In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper explores how Humanistic Buddhism can contribute to reimagining the future of interreligious dialogue in a world marked by polarization and ethical uncertainty. It places Hsing Yun’s teaching “I Am Buddha” in dialogue with Søren Kierkegaard’s claim that “subjectivity is truth.” Although arising from different traditions—Chinese Mahayana Buddhism and nineteenth-century Danish Christianity—both expressions suggest that religious truth becomes meaningful only when it is existentially appropriated and embodied in lived practice. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the paper argues that these teachings function as transformative metaphors that reshape how practitioners understand themselves in relation to religious truth. By highlighting the formative role of metaphor in spiritual life, the study proposes a model of interreligious dialogue grounded in shared processes of existential transformation, demonstrating how Humanistic Buddhist thought can deepen contemporary approaches to dialogue across religious traditions.

A Zen monk and I were standing together watching some Jewish women lighting Shabbat candles on Shabbat eve. He offered his interpretation of why the women covered their eyes when having lit the candles. He said that you cannot look at the light of Shabbat with the same eyes with which you see the light of shabbat. So the women had to close their weekday eyes and open new eyes - shabbat eyes. This presentation explicates my understanding of my Zen friend in terms of the ZEN concept of No-Mind. Then I apply this explication to some new readings of traditional Jewish texts, prominently by Reb Nachman of Breslav. 

This paper explores the intersection of religious traditions and scientific perspectives on youth autonomy, particularly in decision-making regarding gender-affirming care. It examines how various religious practices across Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism mark gradual development toward autonomy, with significant milestones occurring between the ages of 8 and 16. These rites of passage signify moral and intellectual responsibility in a religious context. Scientific research on cognitive development, including studies on identity formation, limbic system regulation, and prefrontal cortex maturation, further informs the conversation. The paper argues that while religious traditions emphasize a measured approach to youth autonomy, scientific insights call for caution in granting full autonomy power during adolescence, given the ongoing development of critical cognitive functions. The paper concludes that legal frameworks should balance the need for youth agencies with the responsibility to protect their well-being, considering both spiritual guidance and scientific evidence to support informed, mature decision-making.

This paper interrogates Søren Kierkegaard’s For Self-Examination as anti-hermeneutical method. Standing as a seminal precursor to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of the dissimilarity between truth and method is Kierkegaard’s notion that the earnest (as interpretive summum bonum) is not found in an "objective" and impersonal technique. Rather, a theo-teleological gaze—focused on transformation through union in Christ—demands subjective appropriation through our prejudices over detached exegesis “against” them. Interpretive assurance becomes busyness, where “the people alter the conception of what earnestness is and consider being busy with interpretation to be real earnestness." Here, the mirror of the Word exposes such pseudo-earnestness, insisting on immediate self-confrontation and action. There is no “objective” mediator or method we can defend our prejudices with. Rather, what stands greater is the final upbuilding maxim from Either/Or, that "in relation to God we are always in the wrong,” which serves as the humbling criterion, built upon our eternal sanctification.

In For Self-Examination, Kierkegaard’s account of reading Scripture is strikingly immediate. He trusts in Scripture's ability to reveal itself to the reader through the Spirit's inspiration. He seems to lack any concerns about deferred meaning that put a gap between reader and text. This might seem to align Kierkegaard with evangelical doctrines of inerrancy, though I argue he is closer to trends in New Criticism and Post-Criticism. Further, I argue that such trust in Scripture's immediacy is laudable today in the face of Christian postliberalism and Christian nationalism, which privilege the mediating role of the interpretative community as authoritative for Scriptural interpretation. Thereby, however, the Scripture loses its power to criticize and correct, and capacity for critique is lacking in these movements. Therefore, Kierkegaard’s sense of Scripture’s immediacy is an important rejoinder to postliberal and Christian nationalist hermeneutics.

This paper explores Søren Kierkegaard’s claim in For Self-Examination that Scripture should be approached as a mirror rather than as an object of detached analysis. A mirror is not normally regarded as an object in itself; instead, it recedes as the viewer focuses on the reflected image. Kierkegaard argues that Scripture functions similarly. When readers treat the text merely as an object of scholarship, they risk neutralizing its reflective and transformative function.

Drawing on Diarmaid MacCulloch’s account of Christianity’s historical shift toward individual subjectivity and Erich Auerbach’s analysis of the biblical orientation toward transcendent meaning, the paper situates Kierkegaard’s insight within broader intellectual history. It then brings Kierkegaard into dialogue with Keiji Nishitani’s distinction between asking “What is for me?” and “What am I for?” Together these perspectives illuminate how Scripture, approached as mirror, can provoke a destabilizing transformation of subjective identity.

This paper investigates whether Kierkegaard’s model of self-reflection, as it operates within his Biblical hermeneutics, contains an implicit normative dimension, a standard by which one mode of engaging with Scripture can be judged more adequate than another. Kierkegaard’s approach to reading the Bible is not a neutral or descriptive enterprise; it is bound up with his conviction that Scripture addresses the individual reader personally and demands inward appropriation. The central question is therefore: does Kierkegaard’s Biblical hermeneutics presuppose a normative account of self-reflection, and if so, what are its criteria, its justification, and its limits?

U.S. discourse around migration often centers economic debates that position vulnerable citizens and migrants as opponents for limited economic resources and opportunities. The financial valence of policies is especially relevant with increased detentions and deportations closely related to economic gains for a few at the harm of many lives. In response, Catholic social thought provides valuable resources to interrogate the assumptions laden in neoliberal economic analysis and re-orient conversation towards the ethical values of human dignity and the common good. Pope Francis especially articulates the harms of consumption and exclusion while also offering a counter-vision of economic life that centers human flourishing of all. As such, I propose that Pope Francis’s social teaching helps us recognize the problem of current economic structures that incentivize harmful treatment and exclusion of migrants and offer creative alternative modes of economic life that center the human person, regardless of citizenship status. 

Immigration detention centers form what Michel Foucault termed “heterotopias,” real spaces whose characteristics reveal new aspects of the surrounding spatiality. Engaging theologically with these heterotopias has great urgency in the face of policies of mass detention and deportation in the United States. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of “abolition geography,” “making freedom as a place” within these heterotopic sites, in dialogue with concepts from decolonial theorist María Lugones, offers an alternate spatiality within these sites to their intended carceral design. Correlating the human act of “abolition geography” with theologian Mary Emily Duba’s concept of God as room-making place in situations of displacement and theologian Loída Martell’s theorizing of the Reign of God as located with sojourners in border-spaces demonstrates how divine presence is embodied through human acts of life-affirming resistance and place-making. This presents a new paradigm for interpreting how God’s presence, more broadly, is actualized in creation through human freedom-making. 

This project examines how Queer Latine Christians in the U.S. cultivate ethical imaginaries through ritual practice in response to migrant carcerality. Focusing on the church Nuestra Cuir Chingoña and its devotion to Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, I analyze anti-carceral vigils held for migrants who have been detained, deported, or killed. Drawing on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with thirteen interlocutors, I argue that these ritual gatherings produce a minoritarian counterpublic in which undocumented vulnerability is transformed into collective ethical obligation. In these spaces, prayer and devotional practice become technologies of protection, remembrance, and solidarity. Bringing queer of color critique into conversation with ethnographic research on Latine Christianity, I show how the church’s ethical imaginaries challenge White Christian nationalist deportation logics that discipline migrant belonging. These rituals do not simply mourn loss; they cultivate forms of collective life that resist carcerality and imagine futures of migrant survival.  

Drawing on German- and Indigenous-language sources from eighteenth-century Moravian archives, this paper argues that early Moravian theology made motherhood a central theological and ecclesiological category displaced biological maternity into a diffuse form of spiritual reproduction. Moravians figured the Holy Spirit as Mother and recognized female leaders as spiritual mothers, thereby relocating maternal authority from biological reproduction to communal spiritual care. In mission communities among Lenape and Mohican Christians, these formulations encountered Eastern Algonquian matrilineal kinship systems, generating forms of translation, friction, and appropriation. Indigenous women’s participation in institutions such as the Single Sisters’ Choirs further detached maternity from marriage and biological reproduction. Moravian missions thus emerge as sites where motherhood functioned as a contested technology of governance, intimacy, and communal belonging.

Can breastfeeding a child be seen as mystical practice? Early Sufi hagiographies often present infants as “distractions” from mystical piety. In this framework, Sufi women either avoided having children or “paused” their devotions until their children were self-sufficient. Drawing on feminist methodologies, this presentation argues that viewing breastfeeding as a distraction from God is rooted in a masculine-centered worldview. Because medieval Islamic legal, religious, and medical sources recommended a two-year lactation period free of sexual activity, I suggest this period could be one of intense religious focus for Sufi mothers. Beyond being freed of sexual obligations to their spouse, the belief that a woman’s character influenced the quality of her breastmilk, women might be extra scrupulous in mystical devotion during lactation. Finally, because a nursing baby is utterly dependent upon their mother, I argue that breastfeeding can be seen as a means to meditate upon one’s dependence upon God.

This paper reconsiders premature child death in ancient Greece and Rome by challenging the assumption that high infant mortality prevented deep parental attachment. Following Adrienne Rich, it distinguishes between motherhood as institution and mothering as embodied practice. Building on Sara Ruddick’s concept of “maternal thinking,” it argues that early death marked the collapse of an ongoing project of preservation and growth.

Placing material evidence at the center, the paper examines how vulnerability and loss were negotiated through objects, bodies, and ritual spaces. Funerary terracottas of nurses and pedagogues, burial assemblages, epigraphic monuments, and protective amulets reveal dense networks of caregiving practices. Drawing on Susan Sered’s analysis of women-centered religious domains, it situates childbirth, infant protection, and mourning within gendered spheres of ritual expertise embedded in lived religion.

Material practices of protection and commemoration demonstrate that ancient communities did not normalize infant death but ritually engaged its destabilizing force.

I read Toni Morrison’s Paradise as a vision of worldmaking through black maternal religious practice. Employing character analysis, I trace how material and somatic practices are religious actions of coming into voice, or as I argue, processes of self-regard. I argue that in Paradise, regard emerges as a central fulcrum of transformation. I read Morrison’s own writings on self-regard alongside political theorist Wairimu Njoya to theorize how regard more broadly, and self-regard specifically emerge as religious practice of attunement, care, and attention. Finally, I (re)turn to Morrison’s initial address thirty-one years ago, and the ways in which her plenary took root. I place womanist ethicist Katie G. Cannon’s reflections on Morrison’s address in conversation with the practice of regard. Black women’s reproductive labor is one of the sites of ultimate religious reflection; a place where questions of justice, right relationship, possibility, harm, evil, accountability, desire and agency are enfleshed. 

This paper considers both the material and textual-archival legacy of Nellie Mae Rowe. Examining Rowe’s references to Africana religions, her ideologies of motherhood and childhood; and her apocalyptic and visionary theories, I argue that the artist conceived of her artistic practice and playhouse as a ministry and a sanctuary respectively. Through close readings of several pieces from Rowe’s canon of work as well as extant oral histories, I demonstrate how Rowe utilized acts of religious creation to invite audiences into practices of improvisation, play, and imagination amid the ongoing social realities facing rural Black Southerners in the late twentieth century, such as gentrification, segregation, white supremacist violence, and poverty.  

This paper will seek to depict one element of the religious identity of T.S. Eliot’s play, The Cocktail Party. I wish to show, by focusing on the influence of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in a play with obvious Christian theology and imagery that the play is undoubtedly hybrid, creatively combining as it does elements of Eliot’s earlier philosophy, Christian love theology, mysticism, and various sources from Indian thought and practice. Further, I wish to suggest that the play itself implies a model of intersubjectivity and poetics that is partially derived from the Indian text.  In this, Eliot’s play is an incipient comparative theology that takes as its starting point the kind of detachment and contemplative attention that it also demands of its audience in the act of experiencing the play. Eliot’s play, far from reflecting a strictly orthodox Christianity, aims to re-signify the tradition through the dialogical tension it embodies. 

The temple built by the Sze Yap association in San Francisco in 1853 is frequently cited as the first Buddhist temple in the United States. This paper examines the uncritical application of the syncretic Three Teachings framework, a presumed blend of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, and its influence on the study of early Chinese Buddhism in the United States. By reexamining the institutional roles of district associations (huiguan), such as the Sze Yao association, and other mutual aid organizations, this paper highlights the underappreciated role of smaller, privates temples in introducing Buddhism to the United States. This paper attempts to shed light on the Chinese pioneers who enshrined the first Buddhist icons in privately-owned temples, including the temples of Li Xiyi and Li Putai in San Francisco, Wong Nim’s temple in San Bernadino, and the family complexes of the Wong clan, all of which enshrined images of the goddess Guanyin.

How do second-generation Asian American youth engage with Buddhism while growing up in temple communities? Drawing on ethnographic interviews with adolescents participating in youth programs at Hsi Lai Temple in Southern California, this paper examines how young participants understand their relationship to Buddhism through volunteering, peer relationships, temple activities, and shared ethical values. The findings show that participation in Buddhist youth programs does not necessarily produce clear religious identification. While some youth identify as Buddhist, others relate to Buddhism primarily as cultural heritage, ethical orientation, or community belonging. At the same time, temple leaders describe youth programs through the framework of Humanistic Buddhism as skillful means designed to attract youth through activities and relationships before introducing Buddhist teachings more deeply. The paper argues that Buddhist identity among second-generation Asian American adolescents of Chinese ancestry develops through gradual and relational engagement rather than through formal religious identification.

In this presentation, I analyze the history of the worship of Kuan-yin in the United States. I also look at how and why this figure has been embraced by many feminists and those who identify as transgender to evaluate potential futures centered around this bodhisattva. 

In 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that "sex" in the 2010 Equality Act refers exclusively to biological sex. For the Triratna Buddhist Community, one of the UK's largest Buddhist movements, organized in significant part along a “single-sex” binary, this ruling has introduced a series of ethical, cultural and institutional dilemmas. This paper traces how a self-described modern Buddhist movement came to deeply encode gender into its workings. It considers the historical, cultural and idiosyncratic forces, including the legacy of its founder Sangharakshita, that shaped this framework, and the challenges that now confront Triratna. Particular attention is given to trans and non-binary practitioners already ordained or on the ordination training path, and most directly impacted. The paper argues that these developments accelerate generational, hermeneutic and organizational reckonings within a complex global community, and raise a number of analytical questions pertaining to concepts of modernity and tradition in the Buddhist world. 

This paper explores the category of time in the philosophy of the Grammarians, primarily in Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya. It argues that thinkers of this school incorporated and adapted earlier conceptualizations of time, including ancient Vedic views and ideas from the kālavāda, and examines the resulting doctrines in detail. The Grammarians’ temporal doctrine culminates in the Vākyapadīya, Bhartṛhari's seminal treatise integrating grammar and philosophy. For Bhartṛhari, time is the creative power of the Absolute Word (Word-Brahman), capable of creating, sustaining, and destroying all existing objects, through which the unmanifest Absolute becomes manifest. This paper provides a comprehensive account of Bhartṛhari’s concept of time, explains why this category occupies such a prominent place in his system, and demonstrates how he resolves apparent contradictions in the conceptualization of time, including its dual nature, simultaneous divisibility and indivisibility, and its coexistence with the Absolute Word.

This paper explores the cross-philosophical and inter-religious dimensions of Rāmakaṇṭha’s Sarvatobhadra, a tenth-century Kashmiri commentary on the Bhagavadgītā. Traditionally regarded as a foundational Vaiṣṇava scripture centered on devotion to Kṛṣṇa, the Gītā has nevertheless been interpreted across multiple philosophical and religious traditions. Rāmakaṇṭha, a Śaiva thinker and disciple of Utpaladeva associated with the Pratyabhijñā tradition, approaches the text from the perspective of Śaiva non-dualism. His commentary stands alongside that of Abhinavagupta (11th century), whose Gītārthasaṃgraha offers another influential Śaiva interpretation of the Kashmiri recension of the Gītā. How does a Śaiva philosopher engage with a scripture devoted to Viṣṇu? Through selected passages from the Sarvatobhadra, this paper examines how Rāmakaṇṭha reinterprets the Gītā’s theology within a Śaiva metaphysical framework, highlighting the fluid intellectual boundaries and shared hermeneutical practices of medieval Kashmiri thought.

This paper asks if it was possible for Hindu thinkers to conceive of intellectual difference as a productive attribute of śāstric discourse rather than a problem that needed to be negotiated through exclusion or hierarchical subsumption. I direct my query towards the reception of the Mokṣadharmaparvan’s(MDh) composite theology of Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Veda and the Pañcarātra among Hindu intellectuals to explore the modalities through which difference was understood and organized. A doxographical approach to the MDh’s eclectic theology can be observed in Viśiṣṭādvaita literature whereby intellectual difference was conceptualized in terms of possessing varying degrees of extraneity to the Veda. By contrast, Svāmīnārāyaṇa’s interpretive framework did not presume a confrontation with extraneity. Rather, he wielded difference to resolve the conceptual paradoxes that broadly characterized Hindu theological discourse. His approach presents an alternative to the treatment of difference within doxographical frameworks, which subsume or reject difference according to a normative hierarchy of authoritative discourse.

What does it mean to practice being in the future? This session will help instructors in higher education engage in understanding the future through practice and play. Through interactive game play participants will be able to create futures in the classroom setting that center hope and liberation and confront oppression, marginalization, and hierarchy.