In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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.

The Biafran War/Nigerian Civil War was a deeply contentious ordeal that took place between 1967-1970 and claimed the lives of upwards of 3 million Igbos. Many statements were given in response to this crisis, but none as provocative as that of former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger who labeled the Igbos the “Jews of West Africa.” This would not be the first nor last time global spectators of the Biafran War would draw comparisons between the atrocities attributed towards the Jews during the Holocaust and the experiences of the Igbos in Biafra. This paper asks in what ways did post-Holocaust consciousness affect international responses to anti-Igbo violence prior to and during the Biafran War (1965-1970) and to what extent did these framings have enduring effects on the Igbos in the post-Biafran epoch?

This paper presents the contours of a new book that charts the necessity of Catholic institutions to know their history and navigate submerged memory, in order to be part of the project of repair today.  Grace of the Ghosts:  A Theology of Institutional Reparation (Fordham University Press, 2025), sets out a roadmap for navigating memories of institutional complicity in the evils of White supremacy that have been death-dealing in the United States.  With micro-histories of some among the ghosts who haunt specific Catholic institutions – of university and parish – the paper details some ways of navigating memories of harm toward institutional reparation.

What does it mean to identify with former East German writer Christa Wolf as scholars in Holocaust studies? Through her elegiac efforts, I argue that we too can begin to confront our complicity in the oppression of others past and present. Focusing on Wolf’s novel Patterns of Childhood, I consider what it has meant for me as an American Jew to see myself mirrored in the life of a former Nazi through Nelly, the Nazi child Wolf’s protagonist once was, a child, like Wolf herself, raised and educated under the Nazi regime. I ask what we might learn about how, at least this one former Nazi child, a writer spent the rest of her life working through her past as it continued to shape an ever-shifting present. To do this, I turn to key moments from chapter 11 of Wolf’s novel, a chapter that begins with the final solution.

This paper examines how railroad circuses shaped religious and cultural narratives of the American West. As one of the most popular forms of entertainment from 1872 to 1920, circuses circulated myths of the West through performances, publicity, and embodied rituals, reaching audiences across North America and beyond. This study explores how circuses commodified Native American life, exoticized non-Christian religions, and staged eclectic religious ceremonies like the one the paper opens with, a memorial service blending a Protestant sermon with Native dances. These spectacles reinforced racial hierarchies and Protestant ideals while simultaneously creating spaces for improvisation and innovation. By tracing the intersections of religion, mobility, and empire, this paper argues that circuses were powerful instruments of U.S. colonialism and myth-making, projecting visions of the West as both wild and morally ordered; a future shaped by ideas of Protestant progress and animated by exoticized spectacle.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’s response to the 1918 flu epidemic provided an opportunity for the church to demonstrate its modern, secular character—and, by implication, its legitimacy as an American religion. By “secular,” I mean that in public, church members separated the category of religion from the category of medicine and subordinated the former to the latter. As they navigated the epidemic, Latter-day Saints strove to embody a vision of modern white American citizenry toward which they had been working since at least their arrival in the Great Basin in 1847. But even in this crucial moment, secularization was uneven. The 1918 flu epidemic, and Latter-day Saints’ responses to it, illuminate a range of ways that Latter-day Saints were modulating their religious practice and working out how to do religion “right” in a modernizing US—while not fully surrendering their identity as a distinctive religious group.

Southern California was a key location for the emergence of the modern anticult movement in the mid-twentieth century. The movement, which began as a loose network of parent support groups that opposed new religious movements they called "cults," was part of a larger debate about the future of religious freedom in the West, and the nation more broadly. California’s history of religious experimentation had fostered a religious diversity that many wanted to continue and expand. Yet, by the mid-twentieth century, the Cold War context and the migration to of the defense industry to California, gave rise to the religious and political conservatism that marked new groups as dangerous. As the anticult movement worked to exclude new religions from constitutional protections, it advanced the project of American Empire building and exemplified the long-standing dialectic between acceptance and opposition in the history of religion in the American West.

This paper examines how boundaries between “religion” and “spirituality” were negotiated and re-negotiated in three interrelated but distinct San Francisco organizations that engaged people with AIDS in the first four years of the epidemic. The three groups overlapped in personnel, purpose, and history. They came together in Ward 5B at San Francisco General, the first hospital ward dedicated exclusively to AIDS. They all engaged in work that could be deemed spiritual, and all had functions that traditionally fall under the rubric of religion. The paper examines how each group claimed and/or disavowed “religion” and “spirituality” in both what it did and how it described itself. It shows that grappling with “spiritual” versus “religious” is not just a question of individual identification but also an organizational grappling with particular tensions in a field, tensions that encourage groups to embrace and/or disavow religion and spirituality internally and in relation to other groups.

“Ecumenical shared ministries” (ESMs) result from two or more congregations merging resources and worshipping together while retaining distinct denominational affiliations (Beardsall et al. 2018). In 2025, I conducted a qualitative study of two ESMs in neighbouring rural communities. Adapting Sarah Dunlop’s method of “narrated photography,” I collected photos of each ESM’s worship space (Dunlop 2024). I then conducted semi-structured interviews to explore how congregants engage in receptive ecumenism to discover “what each tradition might…fruitfully have to learn from the other” (Murray 2008).

My qualitative data suggests that the messy work of receptive ecumenism happens for ESMs through real-time encounters between differently ritualized bodies in a shared worship space. One ESM models receptive ecumenism by bringing differently ritualized bodies into the same space for a shared liturgy. The other ESM rarely engages in receptive ecumenism because differently ritualized bodies take turns using the same space instead of worshipping together in it.

This paper examines how ritual practices emerging from the aftermath of Karbala, particularly lamentation, sermon, and pilgrimage, function as modes of theological production and moral agency in Shii Islam. Centering Zaynab bint Ali’s sermon in Yazid’s court and the ritual traditions that followed it, the paper argues that grief operates not merely as commemoration but as a future-oriented ethical practice that preserves and reconfigures power after mass violence. Drawing on ritual theory, feminist studies of religion, and historical analysis, the paper challenges dominant assumptions that ritual primarily stabilizes tradition or expresses submission. Instead, it demonstrates how Zaynab’s ritualized speech and mourning inaugurate a form of “devotional resistance” in which memory and endurance generate moral authority. By tracing how these practices continue in rituals such as Arbaeen, the paper shows how ritual connects past trauma to future ethical possibility, offering a model for studying ritual as both preservation and transformation.

In this presentation, I explore the role of ritual in a Muslim ethics of community organizing as a means to cultivate solidarity with the Muslim and non-Muslim other. In order to accomplish this, I focus on the “Faithful Fridays” interfaith gatherings held by contemporary American Muslim community organizer IMAN (Inner-city Muslim Action Network) in the Chicago area. Such ritual performances not only cultivate solidarities across religious, racial, and class-based lines; they also function as forms of “prefigurative politics” foreshadowing a world not dominated by state, capitalist, or racial supremacist logics. I unpack the moral imagination cultivated by these performances by drawing on the Qur’anic concept of the barzakh to capture a discursive space which both divides and connects and thus opens up new ways of conceiving the self and other. Consequently, a barzakh moral imagination offers promising insights into how we might understand solidarity.

Rather than look at protests becoming rituals, I here consider a case where ritual as part of protest. I maintain that because of consistent and violent attacks by ICE on protesters in Minneapolis/St. Paul, physical ritual movement became a vital part of protests. 

A resident of the area, and was part of the resistance to ICE agents arrest and detention of citizens. Here, I offer my scholarly observations on events, paired with theory on ritual and protest. This includes reviewing Victor Turner and Richard Schechner’s understanding of ritual and protest, considering theatrical and group components. However, I focus mainly on critical understandings of the use of music and dance in protests. To do so, I describe and examine two specific examples from the Minneapolis ICE protests - Westminster Presbyterian church and the Singing Resistance movement, and Native American dances at memorial sites. 

This paper will examine the role of writing, printing, mass media, and the internet in the evolution of religion to develop a systems theory of new religious movements. I will place a critical analysis of Niklas Luhmann’s sociological systems theory of religion in dialogue with theories of NRMs and philosophy of religion to show how the systems of meaning we describe as religion/religious develop through the material technologies we use to communicate. NRMs can be said to emerge and evolve in proportion to the degree of complexity needed to access and sustain the communication of a novel system of meaning for individuals-in-community relative to the selection pressures of a communication environment. A systems theory of NRMs can better explain why religion will likely never disappear but only change in form as we find new ways to form systems of meaning through the materials and infrastructure we use to communicate. 

This paper positions Speakers’ Corner as a communal ritual space that reifies and celebrates Freedom of Speech every Sunday afternoon. It is an active and functioning as a contemporary hybrid cultic milieu in which New Religious Movements (NRMs), dawah and counter‑dawah, apologetics, conspiratorial worldviews, and emerging forms of new religiosity intersect within a hybrid street–platform environment. Drawing on classic sociological theory including Goffman’s interaction rituals, Habermas’s public sphere, and Campbell’s cultic milieu, the paper illustrates how ritualised performances of Freedom of Speech generate publics and counter‑publics whose exchanges circulate globally via livestreams and short‑form clips. Ethnographic fieldwork (April–June 2025), combined with historical contextualisation, visual sociology and online mapping, traces how confrontational formats, testimonial arcs, and ‘click moments’ become mobile, monetisable, and morally charged. Speakers’ Corner continues an iconic site for examining boundary‑challenging religious innovation, where NRM actors and seekers operate alongside political and heterodox movements. Speaker’s Corner offers a unique vantage point for understanding how democratic values, public order, heterodoxy, and emerging forms of religiosity are being reconfigured into hybrid futures.

This paper analyzes how certain strands of Christian apologetics function sociologically as mechanisms of deviance labeling that generate religious stigma and social exclusion toward minority Christian communities. Drawing on classical theories of deviance and stigmatization developed by Howard Becker, Edwin Lemert, Frank Tannenbaum, and Erving Goffman, the paper argues that apologetic discourse associated with the evangelical anti-cult movements of the 1970s transformed theological disagreement into social deviance through symbolic power and ideological boundary-making. It further traces the transnational circulation of these stigmatizing narratives, showing how labels in North American anti-cult discourse were later appropriated as “evil cults” (xiejiao) within the political and legal framework of 1980s China to justify repression of underground Christian communities. Qualitative evidence from the testimonies of persecuted Christians illustrates the lived consequences of such labeling. The paper also examines how digital media amplify these dynamics by accelerating the circulation of stigmatizing narratives across transnational religious networks.

Based on first-hand research experiences in the field of new religious studies, this paper attempts to identify and analyze some of the changing conditions that have confronted researchers attempting to conduct field work in new religious movements (NRMs) over the last fifty years. Four major conditions are identified: i) the rise of “cult-watching groups” (CAG) in an increasingly global “anticult movement” (ACM); ii) the rise of institutional research ethics boards; iii) the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s; iv) media treatment of NRMs. While these four changing conditions have, in some ways, contributed new methods and avenues of access to the field of NRM studies, this paper will focus on their negative impacts on the research field. Citing from research methods studies, and providing examples of researchers’ experiences in the field, this study will attempt to demonstrate how these four factors can impede or limit research access, delay projects, and divert the focus away from longitudinal research and “pure ethnography” towards short-term projects responding to religious freedom issues, legal cases, and human rights concerns.  

The figure of Kamala Khan as Ms Marvel across two media—graphic novel and Disney streaming series—provides a novel means of teaching topics related to Islam, gender, and women.There has been a rich outpouring of interpretation and scholarship around the publications of the early graphic novels.However, there has been less discussion of the ways in which representation of the superheroine has changed in subsequent media.An analysis of the central character of Kamala Khan with reference to the use of political and religious history in identity formation is followed by an exploration of how themes of immigration and assimilation, Muslim American identity and values, and narrative lines that explicate a Muslim religious identity have changed in the move from graphic novel to mini-series. A gendered analysis points to differences in physical representation, a devolution in personal agency, and a move of focus from religious identity in the graphic novels to ethnic identity in the Disney series.  

Since 2018, the Pakistan Aurat March has been a site of intense controversy, garnering the critique of a number of religious organizations in the country. In this proposal, I use the slogans used by protestors at this annual march as a pedagogical tool to help students think about broader themes pertaining to Islam and gender. Specifically, I aim to teach students about the politics/challenges surrounding women’s movements in Muslim majority countries, the complicated ways in which Muslim women engage with feminism, and the types of arguments religious groups use against women’s movements.

Teaching Islam, sex, and gender in courses that examine Judaism, Christianity, and Islam presents distinctive pedagogical challenges, especially when students encounter the academic study of religion for the first time. This presentation introduces a framework for engaging questions of sex, gender, authority, and interpretation across Abrahamic traditions through three strategies: religious deidentification, comparative textual analysis, and pedagogies of play. Students temporarily bracket confessional commitments, analyze sacred texts across traditions, and experiment with interpretive perspectives through structured activities such as Power Bingo, debate simulations, and role-play exercises. Multimedia resources (including video, visual art, and digital texts) provide accessible entry points into contested topics, while an interactive syllabus helps students trace recurring themes across traditions. Together, these approaches cultivate intellectual curiosity, interpretive humility, and collaborative dialogue when teaching Islam, sex, and gender in interreligious classrooms.

Our Males and Females (dir. Ahmad Alyaseer, 2023) is a short film (11 minutes), filmed in Jordan, and packs a complicated, moving, and timely storyline into its economical run time. The simplest film summary could be: A mother and father have received their deceased daughter from an unidentified “abroad,” and aim to wash her for a proper Muslim burial. However, this would miss the balance between causality and choices, surprises, stripped down scenery, and intensity that this story contains. It is quickly revealed that the child is a transgender young woman who has undergone breast augmentation. The father remains committed to affirming his son’s maleness, while the mother at first uses male pronouns in her recitation of the janazah (funerary) prayer, but elegantly and seamless adjusts to identifying her daughter as such by the end of this gripping and emotional presentation. 

From the first act of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis, to an abundance of metaphors and images employed by rabbis, kabbalists, and philosophers to describe wisdom and godliness, light illuminates the Jewish path of knowledge. In this paper, I will consider light as a physical phenomenon and follow up with a discussion of the significance and meanings of the various lights in the Torah, Midrash, and Jewish philosophy.

This paper considers the symbolism of light in Islamicate discourses of spiritual intellectuality, identifying ways that the Sūfī figure ʿAlā al-dīn al-Mahāʾimī (d. 1431CE) made ambivalent use of the earlier metaphysics of light identified with the Illuminationist (Ishrāqī) school of Islamicate philosophy, founded by Shihāb al-dīn Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī (d.1191CE). Within the historiography of Islamicate intellectual thought, Suhrawardī's Illuminationism offers an image of the immediate spiritual knowledge of Sufism and rationalism of Avicennan Scholastic discourse converging in an epistemological synthesis mirrored by that of Ibn ʿArabī's (d.1240CE) school of the Unicity of Being (waḥdat al-wujūd).  Heuristically, both proffer a vision of a singular, gradational reality accessible through spiritual practice and expressible through a technical discourse, while disagreeing on the nature of that reality.  While Mahāʾimī's criticizes Illuminationism from his position within Ibn ʿArabian existentialism, he utilizes a symbolism of light to solve problems where 'existence' is insufficient.

The mysticism of light is a common feature of early Christian spirituality. This paper will focus on one case study in this larger tradition, namely, the spiritual perception of the nature of the world as blue, sapphire, or turquoise. In Christian contemplative traditions, the sky is experienced as the outer image of God’s infinite horizon, in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). After sketching this tradition from Origen (c.185–264) and Evagrius Ponticus (345–99) to Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), the paper will conclude by touching on the role of sense perception in contemplative experience, the ways that such contemplative states mirror and invert normative sense experiences, and what makes the spiritual senses primordial or properly transensory in these Christian traditions.

This paper examines the Tibetan Buddhist contemplative theory of the rainbow body (’ja’ lus), according to which the material body transforms into multicolored light at the culmination of awakening. While widely known in Tibetan Buddhist communities and cultures—and increasingly referenced in popular spiritual discourse—the doctrinal mechanism underlying this transformation remains insufficiently understood. I provide an example from the eleventh–twelfth century Great Perfection Heart Essence (rdzogs chen snying thig) corpus, in which the rainbow body phenomenon is theorized as an alchemical resolution of the body’s elemental constituents—earth, water, fire, and wind—into their purified mode as “clear light” (’od gsal). I further connect this theory to contemplative practices involving meditation on entoptic visions of luminous forms, typically experienced in dark retreat. The paper thus presents a model of religious light understood as the latent ontological condition of the body disclosed through contemplative perception.

This paper examines the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light as a form of inward illumination that grounds ethical community beyond institutional authority. Drawing on early and modern Quaker sources, the study argues that the Inner Light articulates a pre-religious grammar of spiritual capacity that precedes formal doctrinal systems. Through historical-textual analysis of writings by George Fox, Margaret Fell, William Penn, and Rufus Jones, the paper traces how inward experiences of illumination are translated into shared ethical responsibility and communal witness. Fox’s accounts of direct revelation, Fell’s defense of women’s preaching, and Penn’s political theology demonstrate how divine illumination authorizes moral action independent of clerical mediation. The analysis concludes with Jones’s twentieth-century reinterpretation of the Inner Light as a universal structure of human consciousness. Taken together, these sources show how Quaker spirituality transforms immediate inward experience into enduring ethical communities grounded in shared illumination rather than external authority.

In this paper, I primarily attend to practices of forgetting, particularly in relation to institutions of higher education. I do so, first, to make sense of the current theo-political context and second, to raise two considerations for reflection if colleges and universities seek to continue in their role as keepers and sustainers of collective memory. Although colleges and universities often emphasize their role in the preservation of memory, I start by sketching a legacy of forgetting to better understand present realities. I then explore a couple of Presidential Executive Orders which witness troubling enactments of remembering and forgetting. Finally, I turn to James Crockford’s 2022 article, “Contested Memorials and the Discipleship of Christian Memory,” to think through the role of higher education in relation to memory, attentive to current challenges and perennial moral obligations. 

What is the role of higher education in the current theo-political context? This paper offers a constructive, political-theological vision of higher education as a locus for the negotiation and clarification of collective thoughts and memories that can both build up and transform the contours of existing communities. A better appreciation of epistemological pluralism and the power dynamics of knowledge-production requires going beyond reflexivity, enacting substantial institutional reforms that more strongly embeds scholarship within local communities while also providing the space for transformative encounters that can reconfigure the tensions and bounds of those communities.  I present this vision as a contrast to the "liberal university" and the particular politics of knowledge that it instantiates in both its 'dogmatic' and 'critical-reflexive' modes, highlighting the significance of religious studies in particular by means of a counter-reading of a key figure at the foundation of the discipline and the modern university: F.D.E. Schleiermacher. 

In his late political vision, Pier Paolo Pasolini declared the foreclosure of all outsides to capitalist developmentalism. It followed for Pasolini that socialism had suffered a seemingly final defeat and the Italian State no longer needed the Catholic Church to secure hegemony among a population of otherwise divided peoples. Even so, in a series of articles on the Church, Pasolini concedes a persistent ability of the Church to conjure excessive and shocking feelings when it “address problems that the community is familiar with.” How can an irrelevant and marginal institution still shock? The language of excess is a throughline between Pasolini’s Catholic articles, his earlier writings on aesthetics and cinema, and key texts from his major influences: Erich Auerbach, Georges Bataille, and Norman O. Brown. These thinkers share an association between this excessive experience and what Steven Ozment calls “the permanent possibility of historical novelty” in Mysticism and Dissent.

Drawing on hauntological insights, this paper examines the abuse of specters—the practice of domesticating and reproducing the stories of the dead for display and consumption. This problem is exacerbated by the rapid development of technologies for virtual spaces, which not only mediate but also create and distort narratives. With attention to youth radicalization across the globe, this paper focuses on a case study of the gaming company Roblox to illuminate how the abuse of specters shapes moral agency. The player-generated content “Gwangju of the Day” reconstructed a distorted narrative of the 1980 South Korean pro-democracy movement in Gwangju city. By drawing on hauntology, theological ethics, and scholarship on artificial intelligence, this paper offers guidelines for cultivating ethical relationships with the dead. The paper facilitates a conversation about how religious educators and faith communities can contribute to the formation of moral agency to engage counter memory for a liberatory future.