In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper examines a strength training and functional fitness gym located in Hillcrest, the LGBTQ+ district of San Diego, as an urban space of healing and communal flourishing. Drawing on practical and pastoral theology and informed by participant-observation, it argues that community-based gyms within marginalized neighborhoods can function as sites of embodied ritual that cultivate belonging, activism, and mutual care. As Nancy Ammerman suggests, spirituality often emerges through embodied practices enacted in everyday life. This paper explores how the gym became a site of collective healing following one member’s traumatic brain injury after a car accident. Through group chats, weightlifting, and coordinated activism, members formed bonds of trust and solidarity, using physical training to metabolize trauma and sustain fundraising efforts. Engaging the work of  Sally R. Munt and Nancy Ammerman, this paper positions the gym as a space of spiritual formation and urban religious life beyond traditional sacred institutions.

What do an Eastern Orthodox, a Javanese mystic, and a Balinese Hindu have in common? They believe that water is more than just H₂O. This paper argues that Indonesia's water crisis is not only political or economic but also theological: a neglect of "cosmological integration" between the sacred and the profane. While consecrated water in ritual is protected, natural water flowing through rivers and canals is treated as disposable. This is not merely a secular vs. religious problem: both utilitarian and urban/metropolitan religious approaches reduce water as a neutral resource, confining its moral protection to only within temples, mosques, or churches. Through comparative religion and philosophical theology, I propose an eco-theology of water rooted in Javanese and Balinese traditions, highlighting three dimensions—ontological, covenantal, and liturgical—that restore spiritual and moral significance to water and offer tools for creation care beyond doctrinal boundaries.

Roadside shrines of healing saints in Indian cities, though often appearing random and barely noticeable, are sustained through the constant attention and care of devotees. At one such shrine in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, the space is widely trusted as a healing center, particularly by mothers who bring toddlers for routine check-ups when they suspect their child may be affected by nazar, or the evil eye. This paper examines informal shrines as sites of maternal care grounded in healing and everyday protection. Drawing on feminist literature, I argue that mothering here operates not simply as a biological role but as a collective healing practice shared among mothers, priests, and the saint invoked for protection. Rituals to remove nazar, which include burning chilies, spreading salt, applying kohl, and tying protective bands, also reflect maternal vigilance over children’s vulnerability. The anonymity and diversity of urban landscape do not guarantee safety, and that is where these modest, homely shrines become alternative spaces of healing and protection. In this paper, I aim to intervene in feminist literature to study informal healing sites as gendered infrastructures of care.

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What futures can be conjured from an ancient mythical place? This paper examines the Theosophical Society's use of the Sanskrit concept of Āryāvarta — the ancient Vedic "land of the noble ones" — as a vehicle for a distinctive vision of global spiritual futurity. Rather than treating Theosophy as a nostalgic movement, it argues that the Society's reimagining of Āryāvarta functioned as a forward-looking cosmopolitan project and a blueprint for a coming Universal Brotherhood of Humanity. Drawing on primary sources including Blavatsky, Judge, and Olcott’s writings, the paper traces three phases of the concept's evolution, from its Orientalist origins, through the Society's tumultuous alliance with Dayananda Saraswati and the Arya Samaj, to its gradual transformation into a model of transnational spiritual cosmopolitanism. The Theosophical Āryāvarta, this paper contends, was always oriented toward a future not yet arrived.

George William Russell, "AE" (1867–1935), was a central figure in both the Irish Nationalist movement and the Dublin Theosophical Society, yet the relationship between these two commitments remains understudied. This paper examines three episodes in AE's work to demonstrate that his nationalism and his Theosophy must be read together. In The Irish Theosophist (1892–1897), AE reinterprets Irish legend through a Theosophical lens, presenting Irish adepts as exemplars of Blavatsky's Wisdom-Religion and prophesying a "Celtic Avatar" who would displace British rule. In The National Being (1917), a Theosophical spiritual anthropology undergirds his call for proletarian emancipation through agricultural cooperation. Finally, The Avatars (1933) fictionalizes the Avatar's arrival as a critique of Ireland's stagnation. Tracing AE's thought across these works reveals a reciprocal relationship: nationalist texts shaped his Theosophy, while Theosophical concepts grounded his nationalist commitments. AE's career thus illustrates Theosophy's capacity for mobilization in a revolutionary, anti-imperial register.

This paper examines the reception of works of popular conspiracy fiction in order to develop on Eve Sedgwick’s critique of Robert Hofstadter and demonstrate the ubiquity of paranoid and conspiratorial thinking in contemporary culture. It suggests that a playful orientation to works produced, marketed, and (in most cases) read as fiction allow conspiratorial consumers to blur the edges of reality, blending truth and fantasy. 

Ultimately, in a world increasingly dominated by games, playful paranoia is not only the domain of the fringe conspiracy theorist, but the basic stance of political participation. Via the dazzling and disorienting toy of the internet, an American “conspiracy nation” has transformed into a global phenomenon.

When Shakespeare’s Macbeth fantasizes about “jumping the life to come,” he voices a temptation that continues to animate modern theories of sovereignty: the dream of securing the future by collapsing time itself. The political afterlives of Friedrich Nietzsche reveal divergent responses to this impulse. Neoreactionary political theory—most notably in the Patchwork model proposed by Curtis Yarvin—draws upon Nietzsche’s language of hierarchy and the Übermensch while detaching it from the temporal ontology that grounds it: the doctrine of eternal recurrence. In Yarvin’s neocameralist vision, sovereignty becomes a project of security and futurist stabilization, seeking to eliminate contingency through technocratic monarchy. By contrast, the anarchist esotericism of Peter Lamborn Wilson retains Nietzsche’s Dionysian temporality and its yea-saying. Wilson’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone imagines sovereignty as fleeting, ecstatic rupture—carnival time rather than fortified permanence. Juxtaposing these interpretations reveals that there is more than one way to play the King.

In this presentation, I explore the potential of some Mahāyāna sūtras to illuminate and challenge our own conceptions of literature and “reading” practices, broadly construed. The normative vision of such sūtras places them squarely in a ritual-ethical arena where poetic language makes perfect worlds and immortal bodies. They take for granted what modern scholars so often overlook: the production of language and world is both a bodily act and a linguistic act that makes bodies legible as such. In this way, these sūtras offer a powerful challenge to contemporary assumptions both about the nature of language and narrative and about the kinds of practices deemed to be “ritual.” And given the relevance of the sūtras to contemporary conversations about performative language, normative practices, and their role in making lifeways and persons, they problematize the too often uncritical exclusion of religious texts from serious consideration in contemporary debates.

This paper revisits the notion of poiesis as a productive force of language in Buddhist texts. It proposes to view these texts as operating within a constitutive tension between the openness of meaning, its virtually infinite expressive potential, and its inevitable narrowing into determinate expression. Whereas some twentieth-century philosophers regarded such closure as veiling being as such, Buddhist authors, despite (or precisely through) their strong nominalist commitments, often treat this condition as an opportunity to deploy language in transformative ways. Drawing on a range of Indian Buddhist textual materials, the paper delineates moments of poiesis in which language turns back upon itself and generates new possibilities for meaning, understanding, and perception. Taking this feature to be a constitutive aspect of Buddhist textual production, the paper concludes by considering how it might best be studied and approached, through which disciplines and with what analytical tools, within the study of Buddhist texts. 

The Language, Poesis, and Buddhist Experiments with the Possible Seminar concerned what is made possible in language variously used. Based on our conversations, I offer a constructive account of aesthetic experience. Engagements with works of art, I argue, are best understood as giving rise to aesthetic events: structured experiential episodes that occur under conditions of sustained aesthetic attention. Such aesthetic events are not reducible to interpretations of artworks or to semantic relations between texts and readers, being instead concrete experiential occurrences whose content, affective valence, and intelligibility are partly scaffolded by works of art and by broader aesthetic practices and institutions. We discussed how aesthetic events may be fruitfully compared to virtual experiential episodes, akin to events occurring in dreamscapes—which may call for a variety of aesthetic mindfulness on our part: a micro-phenomenology of aesthetic events through which artworks help us to contour and experiment with the possible.

History is replete with utopian experiments aimed at societal betterment.  Individuals also orchestrate their inner utopias with meditation, mindfulness, and other such wellness practices.  The biblical command to “rejoice in the Lord” (Phil 3:1) seems to stand in opposition to discontentment and despair.  This essay explores the counterintuitive truth that hope and discontentment form a pair.  Specifically, I use insights from Freudian psychoanalytic writings on mourning and melancholy regarding the loss of a beloved object.  How can the experience of loss be an impetus, not a deterrent, for hope?  How can melancholy spawn utopian desires?  The key is the ability to engage in what psychoanalytic philosopher Julia Kristeva terms “signifying.”  I illustrate attempts at utopian signifying with two examples from the Bible: the story of Ruth and Naomi and the episode between Tamar and Judah in Genesis 38.

In recent years, Muslim clinicians and scholars have developed therapeutic frameworks that integrate Islamic theology with modern psychology. One influential example is Traditional Islamically Integrated Psychotherapy (TIIP), a modality that seeks to synthesize Islamic epistemology with contemporary clinical practice. While proponents frame TIIP as a reconciliation between sacred and secular knowledge, this paper argues that the project rests on a critical epistemological disavowal: the refusal to reckon with the genealogical relationship between modern psychotherapy and Freudian psychoanalysis. By neglecting this genealogy, TIIP unintentionally reproduces the tensions between modernity, religion, and subjectivity that it aims to resolve. Drawing on intellectual history, psychoanalytic theory, and clinical case studies, I show how the therapeutic encounter becomes a site where competing epistemological paradigms— Freudian psychology, Islamic metaphysics, and modern clinical science— collide. Borrowing from Lacan’s concept of the “split subject,” I argue that TIIP stages the fracture of modern Muslim subjectivity, managing religious shame without resolving the deeper epistemic tensions produced by colonial modernity.

Purity culture is often described as conservative sexual morality. This paper argues that, in Korean, Korean American, and U.S. evangelical Protestant contexts, it also functions as an authoritarian religious formation. Focusing on the U.S.–Korea Protestant corridor, it examines how sermons, curricula, and public religious rhetoric cast obedience, patriarchy, and sexual discipline as forms of safety, belonging, and moral clarity under conditions of threat. I call this dynamic certainty-as-care. Drawing on political psychology, psychodynamic approaches to religion, attachment theory, and scholarship on institutional betrayal, the paper shows why disclosures of abuse are often received as threats to sacred order rather than as calls to protect the harmed. When authority has already been coded as protective, communities may defend leaders, blame survivors, and suppress dissent. Sexual impunity, then, is one of purity culture’s structural risks.

This paper explores the intersection of biblical exegesis and psychoanalytic theory, placing the narrative of Jonah as interpreted by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, in dialogue with the clinical autobiography of psychoanalyst Harry Guntrip. Central to this study is the concept of third spaces—psychological clearings that emerge both within and beyond the primary dyadic relationship. By examining Jonah’s reaction to the short-lived gourd and Guntrip’s reaction to the death of D.W. Winnicott, I argue that both figures suffer from an "interruption in holistic memory” caused by early childhood trauma, which results in foreclosed perceptions of the future. Trauma-related affects reside in these bodies, initially unbearable, leading to schizoid withdrawals from self and others. The paper concludes that the emergence of therapeutic third spaces allows for the integration of previously undetectable affect to begin, moving the subject from states of withdrawal toward capacities for uncertainty, emotional intimacy, and possibility.

South Korea consistently maintains the highest suicide rate among OECD nations. Utilizing Carrie Doehring’s trifocal lenses and theological reflexivity, this research reconstructs Korean suicidality through an intercultural practical theological framework. While Western suicidology identifies anxious attachment as the primary predictor of suicide, recent quantitative data reveal that avoidant attachment (r =.648) constitutes a more pervasive "silent danger" in the Korean context. By transitioning from the modern lens of empirical data to a postmodern analysis of systemic isolation and individual alterity, this study structures a methodology grounded in the indigenous theology of Salim. Following a tripartite method of suspicion, retrieval, and reconstruction, the research integrates Doehring’s concepts of lament and communal accountability to address the "silent screams" of the avoidant care seeker. Ultimately, this study proposes a life-giving theology that transforms suicidality statistics into a restorative practice of communal Salim.

This paper examines how Mormonism was constructed as a religious and social threat in the mid-nineteenth-century Swedish press. From the moment Mormonism entered public awareness, newspapers played a central role in shaping its image, portraying the movement as fanatical, immoral, and politically subversive. Such representations were closely tied to broader concerns about dissent and social stability within a confessional Lutheran state that still legally restricted alternative modes of religious practice. Drawing on national and provincial newspapers, complemented by ecclesiastical and civil records relating to prosecutions of missionaries and converts, the study traces how narratives of danger and disorder circulated between media, church, and state. By situating anti‑Mormon discourse within debates about religious freedom and modernization, the paper shows how Mormonism became a touchstone in negotiating the boundaries of toleration in nineteenth‑century Sweden, thereby contributing to the growing field of Global Mormon Studies.

Dry Bar Comedy has establish itself as a significant player in the stand-up comedy industry. Since its launch a decade ago, the company has clearly signaled its intention to reshape the comedic market, profession and art form around specific norms of propriety and audience participation. As such, it specifically seeks to expand the circuit of family-friendly clean comedy. Although Dry Bar Comedy does not explicitly promote a religious framework, it is strongly associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I argue that its mission closely aligns with that of its parent company, Angel Studios, which aims to provide stories that “amplify light”.

This paper considers both the successes and stakes of Dry Bar Comedy in the comedy industry, examining the growing popularity of clean and faith-based comedy in the US alongside the evolving relationship between humor, religion and the LDS Church in contemporary entertainment.

This paper takes as its primary subject the archetype of Mormon motherhood, Taylor Frankie Paul, whose public and private persona as a Mormon wife serves as the primary text from which to explore the archetype of the single mother, the co-parent, and the divorcée through the lens of Mormonism and Mormon history.  Particularly salient for this paper will be the ways that the priesthood functions and has functioned for unmarried or divorced mothers, as well as what structures exist and have existed to support these women. Equally important to this study of the frameworks in which mothers like Paul operate are the ways that Mormon mothers experience and have experienced the messiness of this role.  Is and has there been space for mess for Mormon mothers?  What does being a “good mother” mean in a world where mess is a given? 

Death and mourning rituals are among the most persistent and culturally-distinctive Jewish practices today. Yet the early rabbinic concepts of death that produced many of these practices, including care for the deceased body and sitting shiva, bear little resemblance to those of the contemporary West. Today, life and death are boundaried states: death marks the end of agency, awareness, and relationality. The Talmud reflects a cosmology in which the boundaries between life and death are far more porous: The dead are dynamic beings who retain sentience, agency, and affective capacity, while mourners undergo ritual restrictions that render them temporarily “death-like,” aligning their bodily experiences with that of the deceased. Engaging rabbinic texts alongside contemporary theories of animacy, affect, and disability, this paper argues that rabbinic cosmology offers an alternative framework for understanding bodily autonomy that challenges the modern equation of mobility, independence, and productivity with the conditions for human life.

The supposed rabbinic condemnation of gossip occurs because the rabbis (both real and fictive) are themselves engaging in gossip (although it is dressed up as dispute and story telling) and because there is a strong homology between the structure of gossip and the mechanisms we use to keep the dead present in our community. In the simplest sense: gossip is a dialogue between two or more people about someone who is not there. Similarly, all discussion of the dead occurs between two people about someone (necessarily) absent. 

Gossip, while hardly democratic, is a popular method for social introjection (i.e. maintaining the dead,) one that Jewish authorities have tried (and failed) to harness and control; an examination of their efforts and anxieties will help us understand the role gossip plays as a techne for determining the people who are part of our future, even after they are gone.

This paper traces some of the experiences of trans and nonbinary converts to Judaism in the contemporary United States, looking specifically at an online queer digital yeshiva, Yeshiva Yavne. I argue, on the basis of around a year and a half of digital ethnographic research and interviews, that trans converts uniquely navigate simultaneous processes of gender transition and religious conversion, disidentifying with both Jewish history and identity, still engaging with them for the sake of rendering Jewish tradition more inclusive—in terms of gender, race, and disability. This presentation argues that trans converts eschew rigid gendered/religious binaries within a variety of Jewish denominations, “queering” and “transing” Torah study in order to shape Jewish tradition in productive, justice-oriented ways, all in service of working to bring about “olam ha’ba,” or “the world-to-come.” Trans converts offer exciting challenges to contemporary American Judaisms, and their attempts to rework it deserve study.

Cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis-Saint Paul have witnessed strong faith-led resistance to the current ICE regime invading their neighborhoods. But in cities like Dallas and Denver, faith leaders are already organizing themselves while working alongside grassroots movements to meet their current conditions regarding ICE facilities, companies that threaten the safety of immigrants and citizens alike, and threats of increased ICE presence throughout their states. Following two clergy-led immigrant support movements – CLEAR DFW and Colorado Clergy Alliance – this paper utilizes an ethnographic approach to examine how faith-based organizing in Dallas and Denver is adapting historic methods of organizing to meet the current crisis, connecting across state lines, and employing an “ethics of place” that centers immigrant communities with special attention to their physical locals of origin as well as the unique challenges of their current locations.

Religious and especially Catholic responses to the current violence against migrant lives in the United States are coming from many different fronts. From statements from different Catholic Bishops against the current deportation regime and the construction of new detention centers, to the Episcopal Bishops' "Whose Life Matters?" video, to Church World Service's ecumenical "Ash Wednesday Declaration", the growing chorus of church voices decidedly taking a public stance for migrant rights and dignity witnesses to the Biblical command to privilege and protect "the foreigner who resides with you" (Leviticus 19:34). Would the cause of migrant rights be better served by a univocal religious public witness? This presentation examines the concern over the efficacy of disparate religious voices in the public square surrounding migrant rights by considering another instance in which churches, especially the Catholic Church in the U.S., spoke unreservedly with one voice: the pro-life movement and the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The revocation of the “sensitive spaces” policy, which once shielded churches from immigration actions, has made them stages for security theater that uses spectacles of enforcement and illegality to cast “aliens” as figures of enmity.  Yet this policy also amplifies religious actors’ ability to assert counter-narratives that recast migrants as subjects of moral concern.  Drawing on Robert Cover’s narrative theory of law, I contend that when these counter-narratives are mobilized in the courts they make not only a symbolic, but a material difference.  Such a difference can be seen in Evangelical Lutheran Church in America et al. v. Department of Homeland Security et al., where the plaintiffs’ rights of religious conscience, enacted through the provision of sanctuary, are externalized from the private sphere of belief and projected into public space as zones of exception that halt the advance of federal power and glimpse a world more compassionate than our own.