In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper examines children’s literature about Jewish women in the labor movement in order to analyze what story about the Jewish past this particular body of work tells, and what kind of Jewish future it wishes to shape. I argue that this children’s literature overwhelmingly erases the politics of the Jewish labor movement, particularly ignoring socialism, communism, and often even unionization, while amplifying the graphic violence of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The resulting stories become moral tales of doing the right thing in line with capitalist American values, rather than ones of Jewish left radicalism which has the potential to inform a future of principled labor activism and working-class solidarity. Ultimately, this paper questions what happens to the past, the present, and the future of American Judaism and of the American labor movement when the radicalism is erased but the violence remains. 

This paper examines what might be described as the slow cancellation of the cooperative movement’s promised future. Drawing on examples from multiple contexts, cooperative institutions increasingly diverge from the emancipatory visions that once animated cooperative thought. In Indonesia, the cooperative model championed by Mohammad Hatta has gradually been absorbed into state apparatuses serving neoliberal development agendas. In Europe, some co-ops survive but adopt managerial practices that dilute their role as schools of democracy. Even thriving co-ops face persistent internal conflicts, splintered visions, and member dissatisfaction. Rather than treating these developments as failures of an inherently harmonious cooperative ideal, this paper reinterprets them through Foucault alongside the post-Marxist framework of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. It argues for radical negativity as a working ontology, viewing adversarial conflicts within and with the state as constitutive of democratic economic institutions. Using an agonistic model of politics, the paper reconceives cooperative economies as sites of ongoing political struggle and resubjectification.

The renovation of San Salvador’s Historic Downtown (Centro Histórico) is a central collective dream of postwar Salvadoran society. At its heart is the hyper-modern National Library (BINAES), functioning as a secular cathedral for President Nayib Bukele’s future-oriented, religious-infused politics. Drawing on Laurence Davis, I analyze this urban spectacle as “transcendent utopianism,” a top-down vision demanding an ideological faith in capitalist progress that ultimately drives speculative dispossession. In contrast, I examine an alternative renovation process led by the Salvadoran Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperativism (FECOSVAM). Rooted in the labor movement, these cooperatives provide dignified housing to working-class families formerly in precarious tenements (mesones). Following David Bell, I conceptualize FECOSVAM’s cooperative labor as “utopia-as-place”: an immanent space continuously reproduced through shared governance, solidarity, and convivencia. Theorizing this praxis as utopianism renders visible a contesting horizon of social dreaming, challenging the state’s elite, linear model of development.

On July 3rd, 2025, Donald Trump announced that a UFC Event would be held on the South Lawn of the White House as part of celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the USA. The announcement came after multiple key appearances of Donald Trump at UFC Events and the inclusion of key UFC personnel in major Republican moments, such as Dana White’s appearance and speaking on election night 2024. Using current research into the enactment of ritualized violence within sport from within religion and sport studies, this paper will explore the UFC as a site of sportswashing. However, by focusing on the growing participation of women in sport categorised ‘violent’, and specifically women UFC fighters, it will show how women fighters use evangelical-nationalistic sportswashing to buffer against the ongoing project or normalising gender and sexuality that places their identity under threat at the hands of both the state.

Donald Trump and his administration are intimately tied to the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA), with the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) “Freedom 250” event on the White House Lawn being the most obvious illustration. With Trump’s presence in the sport, his Christian nationalist supporters have sought to capitalize on this relationship and integrate MMA into their larger socio-religious projects. While previous scholarship has noted how Muscular Christianity appears within MMA, this paper explicitly argues that MMA has become a vital part of the larger Christian nationalist project’s masculine domination, populist rhetoric, and violence. To understand this dynamic, this paper makes the case for seeing the Christian nationalist embrace of MMA within an adaptive methodology on both the national and local levels. To conclude, this paper highlights how MMA requires greater attention thanks to its place within the larger extremist ecosystem.

Scholars of white Christian nationalism most frequently train their analytical lens on elections, voter blocs, culture war stances, and the words and actions of famous conservative religious leaders. Yet in doing so they miss how the values, aesthetics, and practices of white Christian nationalism become embodied. As a corrective, we draw on our fieldwork in CrossFit and with combatives (i.e. Mixed Martial Arts fighters) as a way to bring bodies back into conversations about processes of political formation. Beyond commonplace theoretical metaphors of a “body politic,” our analysis more aptly addresses what we call a “political physiology” of the body and the role that fitness and physical cultural practices play in forging right wing political identities and imaginaries. We argue that beyond the pews and pulpits, white Christian nationalism is formed and circulated through seemingly mundane spaces like the gym.

The leitmotif of the exiled legitimate cleric was more than rhetoric in the Egyptian non-Chalcedonian polemics of the fifth-through-eighth centuries.  This paper analyzes exile and expulsion of non-Chalcedonian leaders as a trope in hagiographies, as well as a galvanizing factor in connecting various Egyptian localities through epistolary correspondence with non-Chalcedonian leaders in exile.  The analysis accounts for expulsions appearing in Christian non-Chalcedonian hagiographical texts (such as Makarius of Tkow, Daniel of Scetis, and Samuel of Kalamoun); and in the letters of Pope Timothy II Aelurus (d.477), written in exile to the faithful in Egypt. The paper discusses the ironies of exilic displacement, showing how: 1) it was subverted, transformed into a credential of authentic authority, and 2) it served to make non-Chalcedonian orthodoxy unexpectedly mobile.  This paper draws significantly on the unpublished files of David W. Johnson, S.J. (†2011), who serves posthumously as a co-author.

In American Coptic Orthodox parishes, the Synaxarium is often treated as inherited devotional reading, yet it is increasingly becoming a frontline site where the church’s future is negotiated with younger generations. This paper argues that the Synaxarium functions as a technology of ecclesial formation: it scripts models of holiness, suffering, gender, vocation, and communal belonging, and thereby shapes how youth imagine what “Coptic” Christianity can be in the United States. I examine how second- and third-generation Copts receive, contest, or re-narrate Synaxarium figures amid American moral sensibilities, digital media habits, and inter-Christian proximity. Particular attention is given to pedagogical settings (Sunday school, youth meetings, retreats, and online clips) where hagiography is condensed, moralized, or contextualized. I show how these interpretive moves implicitly revise ecclesiology—redefining authority, identity, and continuity—by determining which saints remain credible, and why.

Mkhitar Gosh, one of the most influential figures in the history of the Armenian Church, was born around 1140 in the city of Gandzak (present-day Ganja in Azerbaijan) and was educated at some of the most prominent monasteries in the northern region, eventually attaining the rank of vardapet (given to scholar monks, roughly equivalent to an archimandrite). After receiving this rank, which designated him as scholar and gave him the right to teach, he traveled to the Cilicia region. At the time, the two regions were starkly divided intellectually, theologically, and culturally. This paper argues that this very literal mobility and Gosh’s monastic trajectory influences the characteristics of Gosh’s intellectual and theological approach. It suggests that Gosh’s mobile trajectory between these two regions can serve as an example for a recurring theme and problem in the Armenian experience: the disjoint between Armenian life in the traditional homeland and in diaspora.

This paper examines the historical and hagiographical materials pertaining to Wei Huacun (252-334), the purported first matriarch of the Shangqing current of medieval Daoism. The question that it attempts to answer is how Lady Wei came to occupy a place of such prestige within the tradition. It will argue that this was due in no small part to her familial situation. She was a daughter of a powerful minister, a widow, and a mother of two successful officials. All these facts significantly strengthened her position within the community of practitioners where the Shangqing revelations arose. However, it was Wei’s role as a mother in particular that likely played an outsized role in her recognition in the male-dominated early Shangqing milieu. The paper will conclude by discussing how the traditional understanding of motherhood in China provided a source for female empowerment in Daoism more generally.

The Scripture of Original Deeds is a fifth century Lingbao Daoist text that consists of a series of narratives of the prior lives of the gods of this world, which are heavily indebted to Buddhist jataka tales. In several of these Daoist tales the prior life of the god is that of woman, who wish to shed their female form and transform into male, as indeed occurs at the climactic moment of their apotheosis and appointment to divine rank. While we may see this as a wholesale adoption of Buddhist misogyny and a demotion of the status of women in the Daoist communal tradition, archeological and epigraphic sources from the sixth to the eighth century reveal a more complex response among Daoist women, who saw these tales as inspirational to their own aspirations and practices.        

Hagiographic accounts extoling Daoist female adepts circulated in China from the early medieval period, becoming more systemized in the Tang and Song periods. These hagiographies frequently highlighted their subjects’ religious devotion by underscoring their unattachment to commonplace feminine worldly affairs such as wifehood and motherhood. In contrast to the such depictions, Sun Bu’er (1119–1182), the only woman among the early founders of School of Complete Perfection (Quanzhen), is portrayed as a reluctant and doubting adept. Her hagiography in Orthodox of the Lineage of the Golden Lotus (Jinlian zhengzong ji) underscores her initial distrust of Master Wang Chongyang, the Quanzhen foremost patriarch. It also links her hesitance about becoming an adept to her familial attachments. Maintaining that Sun Bu’er’s hagiography deviated from antecedent depictions of female adepts, this paper suggests that her representation as ultimately devoted, albeit initially reluctant practitioner, offered a more accessible model for Daoist female practitioners.   

This paper examines the historical and hagiographical materials pertaining to Wei Huacun (252-334), the purported first matriarch of the Shangqing current of medieval Daoism. The question that it attempts to answer is how Lady Wei came to occupy a place of such prestige within the tradition. It will argue that this was due in no small part to her familial situation. She was a daughter of a powerful minister, a widow, and a mother of two successful officials. All these facts significantly strengthened her position within the community of practitioners where the Shangqing revelations arose. However, it was Wei’s role as a mother in particular that likely played an outsized role in her recognition in the male-dominated early Shangqing milieu. The paper will conclude by discussing how the traditional understanding of motherhood in China provided a source for female empowerment in Daoism more generally.

The Scripture of Original Deeds is a fifth century Lingbao Daoist text that consists of a series of narratives of the prior lives of the gods of this world, which are heavily indebted to Buddhist jataka tales. In several of these Daoist tales the prior life of the god is that of woman, who wish to shed their female form and transform into male, as indeed occurs at the climactic moment of their apotheosis and appointment to divine rank. While we may see this as a wholesale adoption of Buddhist misogyny and a demotion of the status of women in the Daoist communal tradition, archeological and epigraphic sources from the sixth to the eighth century reveal a more complex response among Daoist women, who saw these tales as inspirational to their own aspirations and practices.        

Hagiographic accounts extoling Daoist female adepts circulated in China from the early medieval period, becoming more systemized in the Tang and Song periods. These hagiographies frequently highlighted their subjects’ religious devotion by underscoring their unattachment to commonplace feminine worldly affairs such as wifehood and motherhood. In contrast to the such depictions, Sun Bu’er (1119–1182), the only woman among the early founders of School of Complete Perfection (Quanzhen), is portrayed as a reluctant and doubting adept. Her hagiography in Orthodox of the Lineage of the Golden Lotus (Jinlian zhengzong ji) underscores her initial distrust of Master Wang Chongyang, the Quanzhen foremost patriarch. It also links her hesitance about becoming an adept to her familial attachments. Maintaining that Sun Bu’er’s hagiography deviated from antecedent depictions of female adepts, this paper suggests that her representation as ultimately devoted, albeit initially reluctant practitioner, offered a more accessible model for Daoist female practitioners.   

This paper focuses on the emergent aesthetic and political formation of the “caste-Hindu Museum” in the current moment of authoritarian capitalism in India. I examine two sites which have imagined themselves as museums: a) the Gobardhan Museum in the largest cow-shelter in Delhi, run by Hindutva activists and b) the museum of the Akhil Bharatiya Agarwal Sammelan (a nationwide association of baniyas) within a temple compound in the “holy” site of Agroha in Haryana. The Gobardhan Museum contains cow-dung artefacts made by a young “entrepreneur and cow-dung artist” while the Agarwal Museum memorializes “notable baniya men” in Indian history and politics. Through an ethnographic inquiry and visual analysis, I explore what Kajri Jain calls the “sensible infrastructure” of a “Hindu India” and  the meanings and motivations behind the museumization of the “sacred cow” and baniya caste pride, and the stakes of naming and creating them as museums.

This paper examines astrology as a form of lived religion within a transnational spiritual organization called the World Teacher Trust, a movement rooted in the esoteric teachings of the early twentieth-century yogi Master C.V.V. and institutionalized by Ekkirala Krishnamacharya in the 1970s. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in India and in online study networks, including participant observation in astrology classes, English mantra recitation, and study groups, the paper explores how practitioners translate planetary principles into ethical discipline and everyday practice. Within this community, astrology functions not simply as a predictive technique but also as a primary cosmological framework through which individuals interpret karma, cultivate self-regulation, and orient their actions within a wider cosmic order. While planetary cycles sometimes become linked to narratives of cultural or national destiny, the movement’s emphasis on celestial relationality and flux also produces a cosmology that complicates fixed notions of identity and belonging.

For over a century, elite and middle-class audiences in the United States and elsewhere have engaged with Hindu traditions, but today new frontiers of Hindu religiosity are increasingly negotiated through digital platforms, podcasts, and motivational media. This paper examines the work of prominent wellness figures including Jay Shetty, Shubh Vilas, and Gaur Gopal—public personalities whose teachings draw on their connections to the Vaiṣṇava tradition of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). While they invoke secular wellness idioms, their teachings subtly extend one form of modern institutional Hinduism into new global publics. The paper analyzes how they navigate tensions between representing a specific devotional lineage and cultivating a marketable brand of corporatized spirituality. In doing so, their public personas reconfigure power relations that have long structured the figure of the “Oriental monk,” mobilizing global wellness discourses and persistent tropes of “virtual Orientalism” to position Hindu traditions as sources of universal wisdom and spiritual expertise.

Members of the Brahma Kumaris actively prepare for what they believe will be the imminent end of the world, as prophesied by their founder. Yet they readily engage with consumer culture publicly proclaim that their brand of meditation works as a form of stress-reduction that can improve marriages and careers. How do they reconcile these seemingly competing orientations toward everyday life and the eschaton? In this paper, I address this question through a comparative ethnographic treatment of Hindu apocalypticism in North India. The Brahma Kumaris, along with the Gayatri Pariwar, are two of the most prominent millennialist groups within Hindu India today. I identify the approaches these two organizations take toward the end of the world (as we know it) to be two styles of Hindu apocalypticism. Through comparison, these two styles offer new ways of thinking about end times preparation in the twenty-first century.

This paper explores the possibility of resisting capitalism given capitalism’s seemingly totalizing effects on our formation as subjects. I address this problem by exploring the work of two scholars whose work in ethics take it quite seriously: Luke Bretherton and Alasdair MacIntyre. Exploring the tensions in Luke Bretherton’s use of Alasdair MacIntyre’s thought for his ethics and political theology, I argue that they differ in their assessments of the possibilities of and limits to systematic ethical critiques of capitalism – and structural analysis in general. This is in part due to their respective frameworks for social analysis: Augustinian cosmology for Bretherton and Aristotelian ethics for MacIntyre. After investigating these frameworks and MacIntyre’s post-Marxist trajectory, I use Fredric Jameson’s concept of utopia to re-read Bretherton’s Augustinian eschatology and MacIntyre’s practices within institutions in a way that opens both to the possibility of emancipatory politics and social transformation.

This presentation explores Ricoeur’s “endless” interpretation of Hegel’s hermeneutic of religion. I complicate Ricoeur’s reading of Hegelian “absolute knowing” as a (purely) epistemological goal, showing instead that the “reciprocal recognition that is absolute spirit” accomplished at the end of Hegel’s dialectic of morality is a practice (of forgiveness), as is the self-expressive “utterance” of the forgiving community that Hegel studies in his chapter on religion. Given this practical orientation in Hegel's text, we have reason to interpret “absolute knowing”—which Ricoeur summarizes as “the conceptual light within which each cultural context, and finally each religious representation, thinks itself”—likewise in practical terms. Thinking, then, does not dissolve our (religious) hopes in an open future in conceptual recapitulation; rather, it is the practice of “giving a reason for the hope that is within us” in the context of interreligious dialogue.

This paper argues that the secularization thesis, as a hermeneutical framework for interpreting modern temporality, performs a double reduction: it reduces time to abstract representations and religion to disembodied doctrine. This double reduction is not just descriptively inadequate: by classifying non-modern temporalities as "religious" or "pre-modern," the secular/religious distinction functions as a mechanism of political deactivation that forecloses the critical potential of temporalities that subvert the coloniality of time. Drawing on post-secular critique and decolonial theory—including Quijano, Maldonado-Torres, Wynter, and An Yountae—the paper shows that these traditions, despite their convergence, have not fully elaborated how the coloniality of time operates through a systematic and practical redeployment of the sacred. A practice-based framework, informed by Bourdieu and Vallega's account of the coloniality of time as an aisthetic disposition, reveals how this operation occurs. To identify how time is decolonized, I argue, we must decolonize the frameworks through which we read it.

Meditative visualization of corpses, cremation grounds, and the incorporation of foul bodily substances pervades the history of Indian Buddhism. Some of these macabre visualizations aim to cultivate disgust (aśubha bhāvanā) for benign objects; others, rooted in Tantric traditions, invoke similar imagery to eliminate disgust for foul, putrid objects. If disgust is fitting when it accurately evaluates its object as contaminating or putrid, both types of visualization seem to generate misfit emotions. Yet philosophers who discussed these practices saw the resulting emotions as fitting and rational. Taking their justifications seriously can inform contemporary philosophical conversations around emotional cultivation and rationality. I argue that some cultivated emotions are best understood as “retrofit” emotions with a complex structure, and that imaginative simulation has an important role to play in emotional retrofitting. 

This paper examines the role of vividness (sphuṭatva) in Jñānaśrīmitra’s and Ratnakīrti’s works on yogic perception. I argue that, for them, vividness does not, strictly speaking, play any epistemic role. Rather, its role is affective and motivational. An awareness-event’s degree of vividness is measured not in terms of how closely it corresponds to the way things are (after all, even hallucinations might be vivid), but in terms of how it motivates certain thoughts and actions. When an awareness-event gives rise to certain judgments, speech, and behavior automatically, it counts as vivid. The question of whether it counts as an instance of knowledge is another matter—one having to do with 1) the relation between the awareness-event in question and its object, and 2) the practical efficacy of the thoughts and actions it motivates. An awareness-event’s vividness and its knowledge-hood (prāmāṇya), then, are distinct issues that need to be treated separately.

This paper argues that the mad yogi’s laughter—an image of success in the Dzokchen practice of breakthrough (khregs chod)—reflects a radically unstructured attentional stance that constitutes a distinctive epistemic virtue. Contrasting this with two other images of attention, the skilled archer (endogenous, willful control) and the attentive listener (exogenous and open receptivity), and drawing on Longchenpa’s Treasury of Reality’s Expanse, this paper argues that this radically unguided stance is cultivated via the suspension of dran pa, or minding attention, that contorts the mind around objects as apparently determinate entities. The result is not epistemic deficiency but disclosure: Suspension of attentional framing reveals the very processes by which experience organizes itself into determinate contents. This is not a novel set of contents but a transformed relation toward attentional framing, a radical form of cultivating the virtues of epistemic humility and openness.