In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper offers theoretical and empirical insights into the ecology of peace within Hindu texts and the lived experience of the minority Hindu religious community during and after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It examines how the ecology of peace is understood and applied in Hindu thought and practice through concepts such as ahimsa, karma, dharma, and vegetarian diet. It then examines how these ideas are articulated in concrete war and post-war contexts, and the ontological relationship between humans and Bhumi (the Earth), suggesting a moral responsibility toward people and the land during both periods. Through a comparative analysis, the paper establishes a framework that constitutes peace ecology from the Hindu perspective.  By examining the contemporary role of minority communities and grassroots initiatives in the ongoing dialogue, the paper places the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina within broader conversations on religion and the peace ecology.

            This paper examines contemporary ascetic performance in the Orthodox Christian monasteries of Mount Athos, Greece. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, it analyzes how forms of ascetic withdrawal and discipline are exercised in, and shaped by, the spiritual, political, and economic networks that connect Mount Athos to the ‘world’ beyond its border. It argues that contemporary forms of Christian ascetic detachment and soteriology constitute a moral, social, and material boundary regime that shapes how monks order their lives, make decisions about themselves and their community, and embrace or reject connections to others. By reflecting specifically on the interactions of Athonite monks with pilgrims, men and women in parishes, and  wage-workers, it illustrates the effects of contemporary asceticism on the lives of individuals living at different degrees of distance from the community. The paper offers insights about how asceticism intersects with contemporary social forces, global discourses, and diverse human experiences. 

In an NGO office in suburban Athens, a bureaucrat draws narrative parallels between historical and contemporary examples of displacement, arguing that the Church’s role has been identical in each. On an island in the Ionian Sea, a volunteer at a historic monastery tells tales of a walking saint that continues to protect those in need centuries after his death. At a church in downtown Athens, a priest pontificates about the future of Christianity, the borders of the Greek state, and the political incorporation of those within it. Across three distinct ethnographic vignettes, this presentation argues that the Orthodox Church of Greece both theorizes and strategically mobilizes an understanding of time as cyclically layered in which people both living and dead can act across generations and the Church’s institutional influence can withstand the waves of historic and political change.

This paper takes interest in the converging discourse surrounding a perceived 'great American sexlessness' from two seemingly incompatible sides: right-wing pronatalists on the one hand, and sex-positive progressives on the other. Over the past few years, countless studies and op-eds have explored the now widely-accepted notion that generation Z is not having sex, a reverse kind of moral panic which turns deprioritizing sex into a diagnosis of puritanism and stokes pronatalist fears of declining birthrates. What sets of cultural anxieties do these twinned discourses articulate? And how is religion differentially wielded to the same end? While articulating very different political orientations, I argue, both pleas to have more sex index a cruelly optimistic set of shared national fantasies rooted in the goods attributed to sex and sexual desire, and the formations of whiteness, heterosexuality, and able-bodiedness which subtend them. 

“Wokeism” as a term enters the U.S cultural lexicon at a moment of 21st century racial reckoning, and it is the concept of racial/cultural reckoning that continually shapes its lexical field. While liberals/progressives describe “wokeism” as a movement towards global liberation, conservatives describe “wokeism” as representative of the inherent problems of a liberal political order.

In this lightening paper, I think through and with “wokeism” using Saidiya Hartman’s "Position of the Unthought" and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments in conversation with 90s Hip Hop Thanatologies. Hartman's work refuses hopeful solutions to the reality of an antiblack world while documenting illegible and anarchic means of Black survival. Meanwhile, thanatologies of 90s hip hop provide a variegated field to understand “woke” on different registers. Taaken together, I highlight how "wokeism" as code for “multi-cultural equity” not only sustains an antiblack world, but ignores the phrase's operationalization as a “wayward” means of survival. 

Ironically, by diving into the ideological commitments inherent within "Gender Ideology," queer individuals can create more room for self-understanding and authenticity.

By stripping the medico-juridical insinuations that intentionally stoke fear, exploring the social interconnectivity of queer identities recenters "social contagion" in a way that uncovers new ways of being while prioritizing agency and joy over imposed normativity and alleged immutability.

"Theory" is a key buzzword in right-wing discourses on higher education and its discontents, often serving as the link stringing together these discourses' visions of a wide range of intellectual and pedagogical projects (gender theory, critical race theory, etc.). State legislatures around the country have passed or are considering bills that explicitly identify "theory" as that which must be banned from the academy and from public life. It is clear that this work does significant rhetorical work for the right today—but why? What does "theory" signify and why does this signification incite a phobic reaction? I offer a brief history of anti-"theory" discourse in US media and politics since 1970, a diagnosis of this discourse's phobic symptoms and political objectives, and a critical argument in defense of "theory."

This paper thinks queerly about “social contagion” vis-à-vis postwar theologies of the family. Drawing on archival materials, I trace how the rise of pastoral psychology within the theological academy was, on the one hand, a response to homosexual panic: early issues of Pastoral Psychology reveal persistent anxieties about the family and the figure of the homosexual. On the other hand, its diagnostic vocabularies provided new language to articulate previously inchoate sexual desires. I argue that pastoral psychology—and practical theology more broadly—spread fears and fantasies that reshaped how theology students thought about sex and the family in postwar America, prompting new and unintended political possibilities. Queer/trans contagion moved precisely through the theories and methods meant to quarantine it. This history of pastoral psychology demonstrates how contemporary anxieties surrounding “social contagion” might paradoxically generate the very political movements they aim to inoculate in the name of “family" or "the child."

“Toxin-free” is a central marketing buzzword within the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement and political imaginary. The word functions as a secular liturgy of purity, while obscuring a deregulatory agenda. This very short paper thinks against the hypocrisy of a MAHA vision for a toxin-free America by turning toward a different archive: the queer-led farm. By treating the queer farm as a living archive and moral framework, this paper challenges the MAHA obfuscation of policy that leads to mass debilitation. I will demonstrate how queer-led agriculture reclaims "toxin-free" as a rigorous, shared practice of environmental and social care.

This paper examines an unexpected resonance between Daoist cosmology and European continental philosophy by examining the womb motif as a challenge to phallocentric metaphysics. Bringing Jacques Derrida’s reading of Martin Heidegger into conversation with the Daoist notion of the “gate of the obscure she-beast” (玄牝之门) in the Daodejing, it asks how womb cosmology might reopen the question of sexual difference beyond metaphysical opposition. The paper revisits Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s concept of Geschlecht, which seeks a primordial unity underlying sexual differentiation yet risks neutralizing difference within a phallocentric framework. Derrida’s reading of khōra in Plato’s Timaeus introduces a “third genos,” an impersonal spacing beyond paternal and maternal figures, though this abstraction remains tied to metaphysical neutrality. By contrast, the Daodejing presents the obscure femininity as a generative threshold where masculine and feminine function as shifting polarities rather than fixed oppositions, offering a dynamic model of generativity that destabilizes phallocentric mastery.

In the Indic scene, we find many cosmological images that reflect the overall Feminine Principle as an all-pervasive generative power that is at once full and empty. The Great Goddess contains the seed syllables of creation that spontaneously arise from the Void energy that a practitioner can experience in deep samadhi. This principle is imagined in female forms precisely because it is not a remote deity but is intimately entangled in the world, and it captures a paradox in which materiality and transcendence dance together. This paper will explore a couple of select Tantric texts to contend that such gynocentric cosmological articulations present a thealogy that is not about a fixed belief system but a continuous presenting of life’s magical manifestations that can be experienced within the body itself. 

Jaina birth narratives distinguish themselves among other Āyurvedic texts for their emphasis on reproduction as an impure, but necessary, process that especially implicates the “womb trio” of women, embryo-fetus, and nonhuman beings. Descriptions of pregnancy and birth found in the Jaina Tandula-veyāliya and Kalyāṇa-kāraka describe women’s reproductive capacity as generative, but also defiled. In this cosmological labor, women are not alone but joined through communal interactions with the embryo-fetus and nonhuman beings to co-create an immanent space of necessary life through food, bi-directional affects of the double-heart (dvai-hṛdaya), maternal emotions and cravings (dohada), as well as the transformation of consumed nonhuman living beings into the physical body of the fetus. Beyond a simple account of gender/species subordination, the mutual impurity and solidarity of the womb-trio invites fresh ethical reflections upon the metaphysical indebtedness to those who jointly the karmic cost for providing existential opportunities for other’s birth and advancement.   

One way to define the complex movement of Mahāyāna Buddhism is to identify its shared teleology: becoming an altruistic bodhisattva. The Yogācārabhūmi (YBh) has long been considered the foundational text for Yogācārin ethics. But does it present a different theory of ethics, especially on altruism, compared to non-Yogācāra Mahāyāna texts? Comparing the Śīla chapter in the Bodhisattvabhūmi of the YBh etc. with the Contemplation on Sentient Beings chapter in the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa etc., this paper argues that Yogācāra indeed developed a unique progressive approach to ethics. The YBh ethical scheme is defined by the threefold bodhisattva precepts. Vinaya precepts are included in the first division of saṃvaraśīla. The second division, kuśaladharmasaṃgrāhakaśīla, provides a modified version to virtue ethics based on an early model. Attention is drawn to the third division, sattvārthakriyāśīla, through which the altruistic imperative is taken to several “extreme cases” compared with the supramundane tendency found in the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa.

This presentation explores a Yogācāra approach to sickness by drawing from Kuiji’s Commentary of the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa. Reading the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa as a manual for bodhisattvas’ practice, Kuiji extends the Yogācāra theory of body to the embodiment of sickness. Instead of reducing sickness to a malfunction of material corporeality, Kuiji analyzes this embodiment to elucidate how illness for a person is karmically cohered into the saṃsāric cosmology of degeneration. When sickness is contextualized in the shared lifeworld of ignorance, a teleological life-trajectory becomes habitually indoctrinated to naturalize health and happiness as the social norms while stigmatizing sickness as a deviation or an inability. The transformation of ignorance to awakening recontextualizes the lived experience of sickness, through which bodhisattvas rehabitualize themselves to embody impermanence as a skillful means for criticizing and correcting social stigmas. It follows that the cultivation of compassion on the bodhisattvas’ path informs a critical-transformative social ethics.

This paper reconsiders the Nara-period Yogācāra monk Dōkyō (d. 772), who has long been portrayed as a corrupt monk who attempted to seize imperial power through Empress Shōtoku. Recent Japanese scholarship has begun to challenge this narrative. Building on this reassessment, the paper argues that Dōkyō may be better understood as an ethical agent operating within Yogācāra and bodhisattva frameworks. It examines his healing practices and use of esoteric Buddhist texts in attempts to cure the empress. Situating Dōkyō within a broader culture of Nara-period “bodhisattva monks,” the paper asks how Yogācāra ethics functioned as a lived moral system expressed through compassion, ritual efficacy, and skillful means. From this perspective, Dōkyō’s activities reveal how bodhisattva ethics could both support and destabilize the moral authority of the ritsuryō state.

This paper proposes examining the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) as an event whose religious and spiritual dimensions were not peripheral to the uprising but constitutive of it. Vodou ceremonies, African cosmologies, Catholic sacramental practice, and prophetic leadership coalesced to produce what scholars increasingly recognize as one of the most consequential revolutions in the history of the Atlantic world. Drawing on the conference theme of 'Future/s,' this proposal situates the Revolution as a generative site for thinking about enslaved peoples' insurgency, Caribbean religion, and the entanglement of spiritual authority with political violence.
By centering the religious dimensions of the Revolution, this paper intervenes in two intersecting conversations: the study of North American and Caribbean religions and the broader scholarly reckoning with how spiritual life energizes and shapes revolutionary action. The paper argues that adequate historiography of the Haitian Revolution demands not merely political or economic analysis, but sustained attention to the cosmological frameworks and ritual practices through which its leaders and participants understood freedom, death, the ancestors, and the divine.

This paper looks at nineteenth-century Black Shakers in Philadelphia and South Union, Kentucky to investigate how those Shakers helped shape their communities, and particularly their communities’ responses to enslavement and inequality. Despite increasing interest, there is woefully little historical research on Black believers, participants, and observers. Scholars of Shakers tend to make similar arguments: Shakers were pacifists, opposed to enslavement, and committed to racial equality. This portrayal of Shakers is not wrong, but it is not quite right. Shaker communities had diverse and complex approaches to Black members, and Black participants in Shaker communities were at times deeply committed, and at times deeply critical of the Society, and often both. African American Shakers in Philadelphia and South Union developed communities of critique that helped shape their Shaker communities. 

The October 21, 1967 March on the Pentagon represented an expansive slice of nationwide dissent against US involvement in the Vietnam War. As part of the protest, counterculture leaders engineered an attempt to exorcise the US military headquarters via levitation, which comprised a ten-step ritual and spoken invocation that borrowed from religious traditions across time and space. The paper argues that the visibility of this action confounds a classic conception of ritual, while renegotiating the terms by which to adjudicate ritual success. Further, the paper resituates accusations of Hippie appropriation within a metaphysical tradition, while seeking to expose those reactionary currents stirred during a so-called revolutionary decade that remain salient today. A brief episode in the turbulent history of the American 1960s, the levitation of the Pentagon critically triangulates discourse around the efficacy of ritual, the ethics of combinative religion, and the possibility of revolution by metaphysical means.

Seventy-five years after the publication of Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath, it has become a well-worn truth that that book privileges time over space. That is not quite true; for Heschel, we should use the things of space in accordance with the primacy of time, with a philosophy of history premised on the claim that history is God's to steer, not humans'. Focusing on Heschel's argument in this manner helps to clarify some of the puzzling (and overly aphoristic) claims in Heschel's 1969 book Israel: An Echo of Eternity. Reading that book in light of The Sabbath allows us to see that Heschel's Zionism is limited. The point of Zionism and its historical successes is only to verify that God's promise is still in effect, not to fulfill those promises. And any expression of Zionism that privileges power over others is to be rejected.

Thinking about Shabbat as crip time involves what Alison Kafer calls “a reorientation to time.” For Autistics the Day of Rest provides what Heschel calls a day to “reclaim our authentic state . . . in which we are what we are . . . it is a day of independence of social conditions.” This paper will examine Heschel’s premise through the lenses of Critical Disability Theory, Crip Theory, Critical Autism Studies, and Neuroqueer Theory to explore the meaning and practice of Shabbat as disability justice from an Autistic perspective. As Heschel frames Shabbat, it is a time away from socially constructed enabled time in which neurodivergent people are dis-abled. For an Autistic person who is dis-abled in neurotypical time, Shabbat time then becomes crip time which is both a liberatory practice and a space where “social conditions” are no longer dis-abling for the neurodivergent.

This paper reexamines the mid-1960s debate between Abraham Joshua Heschel and Joseph B. Soloveitchik over Jewish-Christian dialogue following the Second Vatican Council. While often portrayed as a clash between an open and a restrictive vision of Judaism, the paper argues that the debate must also be understood within the specific context of American Judaism in the Cold War era. Analyzing their writings and newly examined archival material, it shows that Heschel’s support for interfaith dialogue was rooted in a vision of a Judeo-Christian alliance grounded in the Hebrew Bible and united against communist atheism and moral nihilism. Soloveitchik, by contrast, opposed this alliance, fearing it would blur religious boundaries and threaten Jewish distinctiveness within a Christian-majority culture. The debate therefore reflects broader struggles over identity, ideology, and cultural integration in postwar American Judaism.

Recent research in Finland suggests a growing interest in Christianity among young men, challenging assumptions about linear religious decline and the feminization of religiosity. This paper examines young men’s engagements with Christianity through a typological analysis of religious orientations, based on in-depth interviews with 30 young Christian men conducted in 2024–2025. Rather than interpreting young men’s religiosity as either reactionary or aligned with hegemonic masculinity, the analysis highlights diverse ways in which Christian commitment becomes intertwined with meaning-making, moral agency, and identity construction in a highly secularized Nordic context. Drawing on scholarship on plural masculinities and individualized religious engagement, the paper proposes a typology that complicates dominant frameworks for studying religious masculinities. The typology is offered as an analytic provocation, inviting comparative discussion on how religious masculinities are negotiated beyond hegemonic and oppositional models in contemporary societies.

Lutheranism as the main Christian denomination in the Nordic countries has defined the religious, ethical, and societal discourse in the area since the Reformation era. Rulers and societal norms drawn from Lutheranism have been recognized as an essential factor behind the development of Nordic societies. Lutheran hegemony is characteristic in ideals relating to gender roles in family, society, and church. Lutheran masculinity, however, has historical and theological roots expanding beyond hegemonic masculinity in different contexts.

This paper provides insight to the development of Lutheran masculinity ideals, beginning with Reformation era sources and contexts of early Lutheran theological teaching about ideal masculine attributes and behavior. The paper concludes with an example from contemporary politics where Nordic Lutheran masculinity ideals are taken into global context. Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, has recently gained global attention in world politics and a seat next to major Western leaders. 

I argue that the men from the new global-hit TV show Heated Rivalry have become both icons and disruptors: models and inviters of detoxification of masculinity as much as sex symbols and icons of gay love. Moreover, I argue that it is both the four main men characters in the show — given how both straight and gay men have been engaging their stories — and the men who portray the two leading men who are doing this work of inviting viewers of all genders to explore alternative ways of relating masculinity, male physicality, and care.

Indian nondual philosophies are particularly amenable to reconfiguring our conceptions of sentience and insentience. Or rather, one might suggest, with the 9th  -10th century Kashmiri Hindu Tantric philosopher Somānanda that “insentience simply does not exist.”  For this paper, I suggest that this idea, that “insentience simply does not exist” is actually taken up as a contemplative practice, specifically insofar as it was helpful for allowing a practitioner to attain a glimpse into a higher state of enlightenment, an experience of nonduality. Moreover, I suggest that even as this nondualist Pratyabhijñā philosophy entails that everything is ultimately sentient, what allows us to make practical, heuristic distinctions between what we, in ordinary life, think of as sentient and insentient derives from a grammatical formulation, where being sentient is tied to a first-person perspective and being insentient is tied to the third-person expression. 

This paper examines an idiosyncratic account of “effortless natural freedom” (bad med rang grol) in a Tibetan Buddhist Great Perfection tantra, The Pearl Garland (Mu tig ’phreng ba). The text advances a provocative cosmovision in which bodies, sensory faculties, and inert material elements—earth, water, fire, and wind—are said to be primordially and effortlessly “free” (grol ba). Inverting conventional Buddhist soteriology, where freedom names release from saṃsārainto nirvāṇa, this chapter presents freedom not as the culmination of the path but as its precondition, extending even to those forms of existence Buddhism traditionally characterizes as bound, or “marked” by suffering. The tantra accordingly presses a philosophically probing and practical question: If everything is already free, why practice at all? Through close reading of the chapter and its twelfth-century commentary, the paper analyzes its proposition of the freedom of non-living things, and considers its philosophical and environmental-ethical implications.

According to Rumi, all cosmic beings are in love; that is, not only the animate but so too do the inanimate love. Far from being a sentimental view of the universe, however, this conclusion rests on cosmological, exegetical, and contemplative insights that deal with existential questions about spirituality and the perception of the other. Love is an esoteric matter that can be really perceived only through spiritual faculties. Therefore, to perceive the (human or non-human) other properly, one must first encounter one’s spiritual self. Only in becoming a spiritual lover/knower can one perceive empirically the spiritual life of the cosmos.

This paper considers the portrayed sentience of more-than-human beings, particularly elemental water beings, in early modern Kashmiri Rishi Sufi literature and cosmology. In this literature, the more-than-human cosmos is portrayed as animate and engaging with human interlocutors, especially Rishi Sufi masters. Much attention is paid to the springs, rivers, and lakes of Kashmir. These living waters are home to elemental water beings who have the capacity to serve as spiritual interlocutors. In this paper, I explore the contours and implications of this fascinating cosmology in which the more-than-human world is not only sentient but also permeated with beings and consciousnesses which enter into meaningful relationships with humans, implying the possibility of trans-dimensional spiritual lineages. This paper explores the unique Sufi cosmology of the landscape of Kashmir while also bringing Islamic and indigenous ecocritical perspectives to bear on a broader interdisciplinary conversation in the environmental humanities and studies of more-than-human sentience.

The comparative religious category of efficacious ritual singing coalesces from embodied relational practices spanning three autoethnographic ritual contexts: Hindu deathbed chanting; Jewish pre-burial recitations; and Shipibo Amazonian plant medicine songs. In each case, the human voice intentionally invokes and carries divine non-human agent(s) to help patients cross beyond the afflictions of illness and death, relying on deep relational alliances with the more-than-human world in order to effect much needed transformations. As these connections are strengthened and refined over time, contexts for reciprocity and care extend and expand within and beyond humanity. 

Chicana futurism art offers a path of subversion and survival in the domestic realm. This presentation argues that the cultural production of queer feminist artivist Debora Kuetzpal Vasquez empowers Chicanas to reclaim their indigenous past and creates a new ontological reality for the present and future that bypasses colonial constraints. Through analyzing Vasquez’s artwork—“Citlali: Hechando Tortillas y Cortando Nopales en Outer Space” and “Citlatli: Cuando Eramos Sanos”—I explore how Chicanas negotiate being healthy (sanos), sacredness, and ecological pride in domestic spaces. I also address Vasquez’s role leading public art workshops and indigenous virtual ceremonies, highlighting how her multi-modal practices cultivate feminist community and promote decolonial strategies. Utilizing Amelia Mesa-Bain’s domesticana and Gloria Anzaldúa’s coyolxauhqui imperative, I show that Vasquez advances Chicana feminist cosmology, kitchen-based relationality, resistance to coloniality, and creates a new reality for Chicanas.

This paper explores the "transterritorial" future of Andean Indigeneity through the figure of Mama Coca—the "Rebel Hoja." Moving beyond colonial violence, I position Mama Coca as a shapeshifting migrant and sacred elder whose endurance mirrors the Andean diaspora. Engaging Wilson’s (2008) Research is Ceremony, I explore how relating to Mama Coca as ayllu (relative) and ceremonialist enacts a radical "unbordering" that disrupts modern migrant narratives. By centering Cabnal’s (2010) theory of Cuerpo-Territorio and engaging Indigenous speculative storytelling (Dillon, 2012), I argue that future flourishing requires a Kincentric Ecology (Salmón, 2000) recognizing plants as wisdom-keepers. This work challenges human-nature extractivism, moving toward a relational ayni (reciprocity) that honors the agency of more-than-human kin in the building of Indigenous futurisms. Through this lens, Mama Coca becomes a sovereign protagonist in the restoration of memory and territory across borders.

This paper argues that autoimmune and non-communicable diseases must be understood as forms of slow violence generated by environmental coloniality, requiring an integrated analysis that brings together environmental justice, necropolitics, embodied testimony, and decolonial spiritual praxis. Methodologically, the essay employs a decological approach that situates the researcher’s own embodied experience of endocrine disruption as an epistemic lens, in dialogue with ecofeminist theology, indigenous research paradigms, and environmental health sciences. Drawing on sources including Rob Nixon, Achille Mbembe, Elaine Nogueira-Godsey, Ivone Gebara, and interdisciplinary biomedical research, the paper analyzes the Lake Apopka case to show how racial capitalism produces ecological and physiological harm while erasing the spiritual and communal dimensions of suffering. The contribution advances a theopoetic and ecopeotic framework for reimagining ecorelationality, calling for spiritual-political praxis that honors embodied knowledge as a site of resistance and collective survival.