In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Scholarship on religion and the body has examined sexuality, purity, and bodily discipline but rarely considers how aging transforms the moral classification of bodies. This paper argues that Islamic traditions regulated female embodiment across the life course by distinguishing between the sexually disruptive body of the young woman and the desexualized body of the elderly woman. Drawing on Islamic legal discourse, waqf endowments, and Sufi hagiography, it shows how aging reconfigured norms governing women’s visibility, mobility, and bodily interaction. Once no longer associated with fitna, elderly women could appear in courts, establish endowments, and participate in devotional life, revealing how regimes of purity and bodily discipline shifted across the life course.

As we collectively imagine future/s, insights from the Choctaw Green Corn Ceremony inspire reconnection with Mother Earth, invigorate rematriation (Maracle 1988), attend to the wisdom of our ancestors, and encourage harmonious relationships. From an Indigenous feminist perspective, hopeful future/s require practices of culture-keeping such as storytelling, which demand the active presence of the community. Prior to removal from the sacred homeland of the Choctaws, the Green Corn Ceremony was the epicenter of social and spiritual celebrations (Pesantubbee 2005). This paper will explore the key elements of this tradition that relate to kinship with Mother Earth and Father Sky, gratitude for harvest, renewal of the sun, reminder of death, ecological importance of corn, and matrilineal leadership. Choctaw wisdom from this tragically lost ceremony offers fruitful possibilities to shape survivance for our world and its creatures, including the human ones.

Vietnamese Catholicism is culturally influenced by a double layer of patriarchy: Confucianism and traditional interpretations of Catholicism. Confucian teachings, introduced through a thousand years of rule by the Chinese Han Dynasty, subordinate women in most aspects of life and have become the norm for Vietnamese social relationships and order. Likewise, the patriarchal mindset of the Catholic tradition and biblical passages that subordinate women not only reinforce but divinize Confucian thought and practices in Vietnam. Within this context, Vietnamese Catholic women struggle for equality to find their place in the Church. In this paper, I examine the gaps in gender equality and the context for women in the Vietnamese Church to recommend ways for the Vietnamese Church to improve gender equality, which I call ‘A Future in Negotiation.’ This analysis seeks to empower Vietnamese Catholic women to challenge patriarchal structures and establish a point for dialogue with male Church leaders.

Engaging with Sabrina Strings’ genealogical account of fatphobia’s Protestant origins, Michelle Lelwica’s analysis of diet culture as secularized soteriology, and clinical literature documenting weight stigma as a source of measurable trauma this paper argues that the chronic psychological harm fat people carry is not incidental to Christian theological history—it is, in significant part, its product. Applying this framework of social sin to establish the tradition’s structural complicity in the production of this harm, the paper further demonstrates that Christian communities function as sites of theological amplification, intensifying secular fat stigma through the doctrinal encoding of somatic hierarchy as moral and spiritual failure. The paper then turns constructively to retrieve tradition’s own resources as grounds for a reparative theological anthropology, refusing to condition human dignity on somatic conformity, concluding with an account of what institutional repentance requires. This is justice for fat people—liberation from oppressive systems rooted in religion.

This paper looks at two emerging projects in the American Muslim community: Muslim Futures by Utopia Studios and Muslim Futurism by MIPSTERZ. These two projects have complementary approaches to imagining Muslim futures in the US, and potentially globally, that engage various art forms. The author, as a participant observer in both projects, examines the approaches of each to explore the divergences between them to understand the Muslim communities each imagines. In this investigation, one cannot avoid the theological thinking underlying both groups, either implicitly or explicitly. As such, the projects are about the future of US Muslims, and also of Islamic and Religious Studies. The self-conceptualization of these groups is an invitation to reconsider the categories and approaches we use in the study of Muslims.

Through its newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, the Nation of Islam articulated a vision of Black Muslim futurity grounded in self-determination and scientific progress. This paper considers how Muhammad Speaks presented decolonizing African nations as exemplars for its own dream of an independent nation within America. The newspaper portrayed new African nations as rejecting European influence by “doing for self” and embracing scientific tools to improve health outcomes and increase economic productivity, and it encouraged readers to identify with their progress. As such, these stories were more than news. They offered evidence that Black people were reclaiming their rightful position as the leading civilization on Earth and provided a model for Black people in America to follow as they built their own independent nation. From news about industrialization in Ghana to science fairs at the University of Islam, Muhammad Speaks offered readers a glimpse into the vibrant future Black Muslims were building.

This paper documents the formation of a new Muslim Left in New York City, exploring how members of this movement incorporate Islamic theology and ethics into their political practice. On the heels of electing the city’s first Muslim socialist mayor, Muslim organizers are turning to Islam as a language of resistance against the crises of affordability, capitalist accumulation, and imperialist war. Combining participant observation with in-depth interviews, this project documents how the new Muslim Left is challenging the secular Left’s suspicion of theology through its novel articulation of a progressive political Islam. Across Muslim electoral organizations, cultural institutions, informal study circles, places of worship, and performance spaces, I document how Muslim community leaders, political organizers, and creatives in New York City are forging a contemporary Islamic critique of American capitalism and imperialism.

In Bhartṛhari’s sphoṭa (“flash”) theory, Silence—which I use to render paśyantī, the highest level in the threefold hierarchy of speech—represents the purely non-verbal phase of speech and the point of origin from which articulated speech emerges. Bhartṛhari characterizes this through the metaphor of a peahen’s egg: just as a full, multicolored peacock is implicitly present within the egg’s yolk, the complete sentence and its sequential constituents are held implicitly in Silence as an undifferentiated whole. This paper addresses three interrelated questions addressed in Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya: how Silence can be understood as pure, non-conceptual subjectivity; how it differs from mere ineffability; and how it unfolds in a way that it generates an appearance of the world.

This paper argues that the prominent Chan monk Hongzhi Zhengjue 宏智正覺 (1091–1157) expanded the significance of the term mo 默 (silence) from its more narrow use as a method of meditation practice to signify the very goal of meditation (an enlightened state), and even ultimate reality in his new vision of a Caodong-School path to cultivation. The many meanings Zhengjue ascribed to mo (silence) are clearly articulated in his portrait encomia (zhenzan真贊). This paper first places Zhengjue’s portrait encomia within the contemporary monastic practice of fundraising and literati relations to demonstrate the effect Zhengjue’s literary achievements had on contemporary literati. Subsequently, through close readings of the encomia, the article analyzes how Zhengjue employed the character mo 默 in 94 of his 434 portrait encomia as both a reflection of the path to self-cultivation and a symbol of its ultimate goal.

Within dualistic Yoga and Jainism, mauna (silence) is considered as a form of tapas (austerity) or a supporting practice for non-violence or truthfulness. However, as this paper argues, within non-dualistic systems, silence is not just the conscious restraint of speech, but an ontological state. The c. sixteenth-century Aparokṣānubhūti reframes mauna as one of its fifteen yogic steps on the path to the realization of Advaitic oneness. It defines mauna in the words of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (2.9.1) as that state “from which words turn back, together with the mind.” According to the Aparokṣānubhūti, silence by merely restraining speech is child’s play and true silence is equated with brahman. The passage preceding the Taittirīya Upaniṣad verse explains that a wise person journeys through the increasingly subtle sheaths of food, breath, mind, wisdom, and bliss. This bliss is brahman—one who knows it is never afraid and transcends dualistic conceptions of silence.

In China, writing arises to divine the divine, to let heaven speak. Yet contra the cosmology of early divination, early philosophy mostly agrees with Confucius (Kongzi): “heaven doesn’t speak.” For Kongzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Hanfeizi, heaven’s silence is its perfectly effortless efficacy, which we should try to emulate; for Xunzi, it is a silence we should distance ourselves from via ritual, creating worldly order and stability instead. This presentation expounds Mengzi’s speculatively rich middle position, building on Franklin Perkins’ reading. For Mengzi, we should perfect our naturally good and heaven-bestowed, yet thereby ‘unscripted’ (spontaneous, divinely unplanned) dispositions, for want of maximal resilience in the face of everything heaven in complete moral silence enacts, viz., the outrageous caprice of human fates and fortunes. Human self-cultivation thus flips heavenly silence back on itself, achieving heaven’s absolute self-knowing as humanity’s tragic self-consciousness. Our very inability to reconcile with fate is heaven’s "heavening" in silence.

In Bhartṛhari’s sphoṭa (“flash”) theory, Silence—which I use to render paśyantī, the highest level in the threefold hierarchy of speech—represents the purely non-verbal phase of speech and the point of origin from which articulated speech emerges. Bhartṛhari characterizes this through the metaphor of a peahen’s egg: just as a full, multicolored peacock is implicitly present within the egg’s yolk, the complete sentence and its sequential constituents are held implicitly in Silence as an undifferentiated whole. This paper addresses three interrelated questions addressed in Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya: how Silence can be understood as pure, non-conceptual subjectivity; how it differs from mere ineffability; and how it unfolds in a way that it generates an appearance of the world.

This paper argues that the prominent Chan monk Hongzhi Zhengjue 宏智正覺 (1091–1157) expanded the significance of the term mo 默 (silence) from its more narrow use as a method of meditation practice to signify the very goal of meditation (an enlightened state), and even ultimate reality in his new vision of a Caodong-School path to cultivation. The many meanings Zhengjue ascribed to mo (silence) are clearly articulated in his portrait encomia (zhenzan真贊). This paper first places Zhengjue’s portrait encomia within the contemporary monastic practice of fundraising and literati relations to demonstrate the effect Zhengjue’s literary achievements had on contemporary literati. Subsequently, through close readings of the encomia, the article analyzes how Zhengjue employed the character mo 默 in 94 of his 434 portrait encomia as both a reflection of the path to self-cultivation and a symbol of its ultimate goal.

Within dualistic Yoga and Jainism, mauna (silence) is considered as a form of tapas (austerity) or a supporting practice for non-violence or truthfulness. However, as this paper argues, within non-dualistic systems, silence is not just the conscious restraint of speech, but an ontological state. The c. sixteenth-century Aparokṣānubhūti reframes mauna as one of its fifteen yogic steps on the path to the realization of Advaitic oneness. It defines mauna in the words of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (2.9.1) as that state “from which words turn back, together with the mind.” According to the Aparokṣānubhūti, silence by merely restraining speech is child’s play and true silence is equated with brahman. The passage preceding the Taittirīya Upaniṣad verse explains that a wise person journeys through the increasingly subtle sheaths of food, breath, mind, wisdom, and bliss. This bliss is brahman—one who knows it is never afraid and transcends dualistic conceptions of silence.

In China, writing arises to divine the divine, to let heaven speak. Yet contra the cosmology of early divination, early philosophy mostly agrees with Confucius (Kongzi): “heaven doesn’t speak.” For Kongzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Hanfeizi, heaven’s silence is its perfectly effortless efficacy, which we should try to emulate; for Xunzi, it is a silence we should distance ourselves from via ritual, creating worldly order and stability instead. This presentation expounds Mengzi’s speculatively rich middle position, building on Franklin Perkins’ reading. For Mengzi, we should perfect our naturally good and heaven-bestowed, yet thereby ‘unscripted’ (spontaneous, divinely unplanned) dispositions, for want of maximal resilience in the face of everything heaven in complete moral silence enacts, viz., the outrageous caprice of human fates and fortunes. Human self-cultivation thus flips heavenly silence back on itself, achieving heaven’s absolute self-knowing as humanity’s tragic self-consciousness. Our very inability to reconcile with fate is heaven’s "heavening" in silence.

This paper reads Li Bai’s poems on Mount Song as a small corpus linking poetic form to the social and institutional life of a sacred mountain. Rather than treating his “Daoism” as personal temperament projected onto scenery, I show how the poems presuppose Songshan as a worked religious terrain: a Central Marchmount shaped by past legends of transcendents, sites of retreat and rare herbs, imperial sacrifice, and abbeys. Four clusters anchor the analysis: poems on Yuan Danqiu that make friendship and visiting a way of locating aspiration; the sweet flag gatherer poem that condenses the Han Wudi legend into a fleeting encounter with a transcendent; a farewell poem that ties imagined residence to herb gathering; and an address to a female Daoist master that builds presence through absence. Together, they show Songshan made visible through acts of visiting, seeking, and naming: where friendship, hagiographic memory, and institutions converge

This paper explores the Ming woman poet Ye Xiaoluan’s (1616–1632) posthumous identity as a Daoist female immortal in three Ming biographies. Apart from certain historical facts about Xiaoluan’s human life, these biographies highlight her family members’ spiritual encounters with Xiaoluan during her various “returns” as a female immortal. The sections on Xiaoluan’s afterlife suggest the possibility of studying these biographies as hagiographies, which will shed light on how a late imperial cultural figure was remembered and immortalized. The paper analyzes how the notions of poetry and space play a significant role in the writers’ construction of Xiaoluan’s Daoist identity. To convince the readers of her Daoist identity, how did the three authors imagine and depict the sacred spaces? How did poetry participate in legitimizing these writers’ claim of Xiaoluan’s new identity as a Daoist immortal? 

This paper develops a method for reading classical Chinese poetry when it appears as quotation on social media and becomes attached to contemporary places. It begins with a 2016 Weibo “#早自习” (“morning self-study”) post that simply quotes Wang Bo’s Tang poem Xun daoguan (“Seeking a Daoist Temple”). Rather than treating this as a purely literary gesture, the paper argues that quoted poems reflect and participate in devotional practices present across contemporary China. Expanding outward to posts about Daoist caves and temples, it shows how social media posts often emerge during travel experiences, religious visits, or heightened emotional states such as nostalgia, fatigue, longing, or serenity. In these contexts, quoted poetry functions as an emotional intensifier, a legitimizing voice, and a form of cultural capital. The paper demonstrates how feeling gathers around caves—imagined as liminal, sheltered zones of sacred depth—illuminating contemporary expressions of popular Daoism