In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

What does it mean to “take up one’s cross” when suffering is lived within the realities of domestic violence, poverty, and social exclusion? This presentation performs a found-text documentary poem that places the biblical command in Matthew 16:24 in dialogue with poems written by my grandmother, a domestic-violence survivor in rural Appalachia. Drawing on documentary poetic practices, the piece assembles scripture, vernacular poetry, and narrative fragments drawn from a memoir based on family testimony. The poem asks how ordinary believers reinterpret the Christian language of sacrificial suffering while surviving violence. By staging this encounter through documentary poetics, the project demonstrates how vernacular archives of lived faith can participate in the ongoing reinterpretation of sacred texts.

This documentary poem places biblical narratives in direct conversation with the lived experiences of Disabled people, focusing specifically on the "hands of God." By centering this tactile imagery, the work highlights God’s own embodiment through the Incarnation, reframing the divine as one who navigates the world in a Disabled body (after Nancy Eiesland). Too often, scripture is weaponized to link Disability with sin or a "lack of faith." This poem combats such harmful associations, instead uplifting Disabled bodies as good, powerful, and sacred. It creatively imagines a present-day Jesus who bears the marks of his experience and asks: What if the resurrected Christ used a wheelchair? What if Jesus needed to communicate in different ways after the crucifixion? By viewing mobility aids and accommodations as holy, this work invites us to see the Imago Dei in the diverse, beautiful reality of Disabled life.

This presentation explores photography as a form of chaplaincy practice. Drawing from my work as Community Minister at Judson Memorial Church in New York City and as a multi-faith chaplain in training through the FE/CPE program at Union Theological Seminary, I examine how visual practices can function as acts of pastoral presence, witnessing, and care. While chaplaincy in medical institutions often limits creative approaches to spiritual care, my work at Judson allows me to experiment with photography as a pastoral method that centers dignity, recognition, and community connection. The presentation includes a curated photo exhibition, Faces of Judson, documenting moments of gathering, creativity, and everyday life within the congregation. Reflecting on photography’s history as a colonial and extractive medium often dominated by white male photographers, I approach the camera differently—as an Asian woman chaplain using photography not to “take” images, but to practice care, relational presence, and ethical witnessing.

Drawing on the story of the woman caught in adultery, this poem reflects on how the church is often quicker to cast stones than to show love, especially when it comes to sexuality. Calling out the harmful conflation of Queerness with sin, it instead lifts up Queer bodies and Queer love as something beautiful and sacred. Through these lines, I imagine how Christ would respond to the Queer community with the kindness and assurance of love that he showed those outside the boundaries drawn by religious leaders. By reimagining these verses, I hope to offer a space where Queer people can see themselves not as outliers to the Church, but as central participants in the ongoing, beautiful unfolding of God’s creative work.

This contribution reflects on the nineteenth‑ and early‑twentieth‑century reinstallation of Theravāda Buddhism in Bangladesh, situating monastic reform within the long history of Buddhist transmission in Bengal. While southeastern Bengal had survived as a marginalized Buddhist region with weakened ordination lineages and fragmented institutional authority, reformers such as Sāramedha Mahāsthabir and Saṅgharāj Ācāriya Purṇāchār Chandramohan Mahāsthabir sought to restore continuity, legitimacy, and doctrinal coherence. Drawing on historical sources, regional Buddhist historiography, monastic narratives, and institutional records, the speaker reflects on how lineage reform functioned as the central mechanism through which religious authority was renegotiated and restored. In a context where doubts concerning higher ordination, Vinaya observance, and ritual propriety had eroded communal confidence, revitalization was framed as both a return to canonical orthodoxy and a moral purification of the Saṅgha. These reflections also consider how reform unfolded within a dynamic environment shaped by transregional mobility across the Bay of Bengal and renewed connections with Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia, ultimately producing the Saṅgharāj Nikāya and Mahāsthabir Nikāya as structured systems of monastic governance.

This presentation explores the Atin–Ayone robe controversy, a dispute over whether monks should wear the robe over one shoulder (ekaṃsika) or cover both shoulders (pārupana), which emerged in the early eighteenth century and intensified during the Konbaung period. The Ayone faction introduced the Cūḷagandhi sub‑commentary to resolve scriptural ambiguities, while the Atin group was unable to provide authoritative textual support. In 1784, King Bodawpaya intervened, imposing the pārupana style across the entire Sangha and establishing an eight‑member council of Saṅgharājās to supervise monastic discipline and purify the Sangha. Drawing on Weber’s theory of legitimate authority and Bourdieu’s concepts of the religious field and symbolic capital, the speaker reflects on how the resolution of the controversy marked a shift from local monastic pluralism to state‑sponsored orthodoxy, transforming the Cūḷagandhi into a decisive legal instrument. By privileging this sub‑commentary over other Pāli sources, the monarchy and monastic elite jointly produced a specialized textual authority that facilitated institutional reform and doctrinal uniformity in pre‑modern Myanmar.

This speaker offers reflections on the theg chen gso sbyong (Mahāyāna Poṣadha) ritual as a technology of temporary lay monasticism practiced across the Tibeto‑Himalayan region and in communities of converts. Although the vows of the ritual closely mirror the one‑day lay vows of the Prātimokṣa, the gso sbyong uniquely allows both lay practitioners and fully ordained monastics to receive and practice the vows together. Drawing on textual analysis and commentary from teachers such as Trijiang Rinpoche and Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, the speaker considers how the ritual temporarily suspends the hierarchical logic of Prātimokṣa ranking, creating a sanctioned space in which monastic and lay boundaries are blurred. In some cases, lay practitioners holding the gso sbyong may even sleep in monastery prayer halls, accessing spaces normally restricted to monastics. These reflections highlight how the ritual functions as a “great equalizer,” opening monastic spaces to laypeople and imbuing Śrāvakayāna vows with the Mahāyāna bodhisattva spirit.

 This speaker reflects on how Buddhist monasticism enters the public sphere in Ladakh, focusing on reform movements in the post‑Partition nation‑state. The contribution considers how monastic and lay reformers forged alliances to confront practices they identified as “social evils,” including animal sacrifice, alcohol consumption, and polyandry. These reform campaigns generated new discourses of normative Buddhism that often conflicted with vernacular traditions associated with local spirit practices, creating tensions between monastic authorities and lay ritual specialists such as oracles, astrologers, and tantric practitioners. The speaker further reflects on how Buddhist communities navigate the complexities of being Buddhist Indian citizens, negotiating religious identity, national belonging, and the rise of new public spheres shaped by media, state policy, and shifting communal expectations. Through these dynamics, the contribution highlights how monastic ethics become tools for social intervention, moral regulation, and the redefinition of Buddhist identity in contemporary India.

In artificial intelligence (AI) research and development, a benchmark combines data and evaluation criteria to measure how well AI systems perform specific tasks or demonstrate particular abilities. Developing meaningful benchmarks represents a significant opportunity for religious and ethical scholars to shape AI’s future in a positive direction. With Generative AI, evaluation methods alone can orient AI training processes toward moral improvement and religious awareness. Recent efforts to evaluate the ethical dimensions of large language models (LLMs) set the stage for extending this frontier as do well-recognized challenges in constructing models that capture diverse human cultures. Developing benchmarks that more broadly measure human and other suffering, compassionate responses, and richer conceptions of flourishing and well-being provide timely and impactful means to affect AI development. Efforts toward these state-of-the-art ethical and religious benchmarks are reviewed, discussed, and situated within a broader framework oriented toward flourishing.

This paper proposes an open, ontology-driven, AI-mediated research environment for the study of Greek religious texts built from public-domain and openly licensed corpora rather than proprietary platforms. Using TEI/XML resources such as GLAUx, Open Greek & Latin, and Perseus/Scaife, the project explores whether agentic coding tools can automate corpus normalization, metadata reconciliation, citation alignment, hyperlink generation, ontology construction, and graph-based retrieval across biblical, early Christian, and related Greek materials. Unlike conventional search systems centered on keywords, lemmas, or fixed indices, the proposed environment supports relation-aware discovery, customizable semantic linking, and provenance-preserving exploration across corpora. Rather than treating AI as an autonomous interpreter, the paper argues that agentic systems function as infrastructural and hermeneutical assistants: they lower the cost of building open research environments and help scholars navigate, explain, and extend them while preserving human judgment as decisive.

This paper introduces the InterSapience Project, a theological and interreligious proposal for rethinking AI alignment as a moral and relational problem rather than merely a technical one. I advance the notion of “co‑intelligence” (the integrated dynamics of collective, collaborative, and cooperative intelligence) as a normative framework for human–synthetic cooperation. Drawing on process thought, comparative theology, and interfaith ethical resources, the study reframes alignment as relational resonance and mutual transformation. It argues that the crucible of AGI/SSI demands practices of humility, dialogical encounter, and structural justice that theological traditions already model. By engaging AI scholarship (Bostrom, Russell, Tegmark) alongside theological voices (Cobb, Neville, Panikkar, Levinas, Teilhard de Chardin), the paper proposes governance practices grounded in transparency, covenantal accountability, and inclusive deliberation. The result is a theologically informed agenda for policy and design that treats synthetic intelligences as potential participants in shared moral learning, while protecting human dignity and promoting ecological flourishing.

Throughout Christian history, technologies have shaped how individuals engage in spiritual reflection—from the codex and the printing press to contemporary digital media. Scholars of digital religion such as Heidi Campbell note that new technological environments often reshape religious practice and authority. Large language models may represent the next stage in this development.

This paper examines the emergence of AI-mediated tools designed to facilitate spiritual reflection through structured dialogue. Rather than delivering doctrinal instruction, these systems function as conversational partners that ask reflective questions, identify patterns across entries, and generate summaries that help individuals articulate what they believe, doubt, or are still exploring. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of “technologies of the self,” the paper argues that AI may represent a new form of religious technology that assists individuals in examining and narrating their own spiritual lives.

By exploring AI as a reflective companion rather than a religious authority, this paper considers how such tools may reshape spiritual direction, faith exploration, and contemporary religious practice.

This paper develops a genealogy of the “minor” in relation to religion, tracing a shift from “minority” as a juridico-political category toward “minor” as a postidentity, critical mode of theorizing religion. Contemporary approaches to religious diversity and inequality remain largely framed by recognition, rights, and inclusion, yet often reproduce the epistemic hierarchies through which religion is defined and governed.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the minor, alongside queer-of-color critique (Muñoz) and postsecular feminist theory (Mahmood), I conceptualize “minor religion” not as identity but as practice: a process of becoming that destabilizes majoritarian norms in theology and religious studies. Examples from space - such as the “Overview Effect” and adapted ritual practices - highlight religion as relational, situated, and open to alternative futurities beyond identity-centered paradigms.

Indigenous calls to repatriate human remains rehumanize objects in museum contexts: skulls, skeletons, hair, once called specimens, become relatives (again). This profound moral shift from ‘objects’ to ‘subjects’ recognizes violence in a field that was once progressively named "science." This paper considers a critique of violence in the rehumanization process in one repatriation, in this example, through the return of 14 Yawuru and Karajarri ancestors to Broome, Australia, from an Ethnographic Museum in Leipzig, Germany. It draws on ethnographic and historical research alongside Walter Benjamin's essay Toward a Critique of Violence to consider how naming kin allows speakers to understand something anew as violence without issuing guilt, catalyzing a sense of obligation and not punishment. Drawing from her experience as a repatriation coordinator and museum conservator as well as historical research on Yawuru kinship systems, Hamburger will discuss repatriation and religion in terms of the rhetoric of kinship that might describe an Aboriginal critique of violence that asks Western institutions to consider relations to Indigenous people. 

This paper reports on transdisciplinary scenario planning workshops that imagine viable futures with Indigenous and settler communities in the Rocky Mountains, home to headwaters of three major rivers with Indigenous heritages that provide water for millions of people downstream: the Snake River (Columbia River), the Wind River (Missouri River), and the Green River (Colorado River).  As water futures grow more uncertain on a warming Earth, the risk of violence increases. The paper frames the relationship between natural resource scarcity and the activation of religious language to justify violence. With the ascent of settler community Dominionism and white Christian nationalism, water futures adaptation planning networks on both sides of the contact zone might shelter burgeoning Indigenous, sustainable worldmaking.   The orientations forged in scenario planning workshops, where memories and stories meet best science future scenarios recall parable and storytelling traditions and provide a vehicle for religious studies analysis and community engagement.

With the aim of advancing the study of Islam’s contributions to anticolonialism in southern Africa, this paper focuses on the legacies of ʿAlawiyyah Sufi thought and practice in diasporic engagements with the global coffee trade.  Bringing my fieldwork and archival research in South Africa’s Western Cape to literary analysis, I explore the ways in which the pleasures and perils of coffee have constituted and re-animated ʿAlawiyyah-centered strategies for building solidarity against the ravages of Euro-Asiatic slavery and mortgage capitalism.  In line with Africana studies, my paper considers insights made available through greater attention to global histories of food and the environmental humanities.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Chinese Christian organizations expanded social service programs into rural areas of the wartime interior. This paper examines the gendered dynamics of these initiatives, focusing on women workers associated with the National Christian Council of China and related Christian institutions in wartime West China. It argues that gender structured the everyday practice of Christian rural service: while Protestant leaders promoted rural reconstruction as part of a broader project of “Christianizing society,” female teachers, nurses, and social workers carried these programs into village communities. Drawing on institutional records, field reports, and local sources, including village surveys and county-level materials, the paper reconstructs how women workers adapted reform initiatives to village conditions. In doing so, it highlights the central role of women’s labor in shaping Christian engagement with rural society during wartime.

This paper examines Taiwanese Christian women’s transpacific political activism through the case of Elieen Yiyi Chang, who founded the Voice of Taiwan, a New York-based broadcast network, in 1977. Analyzing recordings of three broadcasts and the three kingdoms ideology of Chang, I argue that Chang fused political reporting with Christian moral conviction and that, although she was not in Taiwan during the democratic movement, her influence on democratization was not constrained by her physical location. Instead, the fact that she was in the United States empowered her to conduct transpacific Christian activism without the Kuomintang government’s direct interference and to freely reflect her Christian faith alongside her Taiwanese identity. Centering a Taiwanese Christian woman’s leadership within Cold War transpacific activism, this paper challenges the predominant assumption of Christian women being passive in political activism and demonstrates how Taiwanese Christian women contribute to imagining alternative political futures beyond East Asian settings.

This paper analyzes LGBTQ+ contestations and ecclesial retrenchments in Taiwanese churches during the marriage-equality transition (2017–2019). Using a bounded public corpus—network statements and pastoral guides, recordings and handouts from an evangelical forum, and reflections by LGBTQ+ Taiwanese Christians—it reads these debates as theological anthropology-in-practice. I argue that the controversy activates a two-layer “grammar of desire”: a Cheng–Zhu–inflected tianli/renyu binary that codes desire as moral risk and a received Protestant idiom often imagined through a competitive grace/nature frame. When these grammars resonate, desire is construed less as a site of formation than as a danger-sign; LGBTQ+ lives become especially legible within a single moral register, and ecclesial futures are narrowed in advance. Drawing on Kwok Pui-lan as a lens on taboo and normativity, the paper concludes with an imago Dei-centered alternative that treats desire as formable and proposes examen-like discernment to reopen horizons of possibility for communion and vocation.

This paper reinterprets Kierkegaard’s discourse on suffering by placing it in dialogue with Avgi Saketopoulou’s psychoanalytic concept of traumatophilia. Rather than reading Kierkegaard as affirming the intrinsic value of suffering, the paper argues that both thinkers locate the possibility of transformation in the subject’s encounter with an originary and irremissible opacity at the core of human existence. Drawing on resonances between Kierkegaard and Jean Laplanche’s metapsychology, the paper shows how suffering exposes this constitutive vulnerability and can become an opening beyond the consolations of repair. The analysis culminates in a Kierkegaardian, traumatophilic reading of Sofie Laguna’s Infinite Splendours, which narrates a life shaped not despite but through trauma. The novel also highlights mourning as a missing conceptual element in Kierkegaard and Saketopoulou. Mourning is the labor that allows trauma to become generative without being justified. Together, these threads offer a constructive rethinking of suffering, subjectivity, and transformation.

The Wounded Self: Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Trauma in The Sickness Unto Death

This paper interprets Søren Kierkegaard’s account of despair in The Sickness Unto Death as a phenomenology of wounded selfhood. Contemporary trauma theories describe trauma as a disruption in the subject’s capacity to sustain a coherent relation to itself and its past, producing fragmentation and forms of alienation that resist ordinary processes of meaning-making. I suggest that Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair anticipates this structure of wounded subjectivity.

For Kierkegaard, the self is “a relation that relates itself to itself,” grounded in its dependence upon the power that established it. When this relation becomes disordered, the result is despair—an existential and spiritual distortion in the self’s relation to itself, others, and God. Read alongside contemporary trauma theories, Kierkegaard’s account illuminates the rupture of self-relation and the difficult struggle to recover a self reconciled before God.

This paper will explore traumatized individuals' experiences of meaning.  A traumatized individual in a depressed state can have a fragmented experience of meaning that becomes tied to their mood: as their experience of trauma becomes acutely present, they lose touch with a felt sense of meaning.  This raises an important question: Is it possible for such a person to have a commitment to meaning that is independent of mood, that can sustain them throughout their various reactions to trauma? This paper will examine Soren Kierkegaard’s distinction between “mood” and “earnestness” in his discourse “At a Graveside” as one possible answer.  It will argue that earnestness transcends moods like those experienced by who suffer from traumatic pasts because (1) it is active and (2) it is rooted in the eternal. This implies that Kierkegaardian earnestness, understood with clinical sensitivity, might provide grounding for those who struggle with trauma.

My paper reflects on the question of who can legitimately preach Islam. Is preaching the reserve of the madrasa-trained ‘ulama, or can ordinary believers lacking any formal religious training also lay claim to it? The Tablighi Jama‘at, an early-twentieth-century Indian pietist movement of faith renewal, offers a productive vantage point for addressing this question. Founded by Ilyas Kandhlawi, an ‘alim from Delhi, the Jama‘at encouraged ordinary believers to preach Islamic ideals. The paper discusses the competing forms of religious authority where Tablighi leaders, despite being scholars, could not endorse exclusive religious authority for ‘ulama as traditionally the rightful preachers. They also espoused ordinary believers as legitimate preachers, albeit with a perplexing anxiety to control this authority by exhorting them to avoid complex Islamic thought and always seek the guidance of ‘ulama. I argue this recalibration of religious authority was the product of the anxiety of the Muslim scholarly elite to safeguard Islam in modernity.

Classical Islamic jurisprudence prohibits Muslim women from marrying non-Muslims while permitting Muslim men to marry Christians and Jews. Yet in contemporary Western contexts, many Muslim women enter interfaith marriages, raising questions about the limits of juridical authority and the dynamics of lived Islam. This paper draws on qualitative interviews with over fifty Muslim women in interfaith relationships and 10-12 American Muslim religious leaders, examining how women’s experiences engage with religious guidance. My findings show that women challenge inherited norms—e.g., managing family opposition, creating their own ethical approaches, and raising children inclusively—while navigating conflicts and reconciliation. I propose that a woman’s choice to intermarry speaks to the importance of experiential knowledge: women’s experiences with injustice, often justified through scripture, can generate new, ethically grounded engagements with the Qur’an. This study demonstrates that interfaith marriage is a site where Islamic legal norms, gendered authority, and ethical practice are contested.

This paper examines Islamic religious education in public schools in German-speaking countries as it undergoes a “stress test” amid overlapping crises: events such as October 7, the current war in Iran, refugee movements, rising right-wing populism, diversity conflicts, and discourses on radicalization shape a precarious setting. It analyzes tensions between the constitutional educational mandate, political expectations (integration, prevention, democracy education), identity-political and theological-pedagogical expectations of Islamic communities, and the intra-Islamic diversity of Muslim students (linking to Ibrahim Kocyigit’s paper on multiple understandings of religion among Muslim youth). 

Key questions are: What significance does Islamic religious education have for public negotiations of belonging and for articulating Muslim horizons of the future? In what institutional and discursive settings does it take place, and with what diversity? Which structural and discursive challenges limit its potential, and what future scenarios—from dismantling to a professionalized, reflexive-theological subject—emerge?

In European diversity discourses, it is negotiated both as a social reality and as a normative value. This gives rise to hierarchies between “good” and “bad” diversity. Religious affiliation, especially Muslim visibility, functions as a marker around which recognition, normality, and security are negotiated. This paper examines how such distinctions are translated into institutional expectations and what they mean for Muslim youth’s multiple understandings of religion. “Orientation” is understood as a situational competence that arises from the interplay of agency, recognition orders and institutional frameworks. It focuses on how Muslim youth interpret religious content, reinterpret traditions and negotiate questions of belonging, normativity, and lived practice within Islam. Orientation is also a process of theological and religious self-positioning. This paper is linked to Ulvi Karagedik's presentation on Islamic religious education, while extending it through a focus on youth orientation processes and intra-Islamic negotiations of religion.

In this paper, I offer an analysis of altarcitos devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe as an act of futuring rooted in the material religious practices of Mexican American women. I link altars to mothering in how this material practice communicates a maternal “care perspective” that refuses to reproduce harmful structures and sheds light on the epistemological authority of Mexican American women, affirming their role as propagators of cultural values, religious belief/practice, and traditions among their communities.

This paper examines how transnational Catholic mothers mobilized motherhood as material religion through the embodied practice of wearing headscarves in public protest—purple for South Korean Minkahyup mothers of political victims under authoritarian regimes and white for Argentine Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. This paper unearths a historically significant moment of transnational encounter in June 1994 in South Korea, when Minkahyup invited the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo into solidarity activism in South Korea’s gwangjang (public square). I argue that the headscarves that the mothers wore in public protest functioned as portable “altars” of counter-memory: sensory, visible, and repeatable artifacts that resignified traditional motherhood into a moral vocation of political resistance, oriented toward justice, truth, and restoration of human dignity. In this paper, the headscarf is not a mere symbol but a lived religious practice that operates at the intersection of devotion, grief, and moral agency.

What do Hājar and women such as Sumayya, Umm Ayman, Fizza, and the enslaved concubine mothers (umm walad) of several Shiʿi Imams have in common? Across Islamic narrative traditions, these women appear as enslaved women of African origin whose maternal labor contributed to the birthing and sustaining of influential male figures who shaped Islamic thought, ritual, and sectarian memory. Yet while the authority of their sons is preserved in historical and genealogical records, the mothers themselves appear only briefly in the archive. Sumayya is remembered primarily through the later prominence of her son Ammār b. Yāsir; Umm Ayman appears in sources that emphasize her transfer as property alongside her role in raising the Prophet; and the enslaved mothers of Imams are preserved mainly in genealogical lists. This paper argues that even where historical narratives fall silent, ritual practice and communal memory continue to bear the imprint of their maternal labor.