In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This study examines the goddess Kisshōten as an embodiment of female sovereignty in early to medieval Japanese Buddhism, emphasizing how her female body functioned as a medium of political and spiritual authority. Tracing her origins to the Hindu deity Lakṣmī, Kisshōten inherited associations with fertility, beauty, and queenship, which were re-expressed in eighth-century Japan through statuary, ritual practice, and Buddhist texts offering instructions for creating and worshipping her image. Her divine body was central to repentance rites and temple art, allowing devotees to experience her presence ritually and materially. Powerful Fujiwara women, including Empresses Kōmyō and Kōken (later Shōtoku), actively promoted Kisshōten’s worship, using her female form as a model to articulate and legitimize their own authority. Through hidden statues, mandalas, and ritualized images, Kisshōten’s body operated as both a symbolic and material medium of female-centered rulership, shaping ideals of sovereignty, power, and gender in Nara-period Japan.

The 1,000 life-sized statues of Senju Kannon in the thirteenth-century Sanjūsangendō temple in Kyoto contain hidden votive deposits—dhāraṇī texts, moon disks, and images of the bodhisattva—dating to the hall’s original construction in 1164. Placed inside the hollow statues, these materials form a concealed ritual layer complementing the hall’s multiplicity. This paper argues that the hall functioned as a space for esoteric ritual, where the retired emperor Goshirakawa (1127–1192) could ritually align his body with the bodhisattva through the “three mysteries.” The deposits correspond to mudrā, mantra recitation, and visualization practices, materializing esoteric ritual logic within the statues themselves. The hall integrates human, sculptural, and divine bodies into a network of correspondence, enacting a political theology in which sovereign authority is embodied. By linking visible multiplicity with hidden ritual objects, Sanjūsangendō emerges as a site where ritual, material culture, and political power converge through the shared language of the body.

This paper examines Aki no yo no naga monogatari (“A Long Tale for an Autumn Night”), a late medieval narrative that recounts the tragic relationship between a Tendai monk and a youthful monastic acolyte (chigo). Despite it’s the sophistication and complex visual program in the illustrated scrolls preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the work has received limited attention. The paper argues that the work deploys the body of the chigo as a medium through which notions of gender, desire, and religious meaning are articulated. The chigo is a liminal figure whose feminized beauty—marked through tonsorial, sartorial, and physical semiotics—renders his body both an object of attraction and a divine presence. The narrative further associates him with the natural envinronment, and with Ishiyama Kannon, an androgynous being. The paper will show that Aki no yo is important for understanding conceptions of the body in medieval Japanese religion.

This study examines the goddess Kisshōten as an embodiment of female sovereignty in early to medieval Japanese Buddhism, emphasizing how her female body functioned as a medium of political and spiritual authority. Tracing her origins to the Hindu deity Lakṣmī, Kisshōten inherited associations with fertility, beauty, and queenship, which were re-expressed in eighth-century Japan through statuary, ritual practice, and Buddhist texts offering instructions for creating and worshipping her image. Her divine body was central to repentance rites and temple art, allowing devotees to experience her presence ritually and materially. Powerful Fujiwara women, including Empresses Kōmyō and Kōken (later Shōtoku), actively promoted Kisshōten’s worship, using her female form as a model to articulate and legitimize their own authority. Through hidden statues, mandalas, and ritualized images, Kisshōten’s body operated as both a symbolic and material medium of female-centered rulership, shaping ideals of sovereignty, power, and gender in Nara-period Japan.

The 1,000 life-sized statues of Senju Kannon in the thirteenth-century Sanjūsangendō temple in Kyoto contain hidden votive deposits—dhāraṇī texts, moon disks, and images of the bodhisattva—dating to the hall’s original construction in 1164. Placed inside the hollow statues, these materials form a concealed ritual layer complementing the hall’s multiplicity. This paper argues that the hall functioned as a space for esoteric ritual, where the retired emperor Goshirakawa (1127–1192) could ritually align his body with the bodhisattva through the “three mysteries.” The deposits correspond to mudrā, mantra recitation, and visualization practices, materializing esoteric ritual logic within the statues themselves. The hall integrates human, sculptural, and divine bodies into a network of correspondence, enacting a political theology in which sovereign authority is embodied. By linking visible multiplicity with hidden ritual objects, Sanjūsangendō emerges as a site where ritual, material culture, and political power converge through the shared language of the body.

This paper examines Aki no yo no naga monogatari (“A Long Tale for an Autumn Night”), a late medieval narrative that recounts the tragic relationship between a Tendai monk and a youthful monastic acolyte (chigo). Despite it’s the sophistication and complex visual program in the illustrated scrolls preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the work has received limited attention. The paper argues that the work deploys the body of the chigo as a medium through which notions of gender, desire, and religious meaning are articulated. The chigo is a liminal figure whose feminized beauty—marked through tonsorial, sartorial, and physical semiotics—renders his body both an object of attraction and a divine presence. The narrative further associates him with the natural envinronment, and with Ishiyama Kannon, an androgynous being. The paper will show that Aki no yo is important for understanding conceptions of the body in medieval Japanese religion.

In a Singapore state-run columbarium where people of different religions are put to rest, it is common to see dollhouse-sized polymer clay miniatures of foods of local fare and other everyday items attached to the niche plaque or the base of a columbarium niche. While they are present across multiple religious traditions represented the columbarium, these are especially common on Christian niches. While niches in Catholic columbariums in Singapore also contain these polymer clay miniatures, there are significantly fewer of them. Instead, Chinese New Year and Christmas decorations abound. Using photographic documentation as a starting point, this presentation will :1) analyze the semantic complexity of various material objects surrounding and affixed to columbarium niches of Catholics in Singapore with attention to their theological and social dimensions; 2) contrast the ways in which Catholic and state-run columbariums function as ritual spaces that reflect, generate and sustain theologies of ancestors and family differently; and 3) propose that columbariums are overlooked spaces of primary theology (theologia prima) – a source of theology that is lived, embodied, and experienced – through which material expressions of local theologies as “new creations” emerge.

In several Chinese Filipino Catholic parishes in Manila, devotional practices surrounding Chinese New Year extend beyond the liturgy into ritual engagements with ancestors, saints, and sacred objects. On the eve of the feast, parishioners present offerings of incense sticks, flowers, wine, and fruits before ancestral tablets and images of Mary and the saints. These offerings are later brought to family tombs, while an ancestral veneration ritual concludes the Mass. Commonly described as alay (offering), these practices situate Catholic devotion within networks of kinship, memory, and material practice.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in parishes and cemeteries in Manila, this paper examines how such offerings function as material mediators of remembrance in Chinese Filipino Catholic life. Engaging Jayeel Serrano Cornelio’s concept of “creative Catholics” (2016) alongside theological reflections on inculturation by Jonathan Y. Tan (2011), Peter C. Phan (2004), and Aristotle Dy (2005), the paper argues that alay operates as embodied memory through which Catholic identity is transmitted across generations, revealing material devotion as a form of prima theologia.

This paper explores the Malaysian Chinese Catholic re-imagination of the traditional first day of the Chinese New Year ancestor veneration ritual at the parish columbarium of Saint Michael’s Church, the Chinese Catholic parish in Ipoh, Malaysia. It examines how the parish columbarium provides the ritual space to re-imagine the traditional ancestor veneration ritual on the first day of the Chinese New Year in an inculturated Malaysian Chinese Catholic context beyond its official liturgical placement in the authorized Chinese New Year Mass. In doing so, it questions the conventional definition of liturgical space within the architectural confines of a church building, evaluates the interplay between anamnetic memory and ritual experience which remake and remagine liturgical space as the space which is constructed, negotiated, and synthesized through anamnetic ritualization by the ritual participants themselves.

This study examines Catholic charismatic prayer groups of El Shaddai among overseas Filipino workers in Hong Kong and Singapore through an ethnohistorical analysis of migrant devotional practice. It investigates how prayer gatherings function as sites of identity formation and spatial negotiation. Drawing on theories of religion and space by Thomas A. Tweed (2006) and Kim Knott (2005), the study shows how charismatic practices transform shared environments into temporary sacred spaces. Using interviews, participant observation, and historical reconstruction, it analyzes how praise-and-worship and devotional objects such as rosaries, handkerchiefs, and digital media mediate divine presence while blurring distinctions between official liturgy and vernacular devotion. The findings suggest that migrant religiosity provides both spiritual and socio-cultural support while negotiating authority between lay movements and institutional Catholic structures, producing what the study terms “kabayan spirit in place or out of space.”

"Cop City Will Never Be Built" examines the spiritual and religious practices that animated the movement to prevent the construction of a militarized police training facility in Atlanta’s South River Forest. Contrary to popular depictions of contemporary leftist movements as inherently irreligious, militant “Stop Cop City” activists consistently deployed religious ritual and practice as modalities of political organizing and future-oriented world-making. Through analysis of the political impact of the movement’s spiritual ceremonies, rituals, and direct actions, interviews with movement activists, engagement with a multimedia movement archive, and comparison with resonant movements, this paper reveals spiritual practice as a cornerstone of the Stop Cop City movement, as well as other anti-colonial land defense movements across the Global South.

This paper argues that anti-lynching campaigns should be understood within the historical tradition of abolitionist movements in the United States and as a resource for our contemporary abolitionist future. Spectacle lynchings in the South relied on myths of Black southerners’ inherent criminality and were enabled by sheriffs and the broader penal apparatus. By challenging the racial tethering of criminality to Blackness and critiquing the state’s role in mob violence, anti-lynching activists engaged in abolitionist practice. Examining anti-lynching activism as abolition, however, complicates the contemporary abolitionist demand for nonreformist reforms. To grapple with this tension, this paper compares the anti-lynching campaigns of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). It further interprets lynching as a religious practice and anti-lynching activism as a competing theology that challenged the moral order sustaining racial violence.

Keeping in mind the 2026 American Academy of Religion presidential theme, “Future/s,” this paper argues that theological discourse on race must move beyond the traditional Du Bois–Cone paradigm in order to address the evolving realities of race, immigration, and human dignity in the United States. While W. E. B. Du Bois’s analysis of the color line and James H. Cone’s theological critique of white supremacy remain foundational for Black liberation theology, the racial politics of the present moment increasingly operate through what may be described as the “border line,” where immigration status, nationality, and state power shape experiences of marginalization.

Engaging Haitian Vodou as an Africana religious lens, the paper develops a pneumatocentric ethic of human dignity rooted in Vodou ritual practice, particularly spirit possession as a form of ontological affirmation. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of "heterotopia", Vodou ritual space is interpreted as a site where marginalized communities cultivate dignity and resilience in the face of racialized immigration regimes. Africana religious epistemologies and pneumatologies thus offer critical resources for reimagining the future of theological discourse on race.

This paper argues that Augustine’s account of beatific enjoyment offers a theologically and metaphysically robust alternative to two contemporary eschatological trajectories. Eschatological naturalism locates human fulfilment largely within the imminent order of nature while radical divine immanence collapses the distinction between God and creatures. Surveying proposals from biblical studies, philosophy of religion, and theology, the paper highlights how these trends either naturalize the creature’s end or imply an already realized divinizing participation of nature in God. By contrast, Augustine depicts created being as dependent, fragile, and oriented beyond itself towards its transcendent origin–fulfillable only in the intellectual vision of God. Drawing on texts from the Cassiciacum dialogues to the Confessions and City of God and important letters and sermons, this paper shows how Augustine’s conception of createdness, grace, and divine agency enriches current debates by recentring divine transcendence and the gratuity of beatitude. 

In her book Motherhood, Natalie Carnes speaks on behalf of many mothers when she expresses her dismay with Augustine’s neglect of his experience as a parent in his Confessions. Indeed, Augustine barely mentions his son and leaves his feelings about Adeodatus’ life and death unusually hidden. However, a close reading of Augustine's earlier texts written shortly after Adeodatus died suggests that there is more of Adeodatus in the Confessions than the few words Augustine devotes explicitly to him. In those earlier texts, Augustine introduces his doctrine of ordered love through the metaphor of temporal syllables in a poem “passing away.” This metaphor and doctrine, later incorporated into the Confessions, suggest that he was confronting his dysphoria over Adeodatus’ young death. Reading the Confessions with an eye toward unearthing Adeodatus’ hidden presence there opens up new possibilities for parents to engage with it in understanding their relationships with their children.

This paper sheds new light on the debate over the philosophical origins of the uti-frui distinction by examining the influence of Scripture on Augustine’s interpretation of uti-frui. Several candidates have been proposed for having influenced Augustine’s understanding of uti-frui: Varro, Cicero, and Stoicism. In response, I argue that there is no special source for Augustine’s formulation of the distinction, since this distinction was widespread in antiquity. Augustine’s own interpretation of uti and frui, while indebted to ancient philosophy, took its shape from three Scriptural texts: Ephesians 5:29, 1 Corinthians 7:31, and 1 Timothy 1:5-8. Ephesians helped him articulate an account of the goodness of natural goods, in line with the Old Academy but opposed to Manicheism. 1 Corinthians 7:31 gave him the insight that everything should be used in this life. 1 Timothy 1:5-8 specifies the end of use: love of God and all things as related to God.