In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

In the lived experience of Bhutanese Vajrayana Buddhism, karma is understood as the inescapable law of cause and consequence through which each intentional act leaves a moral residue that affects the prospects for a positive rebirth. As all sentient beings cycle through the six realms of existence depicted on the Wheel of Life, often depicted in the entryways of temples, people have a vested interest in caring for other living beings, any one of which could have been one’s mother. Based on ethnographic work conducted in Bhutan over the past two decades and engaging with concepts from the field of religion and ecology, this paper explores the ecological implications of the Bhutanese doctrine of karma for generating flourishing human and more-than-human futures.

Discussions of karma in both popular and scholarly discourse overwhelmingly interpret it as an individual moral mechanism linking personal action to personal consequence. This paper challenges that assumption by arguing that classical and modern Indic traditions preserve conceptual resources for understanding karma as fundamentally collective, relational, and distributed across shared fields of experience. Drawing on Advaita Vedānta and Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, the paper develops a comparative account of karma as relational becoming rather than individualized retribution. 

This paper extends Joanna Macy's integration of general systems theory and Buddhist philosophy by incorporating contemporary models from dynamical systems to address a persistent challenge to Buddhist ethics: how can radical emptiness sustain ethical possessiveness without collapsing into relativism or nihilism? Building on Macy's description of 'mutual causality,' I argue that strange attractors—infinite patterns governing complex systems—model a "groundless teleology" where purposiveness emerges naturally from codependent processes that lack fixed ends. This framework illuminates the interdependent, systems-oriented basis for Macy's engaged praxis: Buddhist ethical conduct presupposes no final redemption or end-point with some essential nature (viz., a 'final cause') other than reorienting collective action to further the cultivation of skillful responsiveness suffering. A half-century after her first essay and one year after her passing, I show that Macy's legacy continues to inspire philosophical possibilities for rationally validating ethical practice in a world of radical interdependence.

In its message of 1985 to the peoples of the world, the Universal House of Justice declared that world peace is "not only possible but inevitable," yet insisted that whether it arrives through unimaginable suffering or through consultative will is the choice before all of humanity. The apparent tension between inevitability and choice dissolves once we recognize how the Promise of World Peace rejects three historical orientations that Timothy Snyder identifies as presently infecting our politics. These are the politics of eternity, which traps us in a mythical past; the politics of inevitability, which traps us in a complacent present; and the politics of catastrophe, which forecloses the future through despair. Each is rooted in two pervasive habits of mind—the proclivity to totalize reality and the proclivity to fragment it. The Promise counters these by grounding hope and action in an inclusive historical consciousness that understands humanity as inevitably maturing toward oneness—a destiny that is assured, but whose cost depends entirely on our consultative will.

This paper examines a covenantal understanding of sin and moral obligation in Bahá’í theology. While the Bahá’í Faith presents the revelation of Bahá’u’lláh as the divine guidance for the present age, Bahá’ís do not seek to impose their moral laws on others. This paper argues that this apparent tension is resolved through a covenantal framework in which moral accountability arises within specific relationships to divine revelation. Drawing on the writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and recent Bahá’í institutional guidance, the paper proposes that sin is best understood as misalignment with divine guidance within a recognized covenant rather than as the violation of a universalized moral code. Situating this framework alongside covenantal approaches in contemporary Christian theology, the paper explores how layered forms of moral accountability across religious communities may offer a coherent model for comparative theological reflection on sin and ethical responsibility.

The Baha’i relationship to science is usually presented, in both primary and secondary literature, as straightforwardly positive: Baha’is are said to embrace the “harmony of science and religion,” in which science and religion are two separate but complementary systems that reveal greater knowledge about the world. However, looking at authoritative Baha’i writings on same-gender relationships demonstrates that this is too simple a picture. As the dominant medical views on sexual diversity have shifted, Baha’i authorities have gone from embracing the idea that being gay or lesbian was a medical condition subject to cure, thus treating religion and science as partners in making moral claims, to disputing the scientific findings on sexual orientation, then finally downplaying the relevance of medicine to understandings of sexual morality. This pattern suggests that the ways in which Baha’i institutions use the language and authority of scientific findings is dependent on the content of those findings.

The challenge of addressing climate change is not merely technical or political, but a crisis of orientation. As the consequences of a warming planet grow increasingly clear, a core question is not simply "what" to do, but how to reconcile the many approaches and perspectives of a deeply concerned and fragmented humanity. This paper takes the debate surrounding An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015) as a window into this problem, reading the exchange between the manifesto's techno-optimist vision and its degrowth critics as symptomatic of a broader pathology in climate discourse: fragmentation, ideological entrenchment, and the treatment of other perspectives as obstacles rather than interlocutors. Drawing on the conceptual framework of the Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity, a research organization inspired by the Bahá'í Faith, the paper takes initial steps toward articulating a "coherent yet evolving" orientation capable of guiding diverse forms of action toward shared ends.

Can a woman voluntarily imitate the suffering of Christ, and therefore enter into Christianity while yet living in a social context where the aims of feminism are not yet fully victorious? A recent interpreter of Kierkegaard has argued that women and all marginalized people are unable to imitate Christ’s self-giving love and therefore enter into Christianity. This paper challenges such an interpretation by engaging with Kierkegaard’s concept of the “double danger,” his understanding of what it means to be a human being, and the role of faith in becoming a particular individual in relationship to Christ/Love. It then engages with Emilie M. Townes womanist ethics as a case study that exemplifies a way that women may enter into the “double danger” of Christ.

Patriarchal names of God as the father, king, and lord have long been viewed as harmful in feminist, womanist, and queer theologies, due to their perceived legitimation of coercive hierarchy. However, when paired with Kierkegaard’s understanding of Jesus as the absolute paradox—as the incomprehensible union of the finite and the infinite, or omnipotence and abject powerlessness on the cross—these much-maligned names of the divine turn out to be liberating, because they render prophetic judgment on the power-mongering patriarchs today. That is, they call today’s patriarchs to imitate God’s self-emptying by resisting the temptation to wield as much power and control as possible. This is because, for Kierkegaard, Jesus represents the incarnation of infinite love that breaks into the finite world, disrupting the assumed boundary between the creator and creatures. Then the patriarchy of the kenotic God shatters the existing coercive hierarchy rather than reinforcing it.

This paper argues that Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Repetition together disclose a structure of human agency grounded in the resurrectional logic of faith. In Fear and Trembling, Abraham reveals faith as a paradoxical activity that suspends the ethical and transcends the limits of reason through a dialectic of loss and restoration. Repetition, Kierkegaard’s companion text, extends this dialectic into the existential sphere, reimagining repetition as the lived form of this same resurrectional logic: the death and renewal of the self through freedom/choice and memory. The first part of the paper argues that Fear and Trembling presents Abraham as an ideal model of human agency to be esteemed but not emulated. In the second part of the paper, I will argue that Repetition provides a model for emulation. What is lost and recovered in repetition is the subject itself. Through a dialectic of freedom and memory. 

This talk examines how traditional Tibetan understandings of, and practices with, mountains as Territorial Sovereigns inform contemporary Tibetan discourses on climate change and environmental crisis. Drawing on ritual texts, poetic evocations, ethnographic observations, and contemporary Tibetan literature, I explore how Tibetans observe, understand, and articulate the thoughts, moods, and visions of the mountains as essential agents in their world and cosmologies. I place these diverse sources in conversation with each other to consider how Tibetan mountain sovereigns think, experience, and debate about the recent climate and environmental crises. I analyze two short stories— “Snow” and “The Conference of Lhanyen Mountains” —which extend longstanding Tibetan protocols of listening to and engaging with mountains while reflecting on contemporary environmental crises and extractive relations. I argue that Tibetan stories are vital intellectual vessels, offering generative space for reflecting on the possibilities and challenges of understanding places in their fuller being and senses.

Drawing on previously untranslated biographical, ritual, and narrative materials from the Chokling Tersar, this paper examines treasure revelation as an ongoing practice of ecological mediation between land, territorial deities, human communities, and the Buddhadharma. Through close analysis of Chokgyur Lingpa's (Mchog gyur gling pa, 1829–1870) encounters with territorial deities across multiple biographical episodes—and the ritual texts that codify these engagements—I argue that the treasure revealer's ability to navigate these relationships is not incidental to but constitutive of their identity as Padmasambhava's heirs. Foundational narratives of imperial conversion established a relational contract with the land's non-human inhabitants that required periodic reassertion; the treasure revealer, as ecological mediator, is precisely the agent qualified to do so. y propitiating, commanding, and binding territorial deities—and ensuring that each extraction is answered by a substitute that maintains the land's fertility—the treasure revealer simultaneously revitalizes the Buddhadharma for their age and renews the ecological bonds on which its transmission depends.

This paper seeks to explore the more-than-human elements of the Tibetan Treasure tradition (gter ma), specifically the ways in which the Treasure tradition is based on an ethic of exchange between humans and the Tibetan land. The paper will explore three specific dimensions of this ethic of exchange, namely 1) the revelation process as one in which Treasure revealers extract Treasures and deposit Treasure substitutes (gter tshab), 2) the ways in which the Treasure tradition incorporates Indigenous Tibetan land-based presences in the form of Treasure guardians (gter srung), and 3) the expression “samaya bond between sacred land and guest” (gnas mgron gyi dam tshig) as a meaningful expression of a Tibetan ethics of hospitality between the agentic earth and its human guests. 

When Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel (1594–1651), the founder of the Bhutanese state, emerged from retreat in 1625 and announced his establishment of a new polity in the Himalayas, he dispatched an edict to power places throughout the natural world, commanding local deities, earth lords, and spirits of the region to submit to his rule and take their place as protectors of the Buddhist teachings. This paper takes this founding act seriously as a political gesture, asking what conception of political community it implies and what it means for a polity to include non-human forces as members with standing rather than as backdrop or metaphor. Reading Tsang Khenchen Jamyang Palden Gyatso's Song of the Great Dharma Cloud as a founding document of the Bhutanese state, it recovers a framework in which the natural world is not a resource to be governed but an agent that participates in governance.

This talk examines how traditional Tibetan understandings of, and practices with, mountains as Territorial Sovereigns inform contemporary Tibetan discourses on climate change and environmental crisis. Drawing on ritual texts, poetic evocations, ethnographic observations, and contemporary Tibetan literature, I explore how Tibetans observe, understand, and articulate the thoughts, moods, and visions of the mountains as essential agents in their world and cosmologies. I place these diverse sources in conversation with each other to consider how Tibetan mountain sovereigns think, experience, and debate about the recent climate and environmental crises. I analyze two short stories— “Snow” and “The Conference of Lhanyen Mountains” —which extend longstanding Tibetan protocols of listening to and engaging with mountains while reflecting on contemporary environmental crises and extractive relations. I argue that Tibetan stories are vital intellectual vessels, offering generative space for reflecting on the possibilities and challenges of understanding places in their fuller being and senses.

Drawing on previously untranslated biographical, ritual, and narrative materials from the Chokling Tersar, this paper examines treasure revelation as an ongoing practice of ecological mediation between land, territorial deities, human communities, and the Buddhadharma. Through close analysis of Chokgyur Lingpa's (Mchog gyur gling pa, 1829–1870) encounters with territorial deities across multiple biographical episodes—and the ritual texts that codify these engagements—I argue that the treasure revealer's ability to navigate these relationships is not incidental to but constitutive of their identity as Padmasambhava's heirs. Foundational narratives of imperial conversion established a relational contract with the land's non-human inhabitants that required periodic reassertion; the treasure revealer, as ecological mediator, is precisely the agent qualified to do so. y propitiating, commanding, and binding territorial deities—and ensuring that each extraction is answered by a substitute that maintains the land's fertility—the treasure revealer simultaneously revitalizes the Buddhadharma for their age and renews the ecological bonds on which its transmission depends.

This paper seeks to explore the more-than-human elements of the Tibetan Treasure tradition (gter ma), specifically the ways in which the Treasure tradition is based on an ethic of exchange between humans and the Tibetan land. The paper will explore three specific dimensions of this ethic of exchange, namely 1) the revelation process as one in which Treasure revealers extract Treasures and deposit Treasure substitutes (gter tshab), 2) the ways in which the Treasure tradition incorporates Indigenous Tibetan land-based presences in the form of Treasure guardians (gter srung), and 3) the expression “samaya bond between sacred land and guest” (gnas mgron gyi dam tshig) as a meaningful expression of a Tibetan ethics of hospitality between the agentic earth and its human guests. 

When Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel (1594–1651), the founder of the Bhutanese state, emerged from retreat in 1625 and announced his establishment of a new polity in the Himalayas, he dispatched an edict to power places throughout the natural world, commanding local deities, earth lords, and spirits of the region to submit to his rule and take their place as protectors of the Buddhist teachings. This paper takes this founding act seriously as a political gesture, asking what conception of political community it implies and what it means for a polity to include non-human forces as members with standing rather than as backdrop or metaphor. Reading Tsang Khenchen Jamyang Palden Gyatso's Song of the Great Dharma Cloud as a founding document of the Bhutanese state, it recovers a framework in which the natural world is not a resource to be governed but an agent that participates in governance.

This paper examines Crusader imagery on social media to show how creators are deploying the Crusader knight in new ways. By drawing on a shared image of traditional masculinity, the Crusader knight draws affinities between users from a variety of religious and national backgrounds. After a brief look at the history of the internet cultures that inform it, the second half of this paper analyzes widely viewed knight edits on TikTok, taking into account the captions, tags, and comments to get a better sense of how the Crusades have been memeified, communicating affect and vibe more than alignment with a particular religious historical narrative. Ultimately, I show that Crusader content is shaped just as much by internet culture as by the religio-political groups that deploy it. 

What is an ideal man? I explore this question through early Muslim depictions of the beard. Discourses on the appearance, treatment, quality or absence of beards reveal much about the underlying concerns surrounding the masculine roles and identities that were required to enact proper belief, righteous behavior, social status and communal care. Part 1 examines the beard as metonymy for male genitalia, and bearded men as essential begetters of life, patres familias, conductors of ritual, sources of wisdom, or warriors. Part 2 examines cases where facial hair or its absence troubled established associations between beards and men, which clouded patriarchal roles, gendered binaries, and ritual fulfillment. The conclusion suggests how fracturing traditional masculinities enabled men to express fragility, pain or grief, and proffered the revelatory message of care and inclusion to bodies on the margins, including the impotent, castrated or effeminate. 

Can a man be a mystic and a good father? The orthodox obligation to marry and have children meant Muslim men often had to navigate the equally weighty demands of fatherhood and mystical life. Hagiographies of medieval Sufi men have a curious tension: they often praise men who abandoned and ignored their children in pursuit of mystical insight, but also show vast Sufi family networks and discuss in-home Sufi education. While it seems that wayward fathers were idealized, the lived reality indicates that many “ordinary” Sufi men were likely quite active in attending to their children’s spiritual, emotional, and financial needs. Drawing on Sufi manuals, hagiographies, ethical, and legal texts, I begin to trace the major questions of the relationship between mystical fatherhood, saintly narrative, and how an “ordinary” father’s mystical achievement can be recovered and elevated for scholarly consideration.

The year 1526 was an important one for Luther’s liturgical reforms, with the publication of both the Deutsche Messe (German Mass) and the newly revised Taufbüchlein (Baptismal Booklet). Both these texts deal with ritual practices that incarnate and externalize Luther’s neighbourly theology (the move from freedom to service, which are the ethical implications of Luther’s Christology) by (1) prioritizing contextualization that prevents imposing uniformity, (2) making practices accessible to people across the spectrum of faith development, and (3) seeking unity and familiarity when they are done in love. This paper investigates how Luther’s liturgical reforms are concrete examples of Luther’s neighbourly theology and can continue to impact the proclamation of the gospel today. Embodying Luther’s neighbourly theology may mean expanding liturgical practices beyond inherited practices, keeping Luther's concerns in mind, so that freedom, unity, and love are held together in practice – “to the glory of God and the neighbor’s good.”

In his 1530 writing “On Translation: An Open Letter,” Martin Luther offers a theologically and morally rich account of translating the Gospel. Faithful translation concerns the accurate rendering of words into new languages, but it includes more. For Luther, faithful translation is also grounded in a theological commitment to Jesus as the Word made flesh and in a moral commitment in which the translator seeks life together with those to whom she translates. Taken together, these commitments result in Gospel speaking that is faithful, understandable, and lively.  This form of translation is evident in Luther’s sermons and biblical commentaries. It is also evident in the 20th century preaching of Helmut Thielicke and the contemporary liturgical poetry of Meta Herrick Carlson. 

This paper examines contemporary debates about the use of vernacular languages for worship in Adivasi (indigenous) Lutheran churches in North India, attending to the material implications of linguistic diversity for ecclesial unity and evangelism. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the material investments required to support vernacular language use in multilingual contexts strengthen churches and create unity through a shared imagination of reproducible vitality.

This paper considers artist Khalil Rabah’s long running, parafictional art project The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (2003–ongoing). Rabah uses exhibition-making strategies and display conventions to satirize the violent worldmaking projects that museums are called upon to uphold. I join visual analysis of Rabah’s artwork with decolonial critiques of the museum and state, specifically Israel. During the decolonial and revolutionary post-World War II context of the mid-twentieth century, many newly sovereign nations opened museums. In the case of the Zionist settler-colonial project, the museum pre-dates the founding of the nation-state, paving the way for future statehood. These museums legitimize the terms of possession so that by the time the nation-state is declared, the argument for its existence was already made. Rabah indexes the historical to envision the future of Palestinian sovereignty and simultaneously interrogates the veracity of the museum as an institution of objective truth.

This paper examines calls to save Palestine that were made over a decade before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. This research focuses on the works of Muṣtafa Sadiq al-Rāfiʿī (d. 1937), a renowned figure in the 20th reform movement against colonialism in the Middle East. Although he died in 1937, al-Rāfiʿī warned against the approaching threat which Palestine faced. He called upon citizens of the Arab and Muslim world to claim moral responsibility and to act to halt the impending threat. Born in Egypt to parents of Syrian descent, al-Rāfiʿī is known for his social commentaries that focused on ethical reflections related to the lived realities of his time. This paper explores the articles al-Rāfiʿī published in major newspapers in Egypt and the Levant in the 1930’s, studies the context of his appeal, and analyzes the nature of his moral call for action. 

This paper explores the role that public performance of ritual played in demonstrations of cross-cultural and interfaith solidarity, especially between antizionist Jewish students and Palestinians, during the 2024 student encampment uprising. Through stories taken from the authors' lived experiences and from direct interviews and conversations with student organizers at schools such as Columbia, Northwestern, University of California Los Angeles, and others, this paper argues that public performance of traditionally private ritual was a profoundly essential solidarity tactic to the success of the student movement, and in many cases actually served to deepen student's connections to their cultural and faith traditions at a moment of profound uncertainty. By so doing, the act of the performance of these rituals became not just a spiritual practice, but a compelling and necessary political tool.

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Not Light, but Fire: Frederick Douglass, St. Perpetua, and Reorientation

In the account of the martyrdom of Perpetua, a series of scenes maintains a steady insistence on manifesting the truth as a central claim and posture of the text – both for Perpetua before Rome and the text before its reader. This paper examines the mechanics and stakes of this posture of truth-telling through the analytic of Michel Foucault, to argue that the martyr account not only helps to illuminate questions Foucault asks of early Christian practices of truth telling, but that the text is also a site through which to configure the relationship between the early part of Foucault’s genealogical work on power, late work on ethics, and the role of Christianity in his critical project. This paper also raises the role of Perpetua’s pain, and the relationship between body, rhetoric, and text, to pose additional critical questions for religious studies and the contemporary afterlives of martyrdom.