In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

What futures can be conjured from an ancient mythical place? This paper examines the Theosophical Society's use of the Sanskrit concept of Āryāvarta — the ancient Vedic "land of the noble ones" — as a vehicle for a distinctive vision of global spiritual futurity. Rather than treating Theosophy as a nostalgic movement, it argues that the Society's reimagining of Āryāvarta functioned as a forward-looking cosmopolitan project and a blueprint for a coming Universal Brotherhood of Humanity. Drawing on primary sources including Blavatsky, Judge, and Olcott’s writings, the paper traces three phases of the concept's evolution, from its Orientalist origins, through the Society's tumultuous alliance with Dayananda Saraswati and the Arya Samaj, to its gradual transformation into a model of transnational spiritual cosmopolitanism. The Theosophical Āryāvarta, this paper contends, was always oriented toward a future not yet arrived.

George William Russell, "AE" (1867–1935), was a central figure in both the Irish Nationalist movement and the Dublin Theosophical Society, yet the relationship between these two commitments remains understudied. This paper examines three episodes in AE's work to demonstrate that his nationalism and his Theosophy must be read together. In The Irish Theosophist (1892–1897), AE reinterprets Irish legend through a Theosophical lens, presenting Irish adepts as exemplars of Blavatsky's Wisdom-Religion and prophesying a "Celtic Avatar" who would displace British rule. In The National Being (1917), a Theosophical spiritual anthropology undergirds his call for proletarian emancipation through agricultural cooperation. Finally, The Avatars (1933) fictionalizes the Avatar's arrival as a critique of Ireland's stagnation. Tracing AE's thought across these works reveals a reciprocal relationship: nationalist texts shaped his Theosophy, while Theosophical concepts grounded his nationalist commitments. AE's career thus illustrates Theosophy's capacity for mobilization in a revolutionary, anti-imperial register.

This paper examines the reception of works of popular conspiracy fiction in order to develop on Eve Sedgwick’s critique of Robert Hofstadter and demonstrate the ubiquity of paranoid and conspiratorial thinking in contemporary culture. It suggests that a playful orientation to works produced, marketed, and (in most cases) read as fiction allow conspiratorial consumers to blur the edges of reality, blending truth and fantasy. 

Ultimately, in a world increasingly dominated by games, playful paranoia is not only the domain of the fringe conspiracy theorist, but the basic stance of political participation. Via the dazzling and disorienting toy of the internet, an American “conspiracy nation” has transformed into a global phenomenon.

When Shakespeare’s Macbeth fantasizes about “jumping the life to come,” he voices a temptation that continues to animate modern theories of sovereignty: the dream of securing the future by collapsing time itself. The political afterlives of Friedrich Nietzsche reveal divergent responses to this impulse. Neoreactionary political theory—most notably in the Patchwork model proposed by Curtis Yarvin—draws upon Nietzsche’s language of hierarchy and the Übermensch while detaching it from the temporal ontology that grounds it: the doctrine of eternal recurrence. In Yarvin’s neocameralist vision, sovereignty becomes a project of security and futurist stabilization, seeking to eliminate contingency through technocratic monarchy. By contrast, the anarchist esotericism of Peter Lamborn Wilson retains Nietzsche’s Dionysian temporality and its yea-saying. Wilson’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone imagines sovereignty as fleeting, ecstatic rupture—carnival time rather than fortified permanence. Juxtaposing these interpretations reveals that there is more than one way to play the King.

In this presentation, I explore the potential of some Mahāyāna sūtras to illuminate and challenge our own conceptions of literature and “reading” practices, broadly construed. The normative vision of such sūtras places them squarely in a ritual-ethical arena where poetic language makes perfect worlds and immortal bodies. They take for granted what modern scholars so often overlook: the production of language and world is both a bodily act and a linguistic act that makes bodies legible as such. In this way, these sūtras offer a powerful challenge to contemporary assumptions both about the nature of language and narrative and about the kinds of practices deemed to be “ritual.” And given the relevance of the sūtras to contemporary conversations about performative language, normative practices, and their role in making lifeways and persons, they problematize the too often uncritical exclusion of religious texts from serious consideration in contemporary debates.

This paper revisits the notion of poiesis as a productive force of language in Buddhist texts. It proposes to view these texts as operating within a constitutive tension between the openness of meaning, its virtually infinite expressive potential, and its inevitable narrowing into determinate expression. Whereas some twentieth-century philosophers regarded such closure as veiling being as such, Buddhist authors, despite (or precisely through) their strong nominalist commitments, often treat this condition as an opportunity to deploy language in transformative ways. Drawing on a range of Indian Buddhist textual materials, the paper delineates moments of poiesis in which language turns back upon itself and generates new possibilities for meaning, understanding, and perception. Taking this feature to be a constitutive aspect of Buddhist textual production, the paper concludes by considering how it might best be studied and approached, through which disciplines and with what analytical tools, within the study of Buddhist texts. 

The Language, Poesis, and Buddhist Experiments with the Possible Seminar concerned what is made possible in language variously used. Based on our conversations, I offer a constructive account of aesthetic experience. Engagements with works of art, I argue, are best understood as giving rise to aesthetic events: structured experiential episodes that occur under conditions of sustained aesthetic attention. Such aesthetic events are not reducible to interpretations of artworks or to semantic relations between texts and readers, being instead concrete experiential occurrences whose content, affective valence, and intelligibility are partly scaffolded by works of art and by broader aesthetic practices and institutions. We discussed how aesthetic events may be fruitfully compared to virtual experiential episodes, akin to events occurring in dreamscapes—which may call for a variety of aesthetic mindfulness on our part: a micro-phenomenology of aesthetic events through which artworks help us to contour and experiment with the possible.

This paper examines how Mormonism was constructed as a religious and social threat in the mid-nineteenth-century Swedish press. From the moment Mormonism entered public awareness, newspapers played a central role in shaping its image, portraying the movement as fanatical, immoral, and politically subversive. Such representations were closely tied to broader concerns about dissent and social stability within a confessional Lutheran state that still legally restricted alternative modes of religious practice. Drawing on national and provincial newspapers, complemented by ecclesiastical and civil records relating to prosecutions of missionaries and converts, the study traces how narratives of danger and disorder circulated between media, church, and state. By situating anti‑Mormon discourse within debates about religious freedom and modernization, the paper shows how Mormonism became a touchstone in negotiating the boundaries of toleration in nineteenth‑century Sweden, thereby contributing to the growing field of Global Mormon Studies.

Dry Bar Comedy has establish itself as a significant player in the stand-up comedy industry. Since its launch a decade ago, the company has clearly signaled its intention to reshape the comedic market, profession and art form around specific norms of propriety and audience participation. As such, it specifically seeks to expand the circuit of family-friendly clean comedy. Although Dry Bar Comedy does not explicitly promote a religious framework, it is strongly associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I argue that its mission closely aligns with that of its parent company, Angel Studios, which aims to provide stories that “amplify light”.

This paper considers both the successes and stakes of Dry Bar Comedy in the comedy industry, examining the growing popularity of clean and faith-based comedy in the US alongside the evolving relationship between humor, religion and the LDS Church in contemporary entertainment.

This paper takes as its primary subject the archetype of Mormon motherhood, Taylor Frankie Paul, whose public and private persona as a Mormon wife serves as the primary text from which to explore the archetype of the single mother, the co-parent, and the divorcée through the lens of Mormonism and Mormon history.  Particularly salient for this paper will be the ways that the priesthood functions and has functioned for unmarried or divorced mothers, as well as what structures exist and have existed to support these women. Equally important to this study of the frameworks in which mothers like Paul operate are the ways that Mormon mothers experience and have experienced the messiness of this role.  Is and has there been space for mess for Mormon mothers?  What does being a “good mother” mean in a world where mess is a given? 

Death and mourning rituals are among the most persistent and culturally-distinctive Jewish practices today. Yet the early rabbinic concepts of death that produced many of these practices, including care for the deceased body and sitting shiva, bear little resemblance to those of the contemporary West. Today, life and death are boundaried states: death marks the end of agency, awareness, and relationality. The Talmud reflects a cosmology in which the boundaries between life and death are far more porous: The dead are dynamic beings who retain sentience, agency, and affective capacity, while mourners undergo ritual restrictions that render them temporarily “death-like,” aligning their bodily experiences with that of the deceased. Engaging rabbinic texts alongside contemporary theories of animacy, affect, and disability, this paper argues that rabbinic cosmology offers an alternative framework for understanding bodily autonomy that challenges the modern equation of mobility, independence, and productivity with the conditions for human life.

The supposed rabbinic condemnation of gossip occurs because the rabbis (both real and fictive) are themselves engaging in gossip (although it is dressed up as dispute and story telling) and because there is a strong homology between the structure of gossip and the mechanisms we use to keep the dead present in our community. In the simplest sense: gossip is a dialogue between two or more people about someone who is not there. Similarly, all discussion of the dead occurs between two people about someone (necessarily) absent. 

Gossip, while hardly democratic, is a popular method for social introjection (i.e. maintaining the dead,) one that Jewish authorities have tried (and failed) to harness and control; an examination of their efforts and anxieties will help us understand the role gossip plays as a techne for determining the people who are part of our future, even after they are gone.

This paper traces some of the experiences of trans and nonbinary converts to Judaism in the contemporary United States, looking specifically at an online queer digital yeshiva, Yeshiva Yavne. I argue, on the basis of around a year and a half of digital ethnographic research and interviews, that trans converts uniquely navigate simultaneous processes of gender transition and religious conversion, disidentifying with both Jewish history and identity, still engaging with them for the sake of rendering Jewish tradition more inclusive—in terms of gender, race, and disability. This presentation argues that trans converts eschew rigid gendered/religious binaries within a variety of Jewish denominations, “queering” and “transing” Torah study in order to shape Jewish tradition in productive, justice-oriented ways, all in service of working to bring about “olam ha’ba,” or “the world-to-come.” Trans converts offer exciting challenges to contemporary American Judaisms, and their attempts to rework it deserve study.

Cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis-Saint Paul have witnessed strong faith-led resistance to the current ICE regime invading their neighborhoods. But in cities like Dallas and Denver, faith leaders are already organizing themselves while working alongside grassroots movements to meet their current conditions regarding ICE facilities, companies that threaten the safety of immigrants and citizens alike, and threats of increased ICE presence throughout their states. Following two clergy-led immigrant support movements – CLEAR DFW and Colorado Clergy Alliance – this paper utilizes an ethnographic approach to examine how faith-based organizing in Dallas and Denver is adapting historic methods of organizing to meet the current crisis, connecting across state lines, and employing an “ethics of place” that centers immigrant communities with special attention to their physical locals of origin as well as the unique challenges of their current locations.

Religious and especially Catholic responses to the current violence against migrant lives in the United States are coming from many different fronts. From statements from different Catholic Bishops against the current deportation regime and the construction of new detention centers, to the Episcopal Bishops' "Whose Life Matters?" video, to Church World Service's ecumenical "Ash Wednesday Declaration", the growing chorus of church voices decidedly taking a public stance for migrant rights and dignity witnesses to the Biblical command to privilege and protect "the foreigner who resides with you" (Leviticus 19:34). Would the cause of migrant rights be better served by a univocal religious public witness? This presentation examines the concern over the efficacy of disparate religious voices in the public square surrounding migrant rights by considering another instance in which churches, especially the Catholic Church in the U.S., spoke unreservedly with one voice: the pro-life movement and the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The revocation of the “sensitive spaces” policy, which once shielded churches from immigration actions, has made them stages for security theater that uses spectacles of enforcement and illegality to cast “aliens” as figures of enmity.  Yet this policy also amplifies religious actors’ ability to assert counter-narratives that recast migrants as subjects of moral concern.  Drawing on Robert Cover’s narrative theory of law, I contend that when these counter-narratives are mobilized in the courts they make not only a symbolic, but a material difference.  Such a difference can be seen in Evangelical Lutheran Church in America et al. v. Department of Homeland Security et al., where the plaintiffs’ rights of religious conscience, enacted through the provision of sanctuary, are externalized from the private sphere of belief and projected into public space as zones of exception that halt the advance of federal power and glimpse a world more compassionate than our own.

This paper explores how Humanistic Buddhism can contribute to reimagining the future of interreligious dialogue in a world marked by polarization and ethical uncertainty. It places Hsing Yun’s teaching “I Am Buddha” in dialogue with Søren Kierkegaard’s claim that “subjectivity is truth.” Although arising from different traditions—Chinese Mahayana Buddhism and nineteenth-century Danish Christianity—both expressions suggest that religious truth becomes meaningful only when it is existentially appropriated and embodied in lived practice. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the paper argues that these teachings function as transformative metaphors that reshape how practitioners understand themselves in relation to religious truth. By highlighting the formative role of metaphor in spiritual life, the study proposes a model of interreligious dialogue grounded in shared processes of existential transformation, demonstrating how Humanistic Buddhist thought can deepen contemporary approaches to dialogue across religious traditions.

A Zen monk and I were standing together watching some Jewish women lighting Shabbat candles on Shabbat eve. He offered his interpretation of why the women covered their eyes when having lit the candles. He said that you cannot look at the light of Shabbat with the same eyes with which you see the light of shabbat. So the women had to close their weekday eyes and open new eyes - shabbat eyes. This presentation explicates my understanding of my Zen friend in terms of the ZEN concept of No-Mind. Then I apply this explication to some new readings of traditional Jewish texts, prominently by Reb Nachman of Breslav. 

This paper explores the intersection of religious traditions and scientific perspectives on youth autonomy, particularly in decision-making regarding gender-affirming care. It examines how various religious practices across Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism mark gradual development toward autonomy, with significant milestones occurring between the ages of 8 and 16. These rites of passage signify moral and intellectual responsibility in a religious context. Scientific research on cognitive development, including studies on identity formation, limbic system regulation, and prefrontal cortex maturation, further informs the conversation. The paper argues that while religious traditions emphasize a measured approach to youth autonomy, scientific insights call for caution in granting full autonomy power during adolescence, given the ongoing development of critical cognitive functions. The paper concludes that legal frameworks should balance the need for youth agencies with the responsibility to protect their well-being, considering both spiritual guidance and scientific evidence to support informed, mature decision-making.

This paper interrogates Søren Kierkegaard’s For Self-Examination as anti-hermeneutical method. Standing as a seminal precursor to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of the dissimilarity between truth and method is Kierkegaard’s notion that the earnest (as interpretive summum bonum) is not found in an "objective" and impersonal technique. Rather, a theo-teleological gaze—focused on transformation through union in Christ—demands subjective appropriation through our prejudices over detached exegesis “against” them. Interpretive assurance becomes busyness, where “the people alter the conception of what earnestness is and consider being busy with interpretation to be real earnestness." Here, the mirror of the Word exposes such pseudo-earnestness, insisting on immediate self-confrontation and action. There is no “objective” mediator or method we can defend our prejudices with. Rather, what stands greater is the final upbuilding maxim from Either/Or, that "in relation to God we are always in the wrong,” which serves as the humbling criterion, built upon our eternal sanctification.

In For Self-Examination, Kierkegaard’s account of reading Scripture is strikingly immediate. He trusts in Scripture's ability to reveal itself to the reader through the Spirit's inspiration. He seems to lack any concerns about deferred meaning that put a gap between reader and text. This might seem to align Kierkegaard with evangelical doctrines of inerrancy, though I argue he is closer to trends in New Criticism and Post-Criticism. Further, I argue that such trust in Scripture's immediacy is laudable today in the face of Christian postliberalism and Christian nationalism, which privilege the mediating role of the interpretative community as authoritative for Scriptural interpretation. Thereby, however, the Scripture loses its power to criticize and correct, and capacity for critique is lacking in these movements. Therefore, Kierkegaard’s sense of Scripture’s immediacy is an important rejoinder to postliberal and Christian nationalist hermeneutics.

This paper explores Søren Kierkegaard’s claim in For Self-Examination that Scripture should be approached as a mirror rather than as an object of detached analysis. A mirror is not normally regarded as an object in itself; instead, it recedes as the viewer focuses on the reflected image. Kierkegaard argues that Scripture functions similarly. When readers treat the text merely as an object of scholarship, they risk neutralizing its reflective and transformative function.

Drawing on Diarmaid MacCulloch’s account of Christianity’s historical shift toward individual subjectivity and Erich Auerbach’s analysis of the biblical orientation toward transcendent meaning, the paper situates Kierkegaard’s insight within broader intellectual history. It then brings Kierkegaard into dialogue with Keiji Nishitani’s distinction between asking “What is for me?” and “What am I for?” Together these perspectives illuminate how Scripture, approached as mirror, can provoke a destabilizing transformation of subjective identity.

This paper investigates whether Kierkegaard’s model of self-reflection, as it operates within his Biblical hermeneutics, contains an implicit normative dimension, a standard by which one mode of engaging with Scripture can be judged more adequate than another. Kierkegaard’s approach to reading the Bible is not a neutral or descriptive enterprise; it is bound up with his conviction that Scripture addresses the individual reader personally and demands inward appropriation. The central question is therefore: does Kierkegaard’s Biblical hermeneutics presuppose a normative account of self-reflection, and if so, what are its criteria, its justification, and its limits?

U.S. discourse around migration often centers economic debates that position vulnerable citizens and migrants as opponents for limited economic resources and opportunities. The financial valence of policies is especially relevant with increased detentions and deportations closely related to economic gains for a few at the harm of many lives. In response, Catholic social thought provides valuable resources to interrogate the assumptions laden in neoliberal economic analysis and re-orient conversation towards the ethical values of human dignity and the common good. Pope Francis especially articulates the harms of consumption and exclusion while also offering a counter-vision of economic life that centers human flourishing of all. As such, I propose that Pope Francis’s social teaching helps us recognize the problem of current economic structures that incentivize harmful treatment and exclusion of migrants and offer creative alternative modes of economic life that center the human person, regardless of citizenship status. 

Immigration detention centers form what Michel Foucault termed “heterotopias,” real spaces whose characteristics reveal new aspects of the surrounding spatiality. Engaging theologically with these heterotopias has great urgency in the face of policies of mass detention and deportation in the United States. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of “abolition geography,” “making freedom as a place” within these heterotopic sites, in dialogue with concepts from decolonial theorist María Lugones, offers an alternate spatiality within these sites to their intended carceral design. Correlating the human act of “abolition geography” with theologian Mary Emily Duba’s concept of God as room-making place in situations of displacement and theologian Loída Martell’s theorizing of the Reign of God as located with sojourners in border-spaces demonstrates how divine presence is embodied through human acts of life-affirming resistance and place-making. This presents a new paradigm for interpreting how God’s presence, more broadly, is actualized in creation through human freedom-making. 

This project examines how Queer Latine Christians in the U.S. cultivate ethical imaginaries through ritual practice in response to migrant carcerality. Focusing on the church Nuestra Cuir Chingoña and its devotion to Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, I analyze anti-carceral vigils held for migrants who have been detained, deported, or killed. Drawing on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with thirteen interlocutors, I argue that these ritual gatherings produce a minoritarian counterpublic in which undocumented vulnerability is transformed into collective ethical obligation. In these spaces, prayer and devotional practice become technologies of protection, remembrance, and solidarity. Bringing queer of color critique into conversation with ethnographic research on Latine Christianity, I show how the church’s ethical imaginaries challenge White Christian nationalist deportation logics that discipline migrant belonging. These rituals do not simply mourn loss; they cultivate forms of collective life that resist carcerality and imagine futures of migrant survival.