In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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.

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.

In this case study, scholar practitioners will share experiences leading "Multiple Belonging Circles" as a part of the Belonging Colorado project, a statewide effort to help people connect, participate, and collaborate across differences. Following ten people from diverse religious, political, cultural, racial, and gender identities, presenters will share stories, videos, struggles, and insights from the project. Additionally, logistical details will be shared, including funding, collaboration, and participant support.

The United States is plagued by rising polarization, misinformation, and threats to democratic pluralism. The need for empowered leaders with the practical skills and ethical frameworks to translate deeply held values into effective public action is clear. To address this pressing need, our institute is launching the “Values and Public Voice Network.” The primary goal of the VPV Network is to provide a practical, graduate-level public curriculum that equips clergy, nonprofit professionals, organizers, educators, activists, and other leaders to translate their deeply held values into tangible, justice-oriented frameworks for public impact. We are discussing this program as a case study for the "Publicly Engaged Scholarship in the Study of Religion Seminar" to expand relationships, share wisdom, and receive valuable feedback from leaders in other institutions who are engaging in similar work. 

How can scholarship on interreligious relations move beyond the academy to shape the future of relationships between religious communities? This paper examines a developing symposium initiative designed to translate academic research on Hindu–Christian relations into publicly engaged collaboration among scholars, Hindu organizations, and Christian communities in the United States. Building on foundational works such as The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations and Francis X. Clooney’s The Future of Hindu-Christian Studies, the project seeks to bring scholarly insights into practical community engagement.

Using this initiative as a case study, the paper analyzes strategies for building relationships across multiple scales: individual trust between scholars and practitioners, community partnerships between Hindu and Christian organizations, and institutional collaborations that sustain engagement over time. Reflecting on my experiences working with academic institutions and religious organizations, the paper examines how publicly engaged scholarship navigates institutional power structures while cultivating relationships necessary for pluralistic coexistence.

More than four decades after the AIDS crisis began, the history of Quaker responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis remains largely untold within American religious historiography. Similarly, the history of the first Quaker ceremonies of commitment for same-sex couples and Quaker advocacy for marriage equality is underrepresented in academic work about 20th century Quakerism. This paper responds to this lacuna by sharing highlights from an extensive body of research conducted by two researchers who have examined how Quakers grappled with both AIDS and marriage equality, often simultaneously, showing how these were not parallel crises but deeply intertwined struggles within the same congregations and across the many branches of Quakerism in North America. Additionally, by centering local congregational discernment rather than denominational pronouncements, this paper emphasizes how ordinary people transformed inherited theology through lived experience.

This paper examines shifting Quaker identities and their negotiations around wealth from the seventeenth century onwards as members engaged with the early anti-slavery movement. The historical record shows Quaker involvement in transatlantic slavery entailed complicity, compromise, and competing demands. Yet, even within this "enmeshment" (Block, 2010), radical individuals emerged, challenging the status quo and pushing for systemic change despite personal investments and sometimes great cost.

The paper’s unique intervention charts a shift from viewing wealth as good business and benefaction toward recognising it as part of a harmful system - and ultimately converting it into a tool for reform. By mapping this evolution, the paper highlights the enduring ethical responsibilities accompanying financial power in advancing equality and freedom from harm. It offers modern wealth holders a framework to address historical complicity, repair harm, and advance justice today.