This roundtable explores new directions in applied religious studies at the intersection of religion and health. Participants will focus on the following themes: how specific contexts and local conditions (geographic, institutional, funding landscape) are shaping the field of applied religious studies and health; strategic development of undergraduate and graduate curricula and career development initiatives; limitations and constraints under which these programs operate; and future directions and possibilities. Each of the panelists will share insights from projects that they are undertaking to apply religious studies within health care settings: in hospitals, community clinics, trainings for health professionals and chaplains; curricular initiatives, public-facing education, and consulting work. Panelists will share highlights from their respective projects, with attention to both the challenges and opportunities of pursuing this kind of work.
In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book
The 2026 November Annual Meeting in Denver, CO: Friday, November 20 - Tuesday, November 24. All times are listed in Mountain Time Zone. For more information about the November Annual Meeting, co-hosted with the Society of Biblical Literature, click here.
Please note that this is the preliminary schedule and is subject to change. We anticipate a mostly final schedule in mid-August. If you have any questions, please contact annualmeeting@aarweb.org. For Other Events, your event is not confirmed until you received notification from AAR staff.
This roundtable explores new directions in applied religious studies at the intersection of religion and health. Participants will focus on the following themes: how specific contexts and local conditions (geographic, institutional, funding landscape) are shaping the field of applied religious studies and health; strategic development of undergraduate and graduate curricula and career development initiatives; limitations and constraints under which these programs operate; and future directions and possibilities. Each of the panelists will share insights from projects that they are undertaking to apply religious studies within health care settings: in hospitals, community clinics, trainings for health professionals and chaplains; curricular initiatives, public-facing education, and consulting work. Panelists will share highlights from their respective projects, with attention to both the challenges and opportunities of pursuing this kind of work.
Panelist
This roundtable explores new directions in applied religious studies at the intersection of religion and health. Participants will focus on the following themes: how specific contexts and local conditions (geographic, institutional, funding landscape) are shaping the field of applied religious studies and health; strategic development of undergraduate and graduate curricula and career development initiatives; limitations and constraints under which these programs operate; and future directions and possibilities. Each of the panelists will share insights from projects that they are undertaking to apply religious studies within health care settings: in hospitals, community clinics, trainings for health professionals and chaplains; curricular initiatives, public-facing education, and consulting work. Panelists will share highlights from their respective projects, with attention to both the challenges and opportunities of pursuing this kind of work.
Panelist
This Author-Meets-Respondents session provides a forum for critical engagement with Joseph R. Winters’s book, The Disturbing Profane: Hip Hop, Blackness, and the Sacred (Duke University Press, 2025). Winters explores how hip hop’s religiosity is anchored in the "dark sacred"—a register that signifies death and pleasure, opacity and contamination, exorbitance and anguish, rather than conventional notions of purity and wholeness. Bringing religious studies, Black studies, Black feminist thought, and critical theory into conversation with hip hop, the book radically troubles traditional boundaries between the sacred and the profane. Through nuanced analyses of artists such as Notorious B.I.G., Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, Lupe Fiasco, and Nicki Minaj, Winters shows how hip hop destabilizes fixed meanings of sacrality to confront listeners with their own investments in unpleasant social realities, exposing audiences to a volatile sacred and the unruly dynamics of Blackness. Furthermore, the text demonstrates that hip hop’s dark sacrality is deeply intertwined with its expression of, participation in, and resistance to the antiblack and Black gendered violence structuring the contemporary social order. Respondents from a variety of specializations and career stages will evaluate the book’s major contributions to Africana religious studies, hip hop studies, Black feminist critique, and cultural theory.
Copts are the largest Christian community in the Middle East and among the world’s oldest Christian communities. Once the objects of American missionary efforts, they have recently become newly visible in Western political and religious imaginaries. ISIS-related violence and anti-Muslim politics have spurred U.S. politicians and evangelical networks to mobilize projects of “saving” Middle Eastern Christians, reinforcing the moral discourse of the “Persecuted Church.”
Drawing on fieldwork among Coptic migrants across Egypt and the U.S., Martyrs and Migrants examines how American imaginaries of global Christian persecution reshape Coptic collective memory and public identity. Lukasik argues that transnational Copts translate martyrdom into ambiguous forms of visibility, forging a theopolitics of Christian kinship in blood even as they remain subject to racialization, detention, and exclusion. This roundtable reflects on the book’s interventions into debates over religion and empire, violence and migration, and the contested politics of recognition and belonging in contemporary Christianity.
This high-level roundtable convenes leading scholars of Confucianism, Christianity, and comparative theology to assess the methodological and constructive significance of Debating Transcendence: Creatio ex nihilo and Sheng Sheng (Fordham University Press, 2026). The panel examines whether classical Ruist thought offers a philosophically rigorous account of transcendence and how this reframes long-standing debates about Eurocentrism, religious diversity, and global theology. Engaging textual scholarship, constructive metaphysics, and critical theory, participants evaluate the book’s claims regarding generatio ex nihilo, immanent transcendence, and non-confessional theology. By bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives into sustained dialogue, the session models a new stage of Confucian comparative theology—one that is historically grounded, conceptually precise, and globally conversant. The roundtable contributes substantively to contemporary philosophy of religion and comparative religious studies while advancing future-oriented frameworks for transreligious understanding.
This panel views frontiers not as passive receivers of tradition but as dynamic laboratories where new doctrines, iconographies, rituals, and narratives emerge. As our four case studies demonstrate, frontiers have long generated innovative religious forms that reshaped the wider Buddhist world. We analyze devotional narratives of the Malaya mountains in Kashmir, Newar Buddhist donative communities in Nepal, myths concerning Mount Jizu in southwestern China, and the leadership of lama Chokyi Wangchuk in Tibet’s Mangyul Gungtang corridor. These four cases demonstrate that these new geographic as well as imagined frontiers became engines of religious futurity: places where new social possibilities, doctrinal developments, and mythic visions took shape. The panel argues that an analysis of the confluence of creative energies in these frontiers will generate better analyses than would separately addressing each topic merely from the perspective of dominant Indic, Tibetan, or Sinitic forms of Buddhism.
Papers
This paper explores Śivasvāmin’s 9th century Sanskrit poem, the Kapphiṇābhyudaya (The Rise of Kapphiṇa), as a case study in novel literary representations of the Buddha generated through Hindu-Buddhist literary encounters in Kashmir. Specifically, it investigates how the poet’s uptake of a specific poetic structure, a description of a mountain, is used to aid his telling of an avadāna narrative in a courtly poetic (mahākāvya) form. It argues that the poem’s description of the mountain creates an extended comparison between the mountain and the Buddha through the literary devices of pun (śleṣa) and suggestion (dhvani). Thus, what appears to be merely the fulfillment of a generic staple of the courtly poetic genre, is in fact an opportunity to explore the nature of Buddhahood and devotion to the Buddha. Overall, this paper illustrates how literary innovations in early medieval Kashmir produced strikingly new representations of the Buddha in Sanskrit poetry.
Newar Buddhism, a unique tradition in Nepal, has remained a living tradition while Buddhism in other parts of South Asia declined after the 15th century. This paper examines the survival of Newar Buddhism, with a focus on the financial support and patronage it received through donation inscriptions from the Malla era (1201–1779). The key questions explored are: Who were the patrons of Newar Buddhism in terms of caste and occupation? How were resources allocated? And how did Nepal’s patronage system differ from other part of South Asia?
I argue that, alongside royal patronage, the continuous donations from ordinary lay Buddhists were vital to the survival of Newar Buddhism. By analyzing medieval patronage patterns, this study sheds light on Newar Buddhism’s creative strategies for sustaining community support. It contributes to the broader understanding of Buddhist economics, religious sustainability, and the dynamic interactions between Buddhism and surrounding religious traditions in South Asia.
This paper examines how Mount Jizu in Dali, incorporated into the Ming empire’s southwestern frontier in 1371, came to be identified with the Indian mountain Kukkuṭapāda, where the Buddha’s disciple Mahākāśyapa is believed to guard Śākyamuni’s robe while awaiting the future Buddha Maitreya. I argue that local elites, Ming state, and Chinese Buddhists collectively produced a new frontier sacred site. Dali elites sought to enhance ethnic prestige by linking their homeland to the sacred geography of Indian Buddhism, while the Ming state promoted Buddhist institutions as part of its broader effort to culturally integrate the southwestern frontier. At the same time, identifying Mount Jizu with Kukkuṭapāda allowed Chinese Buddhists to address a longstanding “borderland complex” arising from Buddhism’s Indian origins by situating the residence of the first Chan patriarch Mahākāśyapa within Ming territory. The case demonstrates how frontier regions could generate new sacred geographies that reshaped the wider Buddhist world.
This paper examines a purported “borderland Buddhism” along Tibet’s Mangyul Gungtang corridor, a trans-Himalayan conduit for trade, transportation, and religious exchange between Tibet and South Asia since the seventh century. Focusing on the hermitage of Drakar Taso and its nineteenth-century abbot Chokyi Wangchuk (1775–1837), the paper develops the concept of the “frontier lama”—a religious exemplar whose authority and institutional practice are constituted through work from the margins rather than proximity to centers of power. Drawing on Chokyi Wangchuk’s extensive writings, and engaging scholarship on medieval European frontier monasticism, the paper argues that the frontier lama’s defining features—border mobility, stewardship of endangered lineages, and synthesis of doctrinal traditions—represent a coherent pattern of Tibetan religious activity in the southern borderlands. It further contends that the borderlands functioned not as passive periphery but as an active site for the formation, preservation, and transmission of religious culture.
This panel views frontiers not as passive receivers of tradition but as dynamic laboratories where new doctrines, iconographies, rituals, and narratives emerge. As our four case studies demonstrate, frontiers have long generated innovative religious forms that reshaped the wider Buddhist world. We analyze devotional narratives of the Malaya mountains in Kashmir, Newar Buddhist donative communities in Nepal, myths concerning Mount Jizu in southwestern China, and the leadership of lama Chokyi Wangchuk in Tibet’s Mangyul Gungtang corridor. These four cases demonstrate that these new geographic as well as imagined frontiers became engines of religious futurity: places where new social possibilities, doctrinal developments, and mythic visions took shape. The panel argues that an analysis of the confluence of creative energies in these frontiers will generate better analyses than would separately addressing each topic merely from the perspective of dominant Indic, Tibetan, or Sinitic forms of Buddhism.
Papers
This paper explores Śivasvāmin’s 9th century Sanskrit poem, the Kapphiṇābhyudaya (The Rise of Kapphiṇa), as a case study in novel literary representations of the Buddha generated through Hindu-Buddhist literary encounters in Kashmir. Specifically, it investigates how the poet’s uptake of a specific poetic structure, a description of a mountain, is used to aid his telling of an avadāna narrative in a courtly poetic (mahākāvya) form. It argues that the poem’s description of the mountain creates an extended comparison between the mountain and the Buddha through the literary devices of pun (śleṣa) and suggestion (dhvani). Thus, what appears to be merely the fulfillment of a generic staple of the courtly poetic genre, is in fact an opportunity to explore the nature of Buddhahood and devotion to the Buddha. Overall, this paper illustrates how literary innovations in early medieval Kashmir produced strikingly new representations of the Buddha in Sanskrit poetry.
Newar Buddhism, a unique tradition in Nepal, has remained a living tradition while Buddhism in other parts of South Asia declined after the 15th century. This paper examines the survival of Newar Buddhism, with a focus on the financial support and patronage it received through donation inscriptions from the Malla era (1201–1779). The key questions explored are: Who were the patrons of Newar Buddhism in terms of caste and occupation? How were resources allocated? And how did Nepal’s patronage system differ from other part of South Asia?
I argue that, alongside royal patronage, the continuous donations from ordinary lay Buddhists were vital to the survival of Newar Buddhism. By analyzing medieval patronage patterns, this study sheds light on Newar Buddhism’s creative strategies for sustaining community support. It contributes to the broader understanding of Buddhist economics, religious sustainability, and the dynamic interactions between Buddhism and surrounding religious traditions in South Asia.
This paper examines how Mount Jizu in Dali, incorporated into the Ming empire’s southwestern frontier in 1371, came to be identified with the Indian mountain Kukkuṭapāda, where the Buddha’s disciple Mahākāśyapa is believed to guard Śākyamuni’s robe while awaiting the future Buddha Maitreya. I argue that local elites, Ming state, and Chinese Buddhists collectively produced a new frontier sacred site. Dali elites sought to enhance ethnic prestige by linking their homeland to the sacred geography of Indian Buddhism, while the Ming state promoted Buddhist institutions as part of its broader effort to culturally integrate the southwestern frontier. At the same time, identifying Mount Jizu with Kukkuṭapāda allowed Chinese Buddhists to address a longstanding “borderland complex” arising from Buddhism’s Indian origins by situating the residence of the first Chan patriarch Mahākāśyapa within Ming territory. The case demonstrates how frontier regions could generate new sacred geographies that reshaped the wider Buddhist world.
This paper examines a purported “borderland Buddhism” along Tibet’s Mangyul Gungtang corridor, a trans-Himalayan conduit for trade, transportation, and religious exchange between Tibet and South Asia since the seventh century. Focusing on the hermitage of Drakar Taso and its nineteenth-century abbot Chokyi Wangchuk (1775–1837), the paper develops the concept of the “frontier lama”—a religious exemplar whose authority and institutional practice are constituted through work from the margins rather than proximity to centers of power. Drawing on Chokyi Wangchuk’s extensive writings, and engaging scholarship on medieval European frontier monasticism, the paper argues that the frontier lama’s defining features—border mobility, stewardship of endangered lineages, and synthesis of doctrinal traditions—represent a coherent pattern of Tibetan religious activity in the southern borderlands. It further contends that the borderlands functioned not as passive periphery but as an active site for the formation, preservation, and transmission of religious culture.
This roundtable will explore the history of American religious belief in extraterrestrial life by bringing scholars from a number of fields to discuss traditions who have long been convinced that life exists elsewhere in the universe. The roundtable is designed so that it stands at a number of investigative intersections: American Protestantism and new religious movements, science and religion, apocalypticism and politics, as well as technology and material culture. It will also study a variety of American religious traditions including -- but not limited to -- Puritanism, Swedenborgianism, Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Theosophy, Scientology, Nation of Islam and a handful of UFO religions. Roundtable participants will also bring their varied academic interests, training and methodologies to bear on the question of where the study of American extraterrestrial religious belief might find fruitful avenues of study going forward.
The study of religion and ecology arrives at a moment dense with anniversaries and with pressures that make reflection more critical than commemorative. Taking the 2026 AAR presidential theme, “future/s,” as its organizing principle, this roundtable asks what futures—those both concerning and captivating—are visible from within the field. Ecological disruption is more often than not narrated in apocalyptic terms, and the institutional conditions sustaining humanistic inquiry are themselves under strain. Just as cultural and political conversations ask how communities, institutions, and practices must adapt to an altered world, it is worth asking the same of the scholarly field that studies those very questions. Organized in partnership with the ISSRNC, which convened a companion session at its Venice anniversary conference in October, it foregrounds critical, field-level exchange: what has worked, what is under strain, what feels insufficient, and what the field offers scholars carrying it forward.