In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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 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.

Disco Elysium is a 2019 video game where the player plays as Harry DuBois, an amnesiac policeman and complete disaster of a human being tasked with solving a murder. Unlike more traditional “post-apocalyptic” narratives, this game’s setting exists not after a catastrophe, but at the intersection of several. It is a story where the world at once has ended (failed social and political revolutions of the past), is ending (Harry’s own obliteration of and struggle to rebuild the self), and will end (the Pale, connective tissue that both holds the world together and will someday swallow it). All the game’s characters are caught in a moment between the failures of the past and the inevitability of destruction in the future, unable to change either. Yet this is not cause for despair, but an invitation to discover the wondrous in the everyday and rebuild freed from normative demands.

This paper examines how recent video games reinterpret American evangelical apocalyptic discourse across different cultural registers. Focusing on the 2011 independent game The Binding of Isaac and the major studio release Far Cry 5, it argues that these games mobilize biblical apocalyptic imagery to critique two distinct cultural afterlives of dispensationalist eschatology: the intimate psychological world of the evangelical family unit, and the broader political landscape shaped by militant Christian nationalist doomsday prophesizing. In The Binding of Isaac, the apocalyptic imagery of fire-and-brimstone evangelical programming becomes the symbolic language through which a child interprets the collapse of his family unit, and expresses feelings of responsibility for his parents' separation. Far Cry 5 projects the same discourse outward into narratives of militia culture, political violence, and national catastrophe. Together, these games demonstrate how video games have become an indispensable medium for reinterpreting American evangelical biblical discourses of apocalypticism for wider publics.

At the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2017, President Xi Jinping emphasized that national prosperity depends on “building stronger cultural confidence,” grounded in Chinese history and tradition (Xinhua, 2017). One prominent example is guochao, or the “Chinese cultural craze,” through which Chinese scholars and state-owned media celebrate the incorporation of traditional and religious narratives into consumer culture, showcasing cultural confidence locally and globally. This paper examines two guochao cases highlighted by state-owned media: Li-Ning’s 2018 “Wu Dao (A principle of Daoism)” sportswear line and the 2024 video game Black Myth: Wukong, an imagined sequel to Journey to the West. I argue that the state constructs guochao as a cultural branding strategy that repackages Chinese religious narratives into globally consumable cultural products, envisioning a future in which China reclaims the center of global cultural consumption by converting Chinese identity itself into a marketable commodity.