a community of immigrant Iranian AI scientists in Silicon Valley, I ask how human values, affects, and ethical dispositions are themselves being aligned—and misaligned—through AI work and discourse. Through two ethnographic encounters, this paper shows how the epistemic vocabulary of AI becomes a medium through which my interlocutors work on themselves, negotiating the affective remainders of authoritarian religiosity against the self-improvement imperatives of liberal ethical life. I argue that alignment discourse is not a neutral technical framework but a liberal technology of governance historically continuous with statistical population management, and that the affective unruliness my interlocutors exhibit marks precisely where its logic reaches its limits.

Many applications of artificial intelligence (AI) rely on a technocratic ideology that breeds an “obsession… to increase human power beyond anything imaginable, before which nonhuman reality is a mere resource at its disposal.” This paper argues that Western technologists exercise significant power through algorithms that reshape human desire, material opportunities, and moral character. I draw on a variety of Christian theological resources to argue that algorithmic power reshapes political life according to an ethic of control that caricatures God’s omniscience and omnipotence, in turn enabling the oppression of marginalized communities while diminishing accountability within democratic political systems for algorithmic harms. Yet Christian political theologies that (1) emphasize personal and social responsibility for harmful moral actions and (2) elevate the possibilities of local forms of political action may provide fertile ground for re-imaging algorithmic governance.

When tech companies describe their products as in “alignment with human values,” an immediate red flag should be raised. I argue that AI alignment discourse reproduces the same perfectionistic, technocratic and implicitly eugenic logic underwriting Silicon Valley’s multitudinous transhumanistic endeavors. Behind the veil of human values hides an insidious mythos treasured by a powerful technocratic minority. Encoding these particular human values will intensify existing structural inequalities and reifies the (im)morality of the technocratic elite. This paper investigates the motivations behind Silicon Valley’s definition of the human and which human futures will be prioritized as a result. In the following sections, I outline the current discourses within Silicon Valley, already prioritizing an idealized human who is in the image of the technocrat, leaving the disenfranchised even more vulnerable.