In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This presentation draws on the largest study of Buddhist buildings in England to examine how diaspora Buddhist communities move from provisional, improvised worship spaces to permanent, symbolically meaningful sacred architecture (Tomalin & Starkey 2016). Most Buddhist groups begin in private homes, rented rooms, or adaptively reused buildings such as houses, shops, libraries, churches, and warehouses. As communities grow, some develop purpose‑built temples that blend traditional Asian architectural forms with British materials and planning requirements. These architectural transformations reshape religious experience: renovated interiors, dedicated shrine rooms, and culturally significant design elements create places that practitioners describe as spiritually uplifting and identity‑affirming. Renovation itself becomes a form of Buddhist practice and community‑building. The presentation argues that these shifting material forms—whether adapted or purpose-built—mark an evolving civic presence, as Buddhist centres become visible landmarks and heritage sites. This evolution parallels broader Asian diasporic patterns and highlights how built form actively shapes sacred experience.

This paper examines how temple architecture functions as a material strategy of continuity within the American Jain diaspora. Focusing on the Jain Center of Southern California (JCSC), I ask: how does the transition from provisional domestic worship spaces to purpose-built temple complexes reshape religious pedagogy, sectarian negotiation, and communal identity? Drawing on ethnographic research, including interviews and participant observation, I trace the movement from early home-based religious education—conducted in living rooms and garages by first-generation migrants—to institutional temple environments modeled after Indian marble temples (derāsars). I argue that architectural consolidation reorganizes not only ritual practice but also educational programming, authority structures, and generational transmission. Purpose-built temples incorporate classrooms inspired by American institutions while also enabling ecumenical worship that softens sectarian distinctions between Digambara and Śvetāmbara communities. Engaging scholarship in material religion and diaspora studies, this paper demonstrates that built space does not merely contain the sacred; it actively produces religious subjectivity and communal belonging. In the Jain case, architecture becomes a medium through which minority identity is stabilized, pedagogical innovation is institutionalized, and continuity is materially imagined for future generations.

My contribution to this panel will examine the religious spaces created by South Asian Muslims in North America over the past half-century. The first purpose built mosque in the US was built by Albanian immigrants in Biddeford, Maine. The first such mosque in Canada was built by Lebanese Muslims in Edmonton, Alberta. In Toronto, as in Maine, the first mosque was also established by Albanian Muslims. With changes to immigration laws in both countries in the 1960s, South Asians began to be the largest Muslim community, replacing the larger Arab community and those from the Ottoman Empire. They are the largest in Canada, and may well be the second-largest in the US after African Americans. Canada, being part of the British Commonwealth, had a more direct path for South Asian Muslims. After a brief history of these communities and the mosques that they created, I will turn to the South Asian mosque spaces created by Sunni, Shi’a, Ahmadiyya, and Ismaili communities in North America. Particular attention will be given to the work of architect Gulzar Haider, as one of the key South Asian Muslim mosque architects.

On Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., sits Sikh Gurdwara D.C. It hosts regular worship services and langar and claims “civic space” (Tweed 2011) for Sikhs in the nation’s capital alongside other religions. It seeks to complicate a religious landscape primarily defined by White Christianity (Promey 2024). (Its front door is less than three hundred yards from the front door of Washington National Cathedral.) The building illustrates Sikh priorities and the difficulties of erecting a monumental structure in an American city, particularly the nation’s capital. While the building’s founders were among the first Sikhs in the capital, it was completed long after several, larger, suburban gurdwaras. Domes that would crown the building sit in front of it waiting for adequate funding and civic support. The building’s history reveals tensions in the American Sikh community between monumental claims and practical functions. Its structure illustrates the adaptable simplicity of Sikh architecture.

When religious communities erect monumental buildings in urban settings, how those structures are seen matters, shaping scholarship, planning policy, media representation, and public reception. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the BAPS Swaminarayan Mandir in Neasden, London, this paper takes as its case study a building described on the temple's own website as ‘Europe's first Traditional Hindu Temple’ and widely recognised as one of the most prominent religious buildings in Britain. The paper argues that seeing religious architecture should engage what it terms a ‘depth structure’: the theological, historical, and architectural genealogies from which material form arises. At Neasden, the depth structure reveals that architectural form is oriented not only toward what the building communicates but toward what it does: cultivating affective dispositions in those who enter it and securing the conditions for theological preservation across generations. In doing so, the paper offers new ways of thinking about religious materiality, particularly sacred architecture that is visibly different in the urban landscape.

In Appalachian serpent handling congregations, time rarely flows linearly. Services stretch into the night, danger slows perception, and the promise of the end lingers just out of reach. Drawing on fieldwork in Appalachian Pentecostal communities, this paper examines how faith is lived in a rhythm of waiting: for the Spirit, for deliverance, for the end itself. Within these sanctuaries, time accelerates in song and testimony, then stills as a handler lifts a snake, producing a temporal experience that is simultaneously urgent, cyclical, and suspenseful.

These practices enact a form of worldbuilding through nostalgic apocalypticism, in which longing for the past coexists with anticipation of the world’s completion. Through attention to pacing, repetition, and the ethnographer’s own shifting sense of duration, this paper traces how handlers inhabit a time that is both promised and perpetually delayed. Their worship offers an anthropology of temporality in which memory, anticipation, and embodiment are inseparable.

Situated within cultural anthropology, this paper speaks to young Muslim women's aspirations of securing government jobs in Patna, India. Drawing on ethnographic research, I demonstrate how women reimagine aspirations as a form of pious practice, cultivating ethical subjectivity in holding kismat (divine will/predetermined future) and mehnat (human labor) in productive tension throughout their aspirational trajectories. Thinking of destiny as something to be made, women focus on hard work as pious labor bracketing conversations around destiny in their tayyari or preparation phase. When examination attempts prove unsuccessful, women distinguish kismat from badkismati (circumstantial ill-fortune), striving to imagine alternative futures that remain open and unknown. By centering aspiration as pious practice, I extend anthropological attention of everyday Islam into the domain of futurity, where futures are simultaneously open and predetermined. 

Muslims who experience forced migration face difficult decisions as they contemplate death. Many Muslim immigrants wish to be returned to their homeland for burial, but what if exile precludes that option? This paper examines this quandary from the perspective of Turkish Muslim exiles in the U.S. The experience of the spatial dislocation of exile has led some immigrants to reimagine their positions and trajectory in a sacred timescape. Some look to sacred history to the Prophet, who suffered exile and was buried in the land of migration. Some look to the Sufi idea that human existence in the physical world is itself a form of exile, since separation from the divine is an endemic aspect of life, one that will be soothed in (future) death. That is, the immigrants reinterpret the sacred past and future to make sense of their experience of exile and death in a foreign land. 

Guides for interreligious dialogue tend to avoid specifically interracial dynamics. Similarly, guides for anti-racism avoid interreligious dynamics. Race and religion are simultaneously interwoven social constructions and lived realities that impact dialogue together. Building on the work of Khyati Joshi, who focuses on the systemic contexts of white Christian privilege, this interactive discussion will introduce relevant research and articulate three problematic postures of "centering," "othering," and "misrelating" that white Christians often bring to specifically interreligious interactions. Through a practical exercise scrutinizing current interreligious policy, participants will build skills for attending to the unique ways white privilege and Christian privilege converge to impede substantive interreligious progress and how to make realignments. 

This interactive workshop will discuss core aspects of Resisting Anti-Judaism: Practices of Christian Solidarity (Fortress, 2026). The fundamental argument of this book is that while Christians in the post-Shoah era have done significant work in rejecting the most odious elements of bias against Jews, there still remains many structural elements of anti-Judaism within Christian thought and practices. In order to deal with these difficult remainders, it is necessary for Christians to advance new paradigms for thinking about and engaging with Jews and Judaism. This workshop will focus on three core ideas from this book, anti-supersessionism, covenantal imagination, and solidarity, and provide concrete illustration of their implementation.

Interreligious Studies is increasingly charged with developing new models of formation and professional preparation amid shifting religious demographics, rising nonreligion, and intensifying pressures on higher education and adjacent professional fields. This paper reports results from a comprehensive MDiv Effectiveness Assessment at a Divinity School attached to a Research University that is intentionally multireligious and multi-vocational. Ministry formation (inside and beyond congregational settings) requires interreligious competence as a baseline professional capacity, not an elective specialization. Using a pragmatic, mixed-methods design (institutional data analysis; qualitative analysis of direct measures of student work; stakeholder surveys, interviews, and focus groups), we identify what most strongly predict vocational readiness for interreligious practice and teaching. Findings highlight transferable competencies cultivated through multireligious cohort learning, practice-facing pedagogy, and field-based formation where religious difference is operational. We offer grounded implications for curriculum design, faculty development, and evaluation strategies for formation for applied interreligious leadership.

I am developing a preliminary model of studying religious boundary-work that I wish to discuss at the interactive workshop. It proposes five areas of investigation: the location of the boundary; the Interpretation of the postulated difference; the means by which boundaries are expressed, interpreted, and possibly enforced; the motives for drawing boundaries, and the agents involved in boundary-work. I would love to have a critical conversation with colleagues in the field about how this model might be useful in the analysis of interreligious situations.

The panel advances a model of teaching that bridges scholarship and lived experience without collapsing one into the other. It argues that death and dying, far from being marginal topics, provide a generative lens for interreligious learning and ethical formation. By integrating comparative ritual study, practitioner insight, reflective practice, and critical theory, educators can transform how mortality is addressed in higher education, healthcare institutions and congregations.

This session will be of interest to scholars of religion, theology, pastoral care, medical humanities, and related fields seeking pedagogical approaches that are intellectually rigorous, interreligiously literate, and responsive to the existential realities shaping students’ lives.

This interactive workshop roundtable introduces a new edited volume, Beyond Dialogue: New Paradigms in Interfaith Discourse (SUNY Press, 2026). Given the most recent rise in religious extremism, and the suppression of free speech that has targeted dissenting voices and marginalized communities, we have felt it both urgent and important to critically approach the possibilities and limitations of interfaith discourse, in our communities and through our scholarship. Contributors blend academic analysis with activist praxis, employing diverse methodologies spanning theology, history, sociology, and anthropology. Through case studies from North America and beyond, close textual readings, and theoretical interventions––featuring  underrepresented voices including Pagan, Baha'i, and "nones" perspectives often absent from interreligious scholarship––we ask: beyond dialogue, toward what? Brief presentations from editors and contributors on the volume will introduce critical frameworks including "Beyond Interfaith Settlerhood" and "Engaged Buddhism as Engaged Community.”We offer brief remarks before opening to a larger conversation, inviting collaboration with fellow scholar-practitioners. 

Campus interfaith work is often structured around professional staff designing programs for students. This presentation proposes a different model, more at home in student affairs, wherein students are the primary architects of interfaith encounter, and reflects on three years of implementation at a mid-size university. Several student office worker lines were reconceived as an "Interfaith Fellows" program, tasking students with designing programming rooted in their own identities and communities. One fellow's hosting of Ganesh Chaturthi revealed significant unmet demand for Hindu religious life that institutional structures had not previously addressed. A partnership with the student-led Dialogue Society produced monthly interfaith dinners averaging thirty attendees, centering structured conversation across religious difference in a format students shaped and sustained. This presentation reflects on what the model requires institutionally, what it makes possible pedagogically, and what it suggests about student agency and genuine interfaith encounter.

This paper addresses the impact of Hindu college students’ interreligious engagement upon their overall sense of belonging in the context of student clubs/organizations. Data was gathered using interviews and photo-elicitation, and the research method was thematic analysis informed by descriptive phenomenology. Educational researchers have commonly focused on institutionally-sponsored clubs and events as sites of belonging for religiously minoritized students, but these sites were heavily problematized in this study. Because interfaith events typically have an educational focus, they center non-Hindu students while Hindu students assume the labor of religious literacy-building for their peers. Hindu students also experienced religious coercion related to non-Hindu student organizations. Positive experiences of interreligious engagement in group settings were significant but not institutionally-coordinated. Overall, this study provides insight into the role of Christian privilege in interfaith programming and its potential impact upon Hindu students. 

This paper proposes a new framework to rectify Western-based bias in academic interreligious studies by suggesting the inculturation theology of religious diversity—focusing on the common theme of inculturation among different religions. It examines how various religious traditions have adapted their theologies of belonging and community through the process of inculturation. Specifically, this paper analyzes two key examples: Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian vision of local education and World Christianity’s vision of a new Christendom. By examining these cases, this paper shows the mechanics of inculturation at both theoretical and practical levels. Ultimately, it demonstrate how the process of inculturation fosters mutual transformation and develops new religious phenomena. By offering a phenomenological approach rather than a philosophical imposition, the paper shows how different religions reconcile differences and blur their boundaries through continuous communication within the process of inculturation. Based on this, the paper also attempts to illuminate the future of interreligious dialogue/theology.

This presentation has two goals. First, I will define the term ‘covenantal pluralism,’ a task complicated both by the relative newness of the literature—leaving the term at times underdetermined—and by the fact that the term encompasses multiple components. Second, I will examine some of the theoretical challenges and underlying assumptions of the term. Ultimately, although covenantal pluralism offers a robust form of religious pluralism, I will argue that the term requires further clarification if it is to serve as a useful framework for addressing some of our present-day religiously charged conflicts. 

This paper examines the Buddhist "Walk for Peace" sponsored by the Hương Đạo Vipassana Bhavana Center in Ft. Worth, Texas.  From October 2025 through February 2026,  19 monks walked across several southern states on a 2,300 mile pilgrimage to Washington DC.   We'll consider how the Walk allowed for interreligious dialogue both as language and collective, embodied experience.   By examining the monks' voluntary suffering and daily "peace talks" hosted by civic groups, public schools, and churches, we'll see how audiences-- in-person and virtual--recognized a shared purpose and expressed an organic curiosity about Buddhist philosophy and rituals.   Finally, we'll imagine how shared embodied experiences might help establish interfaith understanding at a time when many white Christian Nationalists consider themselves under assault.        

This paper utilizes oral histories like Goodwater’s narrative to demonstrate children—as ideas and as living beings—shaped the development of Black Southern religious cultures from the antebellum period through the beginning of the twentieth century. Focused on nineteenth and early twentieth-century South Carolina, this paper argues Black communities often interpreted childhood as a period of heightened proximity to the more-than-human realm. The paper zooms into two distinct manifestations of this history. In the first section, I examine how Black elders, particularly women, drew on African-descended ritual systems when interpreting the distinctive markings and birth circumstances of certain children, which they viewed as indicative of metaphysical wisdom that was instructive for the entire community. In the next section, I highlight how Black community members carefully mediated children’s distance between the spirit world and the physical realm through ritual performance

After the 2018 discovery of ninety-five unmarked graves of Black convict laborers in Sugar Land, Texas, a process of re-membering began. The most prominent emergence is the African American Heritage Monument and Park—an Afro-futurist architectural feat and now one of the nation’s largest Black history sites. Situated on a Reconstruction-era Black cemetery in a Freedman’s town, integrating Ghanaian Adinkra symbolism, and structured to guide visitors into a pilgrimage-like practice which creolizes a “sankofa journey” with a “stations of the of cross” like contemplative encounter, Black religious history and Black religions are both recalled and enacted by the monument. This paper, AAHM’s lead historical researcher and drafter of interpretive installations, attempts to reflect on the communal processes through which this re-articulation of Black memory came to being and to trace the ways by which Black heritage funds an imagination of insurrectionary freedoms, thereby inaugurating the construction of futures otherwise.

This paper argues that the Black nationalist organization the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) cultivated a “captive spirituality” among its members. Founded in 1968, the RNA declared Black people in the United States a nation held captive by the U.S. government and demanded territorial sovereignty over five Southern states at the height of the Black Power era. Drawing on political education curricula, economic plans, meeting minutes, and internal memoranda from 1968 to 1975, I use “captive spirituality” as a theoretical lens to uncover the spiritual intellectualism shaping RNA leaders’ visions of a liberated Black future. This intellectualism was grounded in talk of soul evolution, esotericism, and ego death as ways of theorizing the modes of being required to build an independent Black nation. In contrast to scholarship that treats Black Power nationalism as the secular successor to earlier religio-racial movements, this paper shows how RNA organizing was grounded in metaphysical thinking that placed Black spirituality at the center of its aims and objectives.

As scholars engage sites of religious life, how should we understand unexpected moments of encounter that arise as we move through religious or sacred spaces? This paper explores the relationship between research and the archive in the process of discovery. Centering the residence of Elijah Muhammad as a site of lived religion and “living presence,” the paper considers not only the possibility of encounter within the archive but also advances a theory of presence; indeed, encounter as epistemology. In this construction, encounters within sacred archives reveal forms of knowledge about religious communities and illuminate how adherents articulate and perform their religious identities. Finally, the paper interrogates the notion of initiation as a form of permission to enter the archive and to experience the religious world it contains.

This paper reflects on what it means to encounter twentieth-century Black nationalist women’s spiritual lives within formal academic archives. Across mainstream repositories, traces of these women often appear fragmented, obscured, and fugitive, rarely foregrounding their religious visions or spiritual freedom dreams. Engaging these materials requires narrative interpretation and ethical, affective listening; i.e. reading for presence within archival absence and lack. Thinking with archival scholar Laura Helton, I ask how scholars might reclaim the genre of the Black archive by attending to the fugitivity of Black nationalist women’s spirituality across dispersed institutional collections. In doing so, I call for scholars to recover Black nationalist women as religious thinkers whose spiritual visions of freedom shaped twentieth-century freedom struggles. By approaching spirituality as a through-line ligamenting fragmented and surveillant archival records, I demonstrate how scholars can re-member the fugitive traces of Black nationalist women’s lives and authorize fuller historical narratives of their contributions.

This paper argues that John of the Cross’s apophatic spirituality offers a decolonial practice capable of healing the interior fractures produced by coloniality. Drawing on Christopher Lasch’s account of cultural narcissism and decolonial thinkers such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Frantz Fanon, and Gloria Anzaldúa, I reinterpret “Imperial Narcissus” as the theological‑political persona formed by modernity’s colonial order—a self that mirrors its own supremacy while wounding those rendered “other.” In this context, John’s dark nights become a journey of being/not, a spiritual undoing of forms of “Being” shaped by coercive metaphysics. Composed from a carceral space, his prose and poetry reveal luminous darkness as protest and reconfiguration. Through readings of The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, and The Spiritual Canticle, I show how this descent disrupts colonial hierarchies while also examining the limits of feminine allegories. Ultimately, becoming nada offers a pathway of de‑linking from colonial power.

The closely-related emergences of psychedelics and Artificial Intelligence point toward a future in which non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSCs) become far more widespread than in the past. Looking at the imagined pasts of these new phenomena may help elucidate the contours of their futures.  First, there now exists a small genre of Jewish speculative histories describing Biblical, Talmudic, Kabbalistic, and Hasidic psychedelic use, which, like many Jewish "searches for a usable past," projects its theological concerns and spiritual practices back into an imagined Jewish past. And second, there are emerging discussions of AI entities and spiritual guides that refer to past mystical and even halachic precedents (Elijah, maggidim, the tzaddik, and sabbath agents).

These discourses point to the transformative impact of NOSCs and to the noetic quality that often attends them; to the dual nature of legitimation strategies (legitimating either AI/psychedelics or Judaism), and to an emerging Jewish archaic revival.  

Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy has been influential on psychologists who wish to integrate “spiritual” or “religious” concerns into the practice of psychotherapy. In this paper, I examine the irony of psychologists adopting Otto’s categories of the “numinous” and the “mysterium tremendum,” categories which resist the rational understanding and instrumentalization sought by psychology. Accordingly, I argue that psychotherapy cannot be a venue for “spirituality,” insofar as that spirituality seeks the kind of mystical experiences that Otto describes.

This paper explores how voice-hearing experiences lead those who hear them toward transcendent and transformative lives, not only for their own but also the lives of others who share this suffering. Drawing on memoirs by those whose voice-hearing has been diagnosed and treated as psychotic within the psychiatric system, this paper examines how such experiences may nonetheless function as mystical phenomena. Central to this inquiry is how hearing voices, approached outside a purely pathological framework, may catalyze profound transformation — of the individual and of the unjust systems that produce suffering among people with psychiatric diagnoses. The paper attends to the vulnerabilities these experiences entail: forced treatment, social alienation, stigma, and the epistemic violence of psychiatric diagnosis that dismisses the experiencer's own understanding. It ultimately argues that voice-hearing, as a transformative experience whose full consequences cannot be known in advance, opens pathways toward spiritual connection and collective liberation.

The idea that prāṇāyāma purifies moral faults appears both in several haṭhayoga texts and in earlier accounts of breath control in Dharmaśāstra literature. While prāṇāyāma has been extensively studied as both a physiological and contemplative technique within yoga’s ancillary disciplines, its role as a form of penance has received comparatively little interest. This paper investigates the rationale behind the expiatory role of prāṇāyāma. On what grounds do yoga texts claim that prāṇāyāma purifies sins? What is the mechanism through which prāṇāyāma purifies moral faults? I trace the rationale for the expiatory nature of breath control back to the description of the sacrifice to the fires in the prāyaścitta section of the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa. The “elemental” logic grounded in the ritual relations among air, fire, and water present in the Vedic agnihotra offers a useful explanation for the expiatory mechanism of prāṇāyāma in later traditions.

In the body of literature belonging to the Unexcelled Yoga Tantras, the contexts in which the six-phased yoga is practiced include the practices of sevā, the haṭha-yoga, and the stage of completion. In each of these practices, the prāṇāyāma takes different forms that have corresponding results—some being temporary and others ultimate—including the five types of meditative experience, a valid cognition, the purification of the six psychophysical aggregates, and other bodily constituents, praises by bodhisattvas, and the attainment of the deities, such as Amoghasiddhi and others. To speak of the role of prāṇāyāma in the six-phased yoga of the Unexcelled Yoga Tantras, one must uncover its relation to other phases of the six-phased yoga and to a broader, conceptual and practical framework of the given tantra. This presentation intends to do exactly this, and to disclosinge certain commonalities and differences among the practices of prāṇāyāma in the Kālacakratantra and the Guhyasamājatantra.

This presentation investigates the roots of a little-studied form of yoga: examination of the flow of breath within the body’s channels (nāḍī), typically for prognostication. Such practices are generally known today as svarodaya, “divination by the breath” or “breathing prognistication.” Despite its prominence in early-modern yoga as well as Indian Sufism, svarodaya remains a neglected area, perhaps because it sits uneasily within categories such as meditation, posture, and breath-control, and due to its surprising connections to medical and warfare divination. As this presentation examines, svarodaya has its roots in the early Śaiva tantra corpus (circa 6th-9th centuries), in practices for examining the circulation of breath and the soul or life-force in bodily channels for self-knowledge and ritual power. 

Although breath-regulation (prāṇāyāma) occupies a central place in many yoga traditions, its role in Jain thought remains understudied. This paper examines Yaśovijaya’s treatment of prāṇāyāma in his Dvātriṃśaddvātriṃśikā (DD). Yaśovijaya, one of the most influential Jain intellectuals of the seventeenth century, engages Patañjali and Vyāsa, adopting their definitions of inhalation (pūraka), retention (kumbhaka), and exhalation (recaka), and acknowledges the benefits of the practice. He argues that prāṇāyāma is acceptable for those inclined toward breathing practices insofar as it reduces karmically binding activity. Ultimately, however, he redefines it not as a technique of physiological control or as related to prāṇa as vital capacity, but as inner transformation (bhāva) encompassing three main components: (1) the expulsion of attachment, (2) the cultivation of insight, and (3) the stabilization of knowledge. I show how his account strategically reinterprets authoritative yogic discourse to align it with specifically Jain soteriological and ethical commitments.

This paper introduces an eruption of publishing about the gross and subtle body known to classical Buddhist Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna tradition among Tibetan monastics during the so-called “Decade of the Brain” (1990s). Responding to the privileging of the neurosciences and its materialist modeling of mind as entirely reducible to brain, a handful of prominent Tibetan monastic scholars in the PRC and in the refugee diaspora sought to elaborately translate and refuse the neuroscience of the day. In these Tibetan refusals of the brain sciences, not only was classical South and Inner Asian Buddhist knowledge about the subtle body and subtle winds restaged for a new global audience. In the process, the epistemological status of the subtle body came to possess a metonymical power to stand in juxtaposition with the imaginary totalities of the West, science, the Indian secular nation-state, and the erasures and exile of Tibetan civilization.