In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

In this paper, I will take up the 19th century Tibetan polymath Jamgön Kongtrul as a theorist of religion. Kongtrul's encyclopedic Treasury of Knowledge places the "inner science" of Buddhism alongside medicine, astrology, logic, and other Tibetan disciplines as intellectual and somatic crafts, locating all knowledge, religious and otherwise, in the relational transformation of persons rather than the correspondence of facts to an objective reality. Pursuing impartiality (rimé), Kongtrul presents a fractally multiplying series of accounts of everything from architecture to Buddhist soteriology, treating each contradictory possibility as an integral whole. Like his European parallels - whose desire for objective and universal knowledge still runs through Religious Studies – Kongtrul’s own hierarchical preferences shape his project. But in his insistence that relational particularity is what makes each way of knowing effective, Kongtrul offers us a different epistemic path. 

How does desire spatialize capital’s large-scale motion into Asia? Working in the Tibetan margins of global capital, this paper turns to the work of a Buddhist monk named Shérab Tendar (Shes rabs bstan dar, b. 1968). A prolific and controversial public intellectual from Qinghai in the PRC, Shérab Tendar relentlessly critiques rationalist desire (Tib. chags pa) at the heart of “Western economics” (nub pa’i dpal ‘byor rig pa) and the social scientific theorizing of the human more generally. He does so under the umbrella of an elaborate “Buddhist economics” (nang pa’i dpal ‘byor rig pa) rooted in a plethora of Buddhist scriptural sources and the alchemical logics of tantric transmutation and purity. Thinking with Shérab Tendar and his economy of tantric desire, this paper reconsiders the putative transparency of the secular and the exceptional neutrality of capitalism as independently articulated projects of modernity.

This paper presents textual ethnography as a collaborative way of making theory with Tibetan experts. Based on multi-year fieldwork among Tibetan communities in India, I suggest four principles of textual ethnographic work as a decolonial method for producing collaborative knowledge with and about Tibetan religious experts. I elevate Tibetan pedagogies and conceptual categories—such as lung (ལུང་།) reading transmission, samaya (དམ་ཚིག) commitments, and “ways of seeing” (མཐོང་ཚུལ།) as tools in a theoretical kit to be harnessed for religious studies beyond the purview of Buddhist traditions. The paper argues for research conducted in Tibetan and sustained through reciprocity and long-term presence, and it uses those commitments to rethink textual communities, religious authority, and gender in Do Khyentsé’s autobiography. Rather than romanticizing insider perspectives, the paper models multilingual, practice‑attuned partnership in which Tibetan interlocutors are recognized—and engaged—as co‑authors of theory.

This paper examines theories of body and embodiment in Tibetan Great Perfection (rdzogs chen) literature, focusing on transcorporeality, human bodies enmeshed in their worlds. Its primary source is The Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs (mkha' 'gro snying thig), revealed by Pema Ledreltsal (pad+ma las 'brel rtsal, 1291–1315/17). In a world constituted by gnosis (ye shes), the authors of The Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs theorized embodiment as porous, permeable, contagious, and enmeshed. The scripture regards bodies as interpenetrating other human bodies, divine bodies, elemental forces, and planetary cycles. Attending to this scripture's alterity on its own terms, the paper employs a decolonial framework that resists assimilating indigenous Buddhist categories into Western European philosophical norms. Instead, it treats the authors of this scripture as theorists of embodiment, whose work carries implications for both Buddhist studies and new materialism.

This paper examines the role of contemporary Tibetan Buddhist intellectuals as contributors to theoretical reflection about religion. In much of the academic study of religion, scholars have argued that theoretical analysis must be conducted from a critical distance outside religious traditions. In contrast, this paper argues that Tibetan Buddhist scholar-practitioners actively participate in theorizing religion from within their own traditions. Drawing on the Tibetan ideal of the khedrup (scholar-adept), it identifies three configurations of modern Buddhist intellectuals: traditional lineage holders engaged in interdisciplinary dialogue, hybrid scholar-practitioners who combine academic training with recognized religious authority, and academic scholars whose Buddhist practice informs their research. Figures such as the Dalai Lama, Anne Klein, and John Dunne illustrate how Tibetan Buddhist thinkers reinterpret doctrines, authority structures, and ethical practices in conversation with contemporary academic and scientific discourse. Recognizing them as theorists expands our understanding of how religious traditions generate critical reflection on religion.

What happens when we read Tibetan Buddhist dance masters not as informants about a local ritual practice, but as performance theorists whose conceptual frameworks challenge foundational assumptions about performance? To engage with this question, this paper turns to cham yik ('cham yig), or dance manuals, a genre of Tibetan Buddhist ritual literature devoted to monastic tantric dance.  Though they are most often thought of as choreographic notations, I argue that cham yik can also be understood as discursive arenas in which Tibetan scholars theorized performance itself. Reading them this way means not requiring the imposition of any Western theoretical grammar to draw out or make sense of these theories.  Rather, it only requires extending to them the same critical attention we have long given to canonical figures in the fields of religion and performance studies and that we remain open to having our assumptions unsettled in the process. 

This paper examines the legacy of Mary S. Slusser, an American scholar of Nepali art, and her role in the acquisition and relocation of Nepali cultural “artifacts” to Western institutions. Contending that Slusser’s knowledge claims legitimized intellectual and cultural dispossession, we explore three interrelated issues: the problematic claims to epistemic neutrality and authority in academic praxis, the tendency of such authority to overlook ethical dimensions inherent in knowledge claims, and the enduring colonial logic that informs scholarly approaches to the study of religion. Drawing on Buddhist teachings on śūnyatā (emptiness), the paper challenges Slusser’s materialist ontology, arguing that her work is both epistemologically flawed and ethically fraught. We propose a decolonial reparative model based on the Buddhist concept of upāya (skillful means) to challenge hierarchies of knowledge that systematically reproduce the non-white Other as objects of study and spectacle, while enabling Western institutions to evade ethical responsibility.

This paper situates the Tibetan concept of the “dream bardo” (rmi lam bar do) not as a subsidiary post-mortem stage, but as a theoretical model of habitually constructed experiential reality. Drawing on Prajñāpāramitā, Yogācāra, and tantric sources, it reconceptualizes consciousness as a trainable domain structured by karmic imprints (bag chags), in which a subtle “habit-body” (bag chags kyi lus) operates. Extending intermediate states beyond death, the dream bardo encompasses waking, meditative, and dream experience as continuous and transformable modes of awareness. It further analyzes the body, temporality, and practices of the dream bardo, where dreaming functions as an epistemology of illusion and a site of cultivation. By proposing bardo as process ontology and intermediate states as liminal thresholds, this framework offers new analytical tools for the study of religion. In dialogue with phenomenology and cognitive science, it challenges reductive models of dreaming and contributes to the decolonization of theoretical discourse.

This paper ambiguates the line between algorithm and ritual, demonstrates a novel natural language processing (NLP) technique, and shares some sociological insights from our data analysis of non-religious rituals. In one sense, this paper is a description of an NLP methodology and the insights it offered to the study of the rituals that non-religious people perform. In another sense, this paper describes an esoteric ritual of translation: a procedure to transpose semantic objects into and out of latent space to reveal patterns in a dataset. This method was invented for the interpretation of unstructured data collected in a study of rituals of the non-religious. It has assisted us with the study of interview data (n=40) and survey data (n=3,175). I show how the subject of study (ritual) merged with the methodology of study (NLP) to describe how NLP is something of a ritual itself. 

This essay argues that algorithmic governance is not merely a technical framework for regulating AI but a ritualized social order that forms subjects, manages thresholds of belonging, and organizes collective expectations of the future. Drawing on Bell (1992), I interpret audits, scores, and oversight procedures as practices of ritualization that authorize certain judgments as objective and trustworthy. With Turner (1969), I show how algorithmic systems govern liminal moments—hiring, credit, and welfare—by converting uncertainty into administratively legible transitions. Against this, Wainwright’s Eucharist and Eschatology (1971) offers a theological critique: algorithmic governance is teleologically thin, habituating communities to prediction and control rather than promise and reconciliation. I therefore propose a eucharistic counter-ritual: communal practices of discernment that resist reducing persons to sortable data and form them for participation in a future received as promise rather than managed as risk within contemporary regimes of algorithmic authority, administrative sorting, and anticipatory governance. 

In the late twentieth century Appalachian serpent handling largely vanished from scholarly and public view following early portrayals like Holy Ghost People (1967) and later controversies surrounding Salvation on Sand Mountain (1995). The practice persisted and has recently entered a media age: worship is livestreamed, pastors preach to remote audiences, while congregants sustain fellowship through social media and digital testimonies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines how digital mediation reshapes ritual presence and continuity in these Pentecostal communities. I argue that this mediated worship is not the dilution of a once-secret rite but its transformation into a mediated form of presence—a “digital afterlife” through which practitioners imagine a future for their faith. Returning to a tradition long absent from the scholarly gaze, this paper asks what happens when ritual moves from mountain sanctuaries to social feeds, and how embodied presence is made visible, archived, and replayable.

Electronic health records (EHRs) are typically understood as technical infrastructures for storing and transmitting clinical information. This paper argues that the clinical record also operates as a ritual technology that produces what might be called the datafied body—a structured moral and epistemic object that organizes care, authority, and decision-making within contemporary medicine. Drawing on ritual theory and science and technology studies (STS), I examine documentation practices, interoperability protocols, and data standardization as ritualized performances that transform embodied patients into portable informational forms. These practices do more than record clinical reality; they establish what counts as legitimate knowledge, stabilize institutional hierarchies, and authorize particular forms of intervention. By interpreting the electronic health record as a technoscientific ritual system, the paper illuminates the sacral logics through which data infrastructures generate moral authority in modern healthcare and demonstrates how technological mediation reshapes the religiously resonant categories through which bodies, care, and responsibility are understood.

Those who leave religion and adopt the atheist identity often attribute their deconversion to logic, reason, or science, and they describe their experience as a sudden awakening to the falsity of religion. Drawing on digital ethnography of the atheist forum on Reddit, this paper argues that deconversion is more often the result of changes to how deconverts felt about religion, rather than what they thought about religion. It identifies a particular ritual practice through which atheists learned to feel angry about religion, explores how that ritual worked in a digital space, and reflects upon the significance of approaching rituals as a means of changing feeling rather than changing beliefs. 

This paper explores how early nineteenth-century American evangelicals combined demographic data (“missionary intelligence”) with eschatological speculation to construct politically potent imagined futures. Focusing on northeastern Congregational and Presbyterian evangelicals, including Lyman Beecher and the leaders of the American Education Society, it examines anxieties surrounding western expansion. Evangelicals avidly collected statistical data on religious demographics, fearing that a severe lack of educated ministers would lead to the dominance of “paganism,” “infidelity,” and “Romanism” in the rapidly growing West. Projecting these trend lines forward, they envisioned a fallen republic that had been divested of its Protestant character. When this demographic panic collided with a dominant eschatology that identified the pope as the Antichrist, it catalyzed intense missionary fervor and nativist anguish. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how the potent synthesis of statistical trend lines and apocalyptic schemas could lead evangelicals toward aggressive political activism and mob violence.

This paper draws a direct line between Confederate nationalist ideology and contemporary Christian nationalisms in America. Although the absence of the slavery question in our contemporary context may obscure their connection, I argue that there is a persistent ideological tradition. Both movements claim an affinity with the Revolutionary era; both affirm that the nation exists in a covenant relationship with God, that democracy and secularization threaten the social order, and that chosen leaders embody God’s greater purposes for the nation. Drawing on antebellum sermons, speeches, and secession convention records, this paper traces how Confederate leaders developed a theocratic nationalism that was not defeated on the battlefield but was preserved within postbellum evangelical communities. It then examines how the ingredients of Confederate nationalism are animating contemporary Christian nationalisms. Finally, this paper asks what this historical continuity reveals about the likely trajectory of evangelical Christian nationalisms in the current political moment. 

This paper examines how divergent American evangelical eschatological frameworks generate distinct visions of and political responses to a “future China.” Existing scholarship on American evangelicals and China often focuses on strategic engagement during the Reform and Opening period, neglecting how internal theological diversity and competing genealogies shaped divergent evangelical responses to Sino-American affairs. This paper compares how Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell developed distinct missionary and political strategies toward China. Although both operated within a premillennial framework, they articulated different geopolitical visions of China’s future, either as a potential Christian power or as an apocalyptic threat. Drawing on underutilized archival materials from the Billy Graham Center and the Jerry Falwell Library, the paper highlights how competing evangelical visions of “future China” informed divergent forms of transnational activism and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the complex role American evangelicals play in mediating contemporary Sino-American relations.

The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., through its association with the Christian Right and its apologetic approach to American Protestant history, not only recapitulates past historiographical conversations regarding the relationship between Christianity and the United States, but also asserts a particular future, a “Christian Right” utopia, wherein Christianity and “civilization” are discursively intertwined with each other. The narrative pushed forward by the Museum of the Bible — a narrative that legitimizes a specific memory of the early United States and the nation’s relationship with evangelical Protestantism — mirrors older, nineteenth-century accounts of American religious history, mainly those of Robert Baird and Daniel Dorchester. Through the narratives of “labor,” of “civilization,” of “differentiation,” and of “information,” the Museum of the Bible depicts the Protestant missional spirit as inextricable from Christianity, celebrates the resulting connections between Christianity and “civilization,” and proclaims a new (and old) future for the Christian Right. 

I argue that carrying a firearm enables evangelical Christians in the twenty-first century to build a particular kind of future. Armed evangelicals imagine a future in which they and their loved ones will encounter a deadly threat, especially in the form of a stranger armed with a gun. In order to counter this threat, Christians envisage themselves as capable protectors, but only if they are armed. Armed evangelical Christians imaginatively build their future through three modes: discourse about wielding their gun against evil on behalf of the innocent, training their attention to detect threats by imagining them in advance, and regular embodied practice with the firearm.