In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper examines how neo-Reformed pastors Joel Webbon and Andrew Isker mobilize postliberal critiques of liberal modernity to imagine a Christian nationalist future through print and digital media. In their books, they argue that liberal societies erode communities, traditions, and divinely ordained social hierarchies. As an alternative, they support forming insular Christian communities organized around heteropatriarchal families and shared religious commitments—which they are attempting to do in Texas and Tennessee. Drawing on Rod Dreher’s “Benedict option” and interpretations of Alasdair MacIntyre, Webbon and Isker frame withdrawal from liberal society as recreating a heteropatriarchal past and preparing a future Christian nation. Through social media posts, testimonials, and images of congregational life, their digital content presents their communities as previews of this future. Digital media thus circulates a localized Christian nationalist future to national and global audiences, visualizing it as attainable and desirable.

This paper turns to a set of sources by white women engaged in domestic reform to propose an alternative genealogy of American liberal critique and Christian postliberalism; in them are Christian idioms of mastery that are feminine in perspective and deeply creative in the ways they imagine the family-state dyad. By refocusing on a genre and demographic not commonly engaged in postliberal discourses, this paper brings a different picture of the postliberal state into view with two key features: that the family has always been a malleable, mutable figure in critiques of the individual, and that women are architects of Christian nationalisms that do not require their subjection.

Recent work on U.S. antiliberal Christian politics has emphasized Christian nationalism, a movement often depicted as growing from Evangelical and ministerial contexts. This presentation (1) traces and (2) analyzes another trend in U.S. Christian antiliberalism, one with a unique view of the nation’s future: Catholic integralism. Tracing this trend reveals that integralism has uniquely thrived primarily in Catholic academic and political contexts. I show how it has spread through elite institutions within the conservative intellectual movement—culminating in an integralist becoming the Vice President of the United States. In analyzing integralism, I argue that its contribution to politics is a self-authorizing political theology of prophetic violence. By reading integralists' own words, I show that integralism combines Carl Schmitt and a branch of Thomism to formulate a politics that licenses violence not only against existential threats, but any discursive opponents to the conceptual moral order that must come to be.

In this paper, I reflect on the significance of white Christian nationalism’s postliberal inheritance for the field of political theology. While scholars of white Christian nationalism have increasingly recognized the impact of postliberal thought on far-right Christian political movements, this same genealogy of political and philosophical critique continues to animate the more normative fields of political theology and Christian ethics, which themselves tend towards anti-capitalism and anti-nationalism. Rather than contest which political expression represents the ‘true’ or more faithful inheritance of postliberal thought, this paper asks how the political success of white Christian nationalism calls into question optimism about the efficacy of postliberal politic thought for a leftist politics.

In the short stories “Lena” and “Driver,” qntm depicts a near-future world in which the invention of whole brain emulation has given rise to the “workloading” industry, in which capitalist firms extract cognitive labor from “virtual images” of scanned human brains. Reading “Lena” and “Driver” alongside Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism by Jonathan Tran, I argue that the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) by capitalist firms emerges from the economic system of racial capitalism, in which “to claim a racial identity or to have one claimed of you is to be submitted to seasoned processes of racial commodification, indexed racially for use and used with racist justification.” To this end, I compare qntm’s depiction of a post-AGI capitalist economy with real-world paradigms of racial capitalism, like the H-1B visa system, which has enabled many thousands of Asian knowledge workers to immigrate to the United States.

This paper explores the theological themes from the 2025 Tony Award Best Musical “Maybe Happy Ending.” The production, originally starring Filipino American Darren Criss and Chinese American Helen J. Shen, tells the story of two retired “helperbots” in a futuristic Seoul, Korea who go on an adventure and fall in love. Through the lenses of techno-orientalism and the figure of the cyborg, this paper explores theological anthropology and eschatological thinking present in the show’s libretto as it pertains to futurity and its inextricability from finitude.

Asian North American religious life is increasingly shaped within AI-mediated digital places structured by algorithmic platforms, social media, and generative technologies. For Generation Z in particular, these environments function as sites of moral formation, belonging, and authority that extend across the Pacific. This paper examines how transpacific Asian and Asian American Christian communities in the United States and Hong Kong negotiate these digital places and what these negotiations reveal about Asian North American religious futures. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Gen Z participants and religious leaders, the paper analyzes how AI-shaped digital life reshapes ethical discernment, communal authority, and intergenerational relations under conditions of migration, racialization, and political precarity. Conceptually, the paper advances “digital place” as an analytic for transpacific Asian North American religious studies, illuminating how religion is reconfigured through technological circulation rather than bounded national contexts.

The early 2020s saw rapid shifts in American attitudes toward cannabis and psychedelics, moving from their twentieth‑century status as dangerous intoxicants to renewed interest as medical therapies and, increasingly, as consumer wellness products. This swift reframing has raised concerns about how best to conceptualize the responsible use of mind‑altering substances. This essay proposes ritual consumption as an alternative framework, drawing on early Confucian discussions of alcohol in ceremonial life. Early Confucian thinkers such as Kongzi and Xunzi acknowledged alcohol’s capacity to facilitate communal bonding, while simultaneously emphasizing propriety, restraint, and the primacy of human connection to prevent misuse. Although cannabis and psychedelics differ significantly from alcohol, the Confucian model illustrates how structured, relational practices can harness psychoactive effects while mitigating risks. Such an approach offers a promising lens for rethinking contemporary engagements with these substances.

This paper explores the practice of restorative sleep in the Mencius where it is described not only in terms of its holistic benefits but more importantly as something essential for the preservation of the goodness of the heart-mind (xin 心). In passages like 6A8 Mencius suggests that sleep can have the salutary effect of nourishing the vital energy (qi 氣) which, in turn, promotes the growth of one’s “sprouts of goodness.” He describes in ecstatic terms how the cultivation of the “flood-like qi” can fill the space between heaven and earth and harmonize with righteousness and the Way. Drawing on contemporary ideas in medicine and macrobiotics, Mencius contends that the nourishment of this inexhaustible vital energy is essential for moral self-cultivation and that holistic practices like sleep can help us to realize our heavenly-endowed natures. For Mencius, sleep nurtures the qi that makes moral mastery possible.

This essay reports quantitative and qualitative findings of an empirical study on the use of contemplative pedagogy as an experiential learning mode in higher education. It assesses the impact on student learning and wellness of using Confucian contemplative practices such as quiet-sitting meditation, self-examination, and self-monitoring. Using analytical and contemplative pedagogies, students studied and practiced these Confucian methods of self-cultivation and reflected on this holistic learning experience. The case studies examined and the findings reported indicate enhancements in their practice of self-care in the following ways: managing their stress, anxiety, and negative emotions more effectively; forming a healthier self-image and sense of personal identity; improved self-discipline and positive habit formation; applying their learning in meaningful ways; and help with sleep and physical, mental, and emotional restoration. The research suggests contemplative pedagogy inspired by Confucian methods of self-cultivation is an effective experiential learning tool by positively impacting student wellness.

This paper reexamines the relationship between virtue-based self‑cultivation and capability-focused education in later-imperial China, arguing that their apparent fusion in the scholar‑official tradition obscures their distinct origins and purposes. While Zhu Xi’s interpretation of the Great Learning grounded education in a transformative ethical practice radiating outward from personal cultivation, late‑Qing reformers such as Zhang Zhidong reframed education as a universal project to strengthen state and society by developing human capability. Yet the spiritual and individual dimensions of Zhang’s vision failed to take root, leaving modern educational discourse dominated by material incentives and thin appeals to abstract social goods. I argue that the eclipse of self‑cultivation created a persistent tension between utopian promises of societal transformation and narratives of perpetual educational crisis. Without a robust account of how education meaningfully shapes persons, systems risk functioning as large-scale conscription into disciplinary routines once reserved for voluntary scholarly vocations.

This paper re-evaluates Zhu Xi’s xingcha 省察 (inward gaze) by contrasting it with Augustinian voluntarism and Thomistic intellectualism. While previous scholarship often aligns xingcha with Augustinian moral censorship, I argue it is a process of verifying one’s moral potential is being fully and authentically manifested. grounded in trust in natural inclinations. By examining yi 意 (conscious activity), I demonstrate that Zhu Xi moves beyond the Augustinian distrust of nature to approach the Thomism. However, unlike Thomism, which prioritizes intellectual prudence over the inward gaze, Zhu Xi maintains xingcha until the final moment of practice. He argues that constant wakefulness is necessary not to suppress evil, but to prevent the violence of universalism caused by inattentiveness to situational variables. Ultimately, Zhu Xi’s xingcha offers a unique model of ethical and religious practice that ensures sincere moral practice through persistent sensitivity to the specificities of every moral encounter.

The early 2020s saw rapid shifts in American attitudes toward cannabis and psychedelics, moving from their twentieth‑century status as dangerous intoxicants to renewed interest as medical therapies and, increasingly, as consumer wellness products. This swift reframing has raised concerns about how best to conceptualize the responsible use of mind‑altering substances. This essay proposes ritual consumption as an alternative framework, drawing on early Confucian discussions of alcohol in ceremonial life. Early Confucian thinkers such as Kongzi and Xunzi acknowledged alcohol’s capacity to facilitate communal bonding, while simultaneously emphasizing propriety, restraint, and the primacy of human connection to prevent misuse. Although cannabis and psychedelics differ significantly from alcohol, the Confucian model illustrates how structured, relational practices can harness psychoactive effects while mitigating risks. Such an approach offers a promising lens for rethinking contemporary engagements with these substances.

This paper explores the practice of restorative sleep in the Mencius where it is described not only in terms of its holistic benefits but more importantly as something essential for the preservation of the goodness of the heart-mind (xin 心). In passages like 6A8 Mencius suggests that sleep can have the salutary effect of nourishing the vital energy (qi 氣) which, in turn, promotes the growth of one’s “sprouts of goodness.” He describes in ecstatic terms how the cultivation of the “flood-like qi” can fill the space between heaven and earth and harmonize with righteousness and the Way. Drawing on contemporary ideas in medicine and macrobiotics, Mencius contends that the nourishment of this inexhaustible vital energy is essential for moral self-cultivation and that holistic practices like sleep can help us to realize our heavenly-endowed natures. For Mencius, sleep nurtures the qi that makes moral mastery possible.

This essay reports quantitative and qualitative findings of an empirical study on the use of contemplative pedagogy as an experiential learning mode in higher education. It assesses the impact on student learning and wellness of using Confucian contemplative practices such as quiet-sitting meditation, self-examination, and self-monitoring. Using analytical and contemplative pedagogies, students studied and practiced these Confucian methods of self-cultivation and reflected on this holistic learning experience. The case studies examined and the findings reported indicate enhancements in their practice of self-care in the following ways: managing their stress, anxiety, and negative emotions more effectively; forming a healthier self-image and sense of personal identity; improved self-discipline and positive habit formation; applying their learning in meaningful ways; and help with sleep and physical, mental, and emotional restoration. The research suggests contemplative pedagogy inspired by Confucian methods of self-cultivation is an effective experiential learning tool by positively impacting student wellness.

This paper reexamines the relationship between virtue-based self‑cultivation and capability-focused education in later-imperial China, arguing that their apparent fusion in the scholar‑official tradition obscures their distinct origins and purposes. While Zhu Xi’s interpretation of the Great Learning grounded education in a transformative ethical practice radiating outward from personal cultivation, late‑Qing reformers such as Zhang Zhidong reframed education as a universal project to strengthen state and society by developing human capability. Yet the spiritual and individual dimensions of Zhang’s vision failed to take root, leaving modern educational discourse dominated by material incentives and thin appeals to abstract social goods. I argue that the eclipse of self‑cultivation created a persistent tension between utopian promises of societal transformation and narratives of perpetual educational crisis. Without a robust account of how education meaningfully shapes persons, systems risk functioning as large-scale conscription into disciplinary routines once reserved for voluntary scholarly vocations.

This paper re-evaluates Zhu Xi’s xingcha 省察 (inward gaze) by contrasting it with Augustinian voluntarism and Thomistic intellectualism. While previous scholarship often aligns xingcha with Augustinian moral censorship, I argue it is a process of verifying one’s moral potential is being fully and authentically manifested. grounded in trust in natural inclinations. By examining yi 意 (conscious activity), I demonstrate that Zhu Xi moves beyond the Augustinian distrust of nature to approach the Thomism. However, unlike Thomism, which prioritizes intellectual prudence over the inward gaze, Zhu Xi maintains xingcha until the final moment of practice. He argues that constant wakefulness is necessary not to suppress evil, but to prevent the violence of universalism caused by inattentiveness to situational variables. Ultimately, Zhu Xi’s xingcha offers a unique model of ethical and religious practice that ensures sincere moral practice through persistent sensitivity to the specificities of every moral encounter.

The traditional Chinese calendar and the modernized Gregorian calendar are commonly framed as representing conflicting ontologies of time, a tension often taken as emblematic of modernity itself. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Taiwanese and mainland Chinese communities, this paper challenges that by examining how multiple calendrical systems are enacted simultaneously in religious and social practice. It compares the qualitative, cosmologically saturated temporality encoded in the traditional Chinese calendar with the homogeneous, empty temporality implied by the Gregorian calendar. Ethnographic findings show that interlocutors routinely mobilize each calendar for distinct purposes through religious and quasi-religious techniques such as divination, auspicious date selection, and ritual timing. Rather than producing conflict, calendrical plurality enables meaningful engagement with pasts, presents, and futures across multiple temporal scales. The paper argues that modern religious life need not be defined by temporal rupture, but can instead be characterized by stable, reflexive navigation of plural temporal ontologies.

Modernist workplaces assumed a separation between work and private time, with religion ensconced in the latter. This separation is recently challenged by tech companies inviting workers to “bring their whole self” to work. Drawing on fieldwork in a tech corporation and nearly 100 interviews with observant Muslim and Jewish workers in Toronto, New York, and Tel Aviv, this paper explores how religious temporalities are reshaped when work time is flexible and religion is legitimate. While classic anthropology portrays religious time as a coherent framework for social synchronization, neoliberal emphasis on self-responsibility shifts sacred time into a realm of individual preference. Using the concept of commensurability, I analyze three techniques my interlocutors use to weave religious obligations into reconfigured work temporalities: framing religious time in labor terms (e.g., “meeting with God”), hierarchical scaling, and digital calendaring. This commensuration reflects a unique tech religiosity, turning the sacred from radical alterity into a category relational with global capitalism.

How does an immigrant Buddhist temple in New England sustain a sense of temporal order and materialize hope for the future among intergenerational Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants? This paper draws on ethnography at a Chinese Buddhist temple, the Thousand Buddha Temple (TBT) in Quincy, Massachusetts, to analyze one of the most significant annual celebrations of the Chinese community—the Lunar New Year. It explores how Chinese immigrants negotiate with the predominantly Christian host cultural environment through calendric rituals in their effort to maintain and strengthen their cultural identity as a community. In this process, the Buddhist temple functions as a “temporal container” for the immigrants, serving as a space where participants reproduce and inhabit cultural time and enact hope. This research offers an empirically grounded case study of how community is shaped through cultural ritual life. 

This paper examines how prophetic authority is formed, interpreted, and sustained within divinatory practices in the Western Himalayas. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it analyzes annual encounters in which village deities speak through human mediums to deliver forecasts, moral evaluations, and ritual instructions. Rather than treating divination as a mechanism for resolving uncertainty, the paper argues that prophetic authority emerges through a relational process in which divine statements are questioned, negotiated, and adapted by their audiences. This interactive dynamic, described as performative accountability, shows how authority depends on responsiveness and evaluation rather than inherent divine status. The paper also explores how shifting descriptions of the celestial realm, local disagreements over predictions, and the availability of digital and meteorological alternatives shape responses to prophetic speech. Together, these practices demonstrate how doubt, interpretation, and ritual engagement sustain divine authority across cycles of divination.

This paper examines three understudied archives of lay Catholic devotional life in 20th-century Hungary that challenge narratives of religious “privatization” under communism and raise theoretical questions about how archives capture religious life and the extent to which archiving practices can make visible or shield certain kinds of religious life from view. These archives, collections of prayer books, petitionary prayers, and ex votos, are often seen as irrelevant to larger questions of community and politics, but this paper shows how, taken together, a greater story emerges from them, one of lay Catholics living, praying, and moving together in order to enact a religio-political vision that takes Hungary to be, rightfully, Mary’s country. Ultimately, these archives reveal a complex vision of Hungarian futures that emerges not in state archives or institutional repositories but in the very cracks between church and state.

The Cofradía de San José, a pious association of lay Catholics in the colonial Philippines, was violently crushed by the Spanish state in 1841. This uprising is a standard event in Philippine history textbooks and the subject of a small but influential body of scholarly literature on Philippine religious movements. However, none of this work considers the history or significance of the confraternity form itself. Meanwhile, confraternities in Europe and Latin America have been the subject of extensive scholarly discussion, yet Philippine confraternities have been almost completely ignored in this literature. This paper is the first to interpret the Cofradía de San José as a confraternity, the most prominent organizational form in the early modern Catholic world. It attempts to fill gaps in literature on both Philippine Catholicism and early modern confraternities, and to consider the significance of this uprising in the context of global Catholicism’s turbulent entrance to modernity.

Despite increased scrutiny of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, abuse of Catholic women religious (CWR) remains under‑researched and under-acknowledged in existing histories. In 19th‑century Australia, CWR ministered amid sectarian hostility and imperial surveillance. In this climate, mere suggestions of impropriety were treated by church leaders as threats to ecclesial legitimacy. Anti‑Catholic publications spread sensationalised stories of clerical misconduct, while CWR were simultaneously targeted with rumours of sexual impropriety. This paper challenges the interpretation that indictments of CWR were sole products of sectarianism. It analyses key case studies, via archival records employing the hermeneutics of epistemic injustice to examine how sexualised gossip and defamatory accusations operated. It argues that many allegations involving CWR were strategically circulated by priests and bishops to undermine rival clerics, amplified by sectarian dynamics. The paper finds that CWR were subjected to direct sexualised abuse and secondary harms as collateral targets of ecclesial power struggles.

Based on personal correspondence sent by lay Catholics to their bishops and lay non-Christian to the Vatican, at the occasion of the council debates on other religions, this paper looks through the many self-definitions given to one's Catholic identity or to what Catholicity means in the eyes of others. 

These unsolicited pieces challenged the role initially assigned to laity. As intimate sources, private correspondence conveys how individuals reflect on, stand for, mediate their faith to a representative of the Church authority. It epitomizes both ongoing ecclesiological changes and the globalization of debates, as spaces for discussion remultiply. Reclaiming agency for protagonists on the margins, it also raises issues of method: what representativeness for a mass of unrelated one-time letters, written by happy few? Why their study is nonetheless essential?

This paper describes the short shrift historical injustices like slavery receive in Rorty’s philosophy of social hope. Rorty’s narrative arc of the United States turns on the notion that philosophers migrated from the revolutionary vanguard to the academy. No longer the primary drivers of social change, twentieth (and twenty-first) century philosophers have to build coalitions in order to achieve their long-term vision of “a classless and casteless society”. However, Rorty’s brand of obstinate liberalism does not consider the potential and proven value of theologically-minded social reformers. Slave redress is not a bygone concern if we seriously range the threat to the social order posed by anarchists, postliberals, and “technofeudalists” like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin. A sudden and rapid infusion to the American middle-class is the kind of stabilizing project that should interest heirs of Enlightenment principles. And yet that kind of backward-looking reflection does not sit well with Rorty’s conditional utopianism. Bringing our peers in philosophy departments to bear on the material turn among Black Theologians is itself a worthwhile goal for the comparative religious ethicist. This paper thus bridges theorists of social hope with the kinds of community-minded practitioners that place a similar premium on political stability.

This paper argues that Richard Rorty’s philosophy of social hope may inadvertently generate the resentment it seeks to abrogate. In diagnosing the erosion of hope within the academy, Rorty recommends subordinating religious commitments to a “greater” civic good, a move that risks alienating large segments of the American public for whom religion remains morally constitutive. Contemporary prison abolitionists such as Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore often draw upon Marxist-inflected frameworks that similarly marginalize religion’s role in sustaining utopian imagination, even as they draw from religious inspiration. This tension constrains the broader appeal of abolitionist justice. While the for-profit prison system represents a profound injustice incapable of reform, any viable utopian vision must address those who perpetrate egregious physical violence; absent such reckoning, many citizens perceive not hope but instability. Unlike Marx or Rorty, John Rawls integrates religion into his account of a “realistic utopia,” treating comprehensive doctrines as legitimate moral sources. His proceduralism offers a shared framework through which comparative religious ethicists might enable religious communities and activists to translate, negotiate, and coordinate their commitments within a fractured public sphere.

A central argument of Philosophy and Social Hope is that we must learn to do without many concepts that have previously structured philosophical inquiry. In making this case, Rorty regularly replaces or redefines philosophical terms with a reference to the future. Truth, for example, has no meaning except as an orientation of inquiry to a possible future. He makes a similar move regarding wonder, which Aristotle says is the beginning of philosophy. He argues that pragmatists transfer the wonder and mystery that Greek and Abrahamic traditions found in the nonhuman world to the human future (51-52). This paper critically analyzes this displacement of wonder. These religious and philosophical traditions offer, in Rorty's terms, "tools" of wonder at the nonhuman world. As the world and its multispecies communities are increasingly remade the image and (short-term) interests of humans, the cultivation of our tools of wonder may be crucial in the effort to learn to live as parts of earth's multispecies communities -- and in the effort to build hopes for a future other than one marked by human technological domination.

This paper explores the role of anger and courage in fostering social hope within climate justice movements. Departing from a quote often attributed to Augustine, the paper explores Hope’s “two beautiful daughters: Anger at what is, and Courage to make it different” as an antidote to climate fatalism. This paper argues that climate fatalism must be resisted not because the position is wrong, but because it too easily lends itself to white-supremacist eco-fascist ideologies. Indeed, “acceptance” of the inevitable destructive effects of climate disaster pushes many toward draconian survivalist mentalities. Ecofascists embrace this kind of climate fatalism as they advocate for the elimination of Black and Brown bodies as necessary to ensure the survival of white lives as global resources grow slimmer due to climate change. For this reason, ethicists and scholars ought to resist climate fatalism at every juncture. Citing both secular and religious climate justice movements, this paper advocates exchanging climate fatalism for climate rage to cultivate social hope, even if the data shows the situation is hopeless.

Contemporary psychological accounts often define hope in terms of individual agency and goal attainment, thereby limiting their capacity to address intergenerational injustice, ecological precarity, and moral fragmentation. This paper advances a relational and intergenerational account of hope through a Two-Eyed Seeing dialogue between Anishinaabe moral epistemology and theological ethics. The Anishinaabe are an Indigenous people of the Great Lakes region of North America, whose moral traditions emphasize relationality, responsibility, and continuity across generations. Centering Anishinaabe relational ontologies—particularly the Seven Generations principle—hope is reframed as a moral commitment grounded in belonging and future-oriented care. Philosophical-theological resources from Joseph Pieper, Jürgen Moltmann, and Abraham Joshua Heschel serve as critical interlocutors, challenging dominant Western conceptions of hope in moral education.

In this paper, I argue that the tāntric practice of offering food to the deity (naivedya) is reinterpreted within the sixteenth-century Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition as a bhakti practice that infuses devotional contemplation of Kṛṣṇa into ritual and elevates such contemplation over the importance of all ritual action. I analyze how Gopāla Bhaṭṭa Gosvāmin’s framing of naivedya in Haribhaktivilāsa expands the practice from the realm of ritual worship (arcanā) into the contemplative practice of surrendering the Self (ātma-nivedana) in entirety as an offering (arpaṇaṁ) to Kṛṣṇa. This helps to reframe naivedya as devotional service (sevā), a point that is further developed by Jīva Gosvāmin in Bhakti Sandarbha. I further connect the Haribhaktivilāsa’s presentation of naivedya to Jīva Gosvāmin’s comments on food contemplations in Bhakti Sandarbha and his Durgama-saṅgamanī commentary on Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu, which respectively emphasize the expansive devotional nature and efficacy of food contemplations in broader Kṛṣṇa-bhakti theology. 

Plant-based meats designed to mimic animal flesh promise major harm reduction by displacing industrial animal agriculture. Yet some animal ethicists argue that “faux flesh” carries a symbolic cost: it can preserve the imaginative framework in which animals remain edible, even when no animals are eaten. This paper brings that debate into conversation with Jain contemplative foodways, focusing on Jainism’s triadic account of violence as enacted through thought, word, and bodily action. I argue that Jain dietary discipline sharpens the ethical significance of representation by treating mental and linguistic formations as karmically and morally weighty, not merely as predictors of future physical harm. At the same time, I develop a Jain-inflected harm-reduction view: faux meat may be ethically preferable to animal flesh while still calling for practices that retrain desire, perception, and language so that “meat” does not remain the normative horizon of food.

Due to the widespread harms the dairy industry causes to animals, humans, and the environment, some Jains contemplate and adopt veganism into their personal and community foodways. Jain pro-veganism has, nevertheless, led to pushback against veganism within the global Jain community. This paper specifically shows how contemporary Jains draw upon Jain scriptures to advocate against veganism, while nevertheless also incorporating non-Jain anti-vegan arguments encountered transnationally. By integrating perspectives from Food Studies, Critical Animal Studies, and Human-Animal Relations, the paper reveals how transnational cognitive dissonance alleviation strategies are a central component of many Jains’ increasing contemplations of anti-veganism. Drawing from recent discourse in the vegan/anti-vegan debate in the global Jain community, the paper will illustrate how non-Jain, transnational cognitive dissonance alleviation strategies perpetuated by the dairy industry have penetrated Jain anti-vegan scriptural discourse within Jain communities, causing those who promote them to inadvertently contemplate and perpetuate harmful anti-vegan discourses.

With escalating ecological crises and their profound impacts on human and non-human lives, there is growing dialogue about whether our complex relationship with the more-than-human world must be addressed through the ways that we view, treat, and perhaps eat non-human animals. Putting Critical Animal Studies and Food Studies into dialogue with Contemplative Studies and Yoga Studies allows yoga and contemplative practices to move laterally across disciplines to develop inquiry into the mental states and afflictions that prevent humanity from being at peace with each other, other forms of life, and ecosystems. This paper ethnographically examines how contemporary yoga spaces engage with animal and environmental ethics using ethnographic methods. As an engaged public scholar, I explore how yoga communities enact ahiṃsā, ecological responsibility, and care for more-than-human life, and how contemplative concepts and practices can inspire deeper awareness of how we treat animals and ecosystems through awakening compassion for all beings.