In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper reconsiders the cultural memory of black religious leadership during the civil rights movement in light of the work and influence of the Rev. Dr. Prathia Hall, the renowned civil rights leader, pastor, professor, and womanist theologian. This paper will consider her own rhetorical presence and performances in relation and contrast to the reproductive logics that produced a particular succession of representative race men in the wake of King’s assassination. Hall embodies the intimately engaged yet frequently overlooked modes of leadership taken up by women in the long civil rights movement and beyond. I interrogate how her commitments to womanist theology and praxis shape both her public speech and her communal investments, offering an alternative account of black leadership that harmonizes more thoroughly with the collective charisma suggested by Cedric J. Robinson in his classic text Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership.

This paper examines the continuation and transformation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s theological vision of the Beloved Community through the leadership and activism of Jesse L. Jackson, particularly in the formation of Operation PUSH. Drawing upon Transformational Leadership, this paper argues that Jackson operationalized King’s moral and theological framework into a structured socio-economic movement aimed at empowerment, political participation, and economic justice. While King articulated the Beloved Community as an eschatological and ethical vision rooted in agape love, nonviolence, and social reconciliation, Jackson translated these ideals into institutional strategies that mobilized marginalized communities toward collective agency. Through Operation PUSH, Jackson reframed Kingian theology within the language of economic justice, political advocacy, and self-determination, demonstrating how prophetic theology can become sustained social infrastructure for liberation and community empowerment.

This paper brings into conversation the witness of Martin Luther King Jr. and Óscar Romero through the lens of the ethics of care. Although they lived in different contexts, the struggle against racial segregation in the United States and the political violence of El Salvador, both leaders understood Christian love as a public and demanding commitment to justice. Drawing on feminist ethics of care and liberation theology, the paper argues that their ministries can be read as examples of a subversive ethics of care: a form of love that resists injustice and refuses neutrality in the face of suffering. King’s vision of agape and Romero’s pastoral defense of the poor both show that care is not simply compassion or charity, but a practice of prophetic responsibility. By placing these two figures in dialogue, the paper highlights how nonviolent resistance can be understood as a form of organized love that protects human dignity and challenges systems that produce exclusion and violence.

Drawing on German- and Indigenous-language sources from eighteenth-century Moravian archives, this paper argues that early Moravian theology made motherhood a central theological and ecclesiological category displaced biological maternity into a diffuse form of spiritual reproduction. Moravians figured the Holy Spirit as Mother and recognized female leaders as spiritual mothers, thereby relocating maternal authority from biological reproduction to communal spiritual care. In mission communities among Lenape and Mohican Christians, these formulations encountered Eastern Algonquian matrilineal kinship systems, generating forms of translation, friction, and appropriation. Indigenous women’s participation in institutions such as the Single Sisters’ Choirs further detached maternity from marriage and biological reproduction. Moravian missions thus emerge as sites where motherhood functioned as a contested technology of governance, intimacy, and communal belonging.

Can breastfeeding a child be seen as mystical practice? Early Sufi hagiographies often present infants as “distractions” from mystical piety. In this framework, Sufi women either avoided having children or “paused” their devotions until their children were self-sufficient. Drawing on feminist methodologies, this presentation argues that viewing breastfeeding as a distraction from God is rooted in a masculine-centered worldview. Because medieval Islamic legal, religious, and medical sources recommended a two-year lactation period free of sexual activity, I suggest this period could be one of intense religious focus for Sufi mothers. Beyond being freed of sexual obligations to their spouse, the belief that a woman’s character influenced the quality of her breastmilk, women might be extra scrupulous in mystical devotion during lactation. Finally, because a nursing baby is utterly dependent upon their mother, I argue that breastfeeding can be seen as a means to meditate upon one’s dependence upon God.

This paper reconsiders premature child death in ancient Greece and Rome by challenging the assumption that high infant mortality prevented deep parental attachment. Following Adrienne Rich, it distinguishes between motherhood as institution and mothering as embodied practice. Building on Sara Ruddick’s concept of “maternal thinking,” it argues that early death marked the collapse of an ongoing project of preservation and growth.

Placing material evidence at the center, the paper examines how vulnerability and loss were negotiated through objects, bodies, and ritual spaces. Funerary terracottas of nurses and pedagogues, burial assemblages, epigraphic monuments, and protective amulets reveal dense networks of caregiving practices. Drawing on Susan Sered’s analysis of women-centered religious domains, it situates childbirth, infant protection, and mourning within gendered spheres of ritual expertise embedded in lived religion.

Material practices of protection and commemoration demonstrate that ancient communities did not normalize infant death but ritually engaged its destabilizing force.

I read Toni Morrison’s Paradise as a vision of worldmaking through black maternal religious practice. Employing character analysis, I trace how material and somatic practices are religious actions of coming into voice, or as I argue, processes of self-regard. I argue that in Paradise, regard emerges as a central fulcrum of transformation. I read Morrison’s own writings on self-regard alongside political theorist Wairimu Njoya to theorize how regard more broadly, and self-regard specifically emerge as religious practice of attunement, care, and attention. Finally, I (re)turn to Morrison’s initial address thirty-one years ago, and the ways in which her plenary took root. I place womanist ethicist Katie G. Cannon’s reflections on Morrison’s address in conversation with the practice of regard. Black women’s reproductive labor is one of the sites of ultimate religious reflection; a place where questions of justice, right relationship, possibility, harm, evil, accountability, desire and agency are enfleshed. 

This paper considers both the material and textual-archival legacy of Nellie Mae Rowe. Examining Rowe’s references to Africana religions, her ideologies of motherhood and childhood; and her apocalyptic and visionary theories, I argue that the artist conceived of her artistic practice and playhouse as a ministry and a sanctuary respectively. Through close readings of several pieces from Rowe’s canon of work as well as extant oral histories, I demonstrate how Rowe utilized acts of religious creation to invite audiences into practices of improvisation, play, and imagination amid the ongoing social realities facing rural Black Southerners in the late twentieth century, such as gentrification, segregation, white supremacist violence, and poverty.  

This paper will seek to depict one element of the religious identity of T.S. Eliot’s play, The Cocktail Party. I wish to show, by focusing on the influence of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in a play with obvious Christian theology and imagery that the play is undoubtedly hybrid, creatively combining as it does elements of Eliot’s earlier philosophy, Christian love theology, mysticism, and various sources from Indian thought and practice. Further, I wish to suggest that the play itself implies a model of intersubjectivity and poetics that is partially derived from the Indian text.  In this, Eliot’s play is an incipient comparative theology that takes as its starting point the kind of detachment and contemplative attention that it also demands of its audience in the act of experiencing the play. Eliot’s play, far from reflecting a strictly orthodox Christianity, aims to re-signify the tradition through the dialogical tension it embodies. 

The temple built by the Sze Yap association in San Francisco in 1853 is frequently cited as the first Buddhist temple in the United States. This paper examines the uncritical application of the syncretic Three Teachings framework, a presumed blend of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, and its influence on the study of early Chinese Buddhism in the United States. By reexamining the institutional roles of district associations (huiguan), such as the Sze Yao association, and other mutual aid organizations, this paper highlights the underappreciated role of smaller, privates temples in introducing Buddhism to the United States. This paper attempts to shed light on the Chinese pioneers who enshrined the first Buddhist icons in privately-owned temples, including the temples of Li Xiyi and Li Putai in San Francisco, Wong Nim’s temple in San Bernadino, and the family complexes of the Wong clan, all of which enshrined images of the goddess Guanyin.

How do second-generation Asian American youth engage with Buddhism while growing up in temple communities? Drawing on ethnographic interviews with adolescents participating in youth programs at Hsi Lai Temple in Southern California, this paper examines how young participants understand their relationship to Buddhism through volunteering, peer relationships, temple activities, and shared ethical values. The findings show that participation in Buddhist youth programs does not necessarily produce clear religious identification. While some youth identify as Buddhist, others relate to Buddhism primarily as cultural heritage, ethical orientation, or community belonging. At the same time, temple leaders describe youth programs through the framework of Humanistic Buddhism as skillful means designed to attract youth through activities and relationships before introducing Buddhist teachings more deeply. The paper argues that Buddhist identity among second-generation Asian American adolescents of Chinese ancestry develops through gradual and relational engagement rather than through formal religious identification.

In this presentation, I analyze the history of the worship of Kuan-yin in the United States. I also look at how and why this figure has been embraced by many feminists and those who identify as transgender to evaluate potential futures centered around this bodhisattva. 

In 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that "sex" in the 2010 Equality Act refers exclusively to biological sex. For the Triratna Buddhist Community, one of the UK's largest Buddhist movements, organized in significant part along a “single-sex” binary, this ruling has introduced a series of ethical, cultural and institutional dilemmas. This paper traces how a self-described modern Buddhist movement came to deeply encode gender into its workings. It considers the historical, cultural and idiosyncratic forces, including the legacy of its founder Sangharakshita, that shaped this framework, and the challenges that now confront Triratna. Particular attention is given to trans and non-binary practitioners already ordained or on the ordination training path, and most directly impacted. The paper argues that these developments accelerate generational, hermeneutic and organizational reckonings within a complex global community, and raise a number of analytical questions pertaining to concepts of modernity and tradition in the Buddhist world. 

This paper explores the category of time in the philosophy of the Grammarians, primarily in Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya. It argues that thinkers of this school incorporated and adapted earlier conceptualizations of time, including ancient Vedic views and ideas from the kālavāda, and examines the resulting doctrines in detail. The Grammarians’ temporal doctrine culminates in the Vākyapadīya, Bhartṛhari's seminal treatise integrating grammar and philosophy. For Bhartṛhari, time is the creative power of the Absolute Word (Word-Brahman), capable of creating, sustaining, and destroying all existing objects, through which the unmanifest Absolute becomes manifest. This paper provides a comprehensive account of Bhartṛhari’s concept of time, explains why this category occupies such a prominent place in his system, and demonstrates how he resolves apparent contradictions in the conceptualization of time, including its dual nature, simultaneous divisibility and indivisibility, and its coexistence with the Absolute Word.

This paper explores the cross-philosophical and inter-religious dimensions of Rāmakaṇṭha’s Sarvatobhadra, a tenth-century Kashmiri commentary on the Bhagavadgītā. Traditionally regarded as a foundational Vaiṣṇava scripture centered on devotion to Kṛṣṇa, the Gītā has nevertheless been interpreted across multiple philosophical and religious traditions. Rāmakaṇṭha, a Śaiva thinker and disciple of Utpaladeva associated with the Pratyabhijñā tradition, approaches the text from the perspective of Śaiva non-dualism. His commentary stands alongside that of Abhinavagupta (11th century), whose Gītārthasaṃgraha offers another influential Śaiva interpretation of the Kashmiri recension of the Gītā. How does a Śaiva philosopher engage with a scripture devoted to Viṣṇu? Through selected passages from the Sarvatobhadra, this paper examines how Rāmakaṇṭha reinterprets the Gītā’s theology within a Śaiva metaphysical framework, highlighting the fluid intellectual boundaries and shared hermeneutical practices of medieval Kashmiri thought.

This paper asks if it was possible for Hindu thinkers to conceive of intellectual difference as a productive attribute of śāstric discourse rather than a problem that needed to be negotiated through exclusion or hierarchical subsumption. I direct my query towards the reception of the Mokṣadharmaparvan’s(MDh) composite theology of Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Veda and the Pañcarātra among Hindu intellectuals to explore the modalities through which difference was understood and organized. A doxographical approach to the MDh’s eclectic theology can be observed in Viśiṣṭādvaita literature whereby intellectual difference was conceptualized in terms of possessing varying degrees of extraneity to the Veda. By contrast, Svāmīnārāyaṇa’s interpretive framework did not presume a confrontation with extraneity. Rather, he wielded difference to resolve the conceptual paradoxes that broadly characterized Hindu theological discourse. His approach presents an alternative to the treatment of difference within doxographical frameworks, which subsume or reject difference according to a normative hierarchy of authoritative discourse.

What does it mean to practice being in the future? This session will help instructors in higher education engage in understanding the future through practice and play. Through interactive game play participants will be able to create futures in the classroom setting that center hope and liberation and confront oppression, marginalization, and hierarchy.