In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

In late imperial China, while permanent vegetarianism was often criticized, periodic fasting gained widespread state and social acceptance. Central to this practice were widely circulated fasting calendars, which mapped sacred dates to encourage ritual purity, accumulate merit, and foster divine connections. This presentation explores the construction, circulation, and reception of knowledge concerning "divine time." Focusing on the representative Yuxiaji (玉匣記) and analyzing editions from 1684 to 1891, the study reveals how a shared repertoire of fasting days was created, transcending strict regional and confessional divides. Furthermore, by juxtaposing these prescriptive texts with descriptive historical sources from Suzhou—a major publishing and religious hub—this research demonstrates how fasting calendars were actively employed in daily practice, ultimately shedding light on the sanctification of everyday life and the temporal experience of spirituality.

Much scholarship on Chinese bronze mirrors emphasizes their Daoist associations. This paper highlights two overlooked cases that situate mirrors instead within the broader shushu數術 repertoire. The first concerns two ninth-century mirrors inscribed with a hemerological diagram used to select auspicious departure dates, a method widely attested in Chinese and Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts. Their portability suggests that mirrors functioned as practical tools for managing travel risk. The second case, preserved in Tang poems and later ritual descriptions, involves a domestic divination in which a woman listens for chance speech after orienting herself through a spinning ladle in water; the square stove, round pot, and rotating ladle cosmologically map Earth, Heaven, and the Dipper. Together, these cases show the multivalence of mirror use beyond Daoism. They also reveal the gendered distribution of travel ritual, linking mobility, divination, and household practice in Tang China.

Through an analysis of the online circulation of short videos produced by Chinese lay Buddhists featuring their temple visits, this paper explores how such audio-visual artifacts mediate religious experiences and serve as a reflexive process in (re)constructing the interplay between religious traditions and ethical experiences. I focus on videos posted on one of China’s biggest social networking platforms, RedNote, which is especially popular for sharing tips on travel, makeup and fashion, to examine how lay Buddhist videos circulated in a media environment, where mass culture, consumer culture, and religious traditions interact with each other, reconstruct the concepts of religious experience, authenticity, and legitimacy. I also situate these videos within the context of the revival of Buddhism in reform-era China to see how they, embodying the renewed interest in traditional Buddhist self-cultivation, reveal the nexus of personhood construction and the social project of moral cultivation in contemporary China. 

This paper extends current scholarly discussions of embodiment and healing in religious studies to the domain of material objects. By analyzing a corpus of medieval Chinese narratives that foreground the vulnerability and pain of Buddhist statues, the paper redefines disability not as a marker of alterity but as a vulnerable phase of existence shared by both sentient beings and Buddhist icons. The analysis further demonstrates that religious agents in medieval China often occupied simultaneous roles as caregivers and care-receivers, allowing healing to emerge through reciprocal relationships. This paper also shows that medieval Chinese monks employed Buddhist narratives to transform the material vulnerability of Buddhist images into sites of compassion and doctrinal reflection, thereby highlighting the significance of Buddhist literature beyond being mere didactic tools or records of social memory.

Addressing the unit’s special emphasis on religion and labor in South Asia, this paper will analyze an important, though implicit, connection between two main threads of Shankar Ramaswami’s Souls in the Kalyug: on the one hand, the close relationships between Delhi metal polishers and their machines, and on the other, divine presences in the factory and even within the machines themselves. As this paper will show, the resulting “god–man–machine” imbrication bears important implications not only for how the workers see themselves, their machines, and their gods, but also more broadly as a corrective to posthumanist frameworks which ignore or deny the crucial roles of the divine. This paper will thus contend that Ramaswami’s analysis, through its attention to the dynamic interactions among metal workers, their machines, and deities, pushes posthumanists to consider how the divine works alongside and in concert with technology in humans’ quest to be “more-than-human.” 

This paper presentation will examine ritual practice as a form of labor by tracing Kamala's claim, an oracle of Kodungallur Bhagavathy in the southern Indian state of Kerala, that ritual possession is a toḻil (an occupation). Using a recurring weekly ritual at her personal shrine as an analytic thread, the paper studies how ritual possession, livelihood, and ethical life are co-constitutive. By situating her claim within the social and political histories of Izhava caste assertions of dignity, the presentation examines how work becomes an operative category for oracles both through its assertion and refusal. It analyzes the choreography and improvisation of this ritual across shrines, foregrounding ritual possession as a form of embodied labor co-authored with the Goddess.  

Speaking of “futures” instead of “the future” foregrounds the fact that no singular future is guaranteed. In recent storytelling, two futures are particularly common: the techno-optimist, which envisions the triumph of capitalist innovation, and the climate dystopian, which envisions the inability of capitalism to contain its ecologically destructive powers. Both futures extrapolate features of the current “business-as-usual” order to one or another logical conclusion. This paper explores an alternative narrative found in several recent novels. These novels, including Eiren Caffall’s All the Water in the World (2025), Susanna Kwan’s Awake in the Floating City (2025), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017), are set in cities that are now at least partially submerged by rising seas. While the waters wash away much of what the cities have been, they also make new forms of life possible. This paper explores the way these novels thematize water – and, with it, the uncontrollable power of a changing climate – as both destructive and potentially liberative. 

This paper presents climate fiction as an essential pedagogical tool for envisioning more sustainable and just ecological futures, drawing upon the “The Camille Stories” by Donna J. Haraway as one example (2016). Haraway’s fiction depicts human and more-than-human ongoingness in the face of destruction and despair – challenging readers to resist nihilism and build resilient communities even without the guarantee of success. Beyond analyzing the theory and method of climate fiction, this paper focuses on the benefits of asking students to write their own fictional pieces. Fiction writing challenges students to envision the futures they actually want to sustain: the people, places, and values that are worth their collective effort to protect. Writing fiction also allows students to productively grapple with the possibilities and limits of their own ecological agency. This paper will conclude with practical activities and writing prompts that instructors can integrate within their own courses.  

This project (re)imagines Asian American ecofeminist theology through planetary entanglements, offering a decolonizing, relational, and future-oriented response to ecological collapse, climate crisis, and pandemic precarity. Drawing on Judith Butler’s phenomenology of vulnerability and Catherine Keller’s panentheistic ecotheology, it situates ethical and theological reflection within the interdependence of human and more-than-human life. Central to both method and message are two Korean concepts: salim (살림), “enlivening” or "sustaining life", and jeong (정), "relational affectivity and "care". These concepts function as metaphor and ethical lens, showing how contextual, everyday ecofeminist practices—acts of care, repair, and co-flourishing—embody hope for planetary futures while enacting a decolonizing ethic that resists hierarchical and instrumental logics. Salim and jeong provide frameworks for (re)imagining ecological and social interdependence, situating hope as one of many therapeutic-paths within broader ecotheology. The study advances a decolonial theology of Hope, envisioning a new Earth/us co-created through care, relational integrity, and transformative planetary engagement.

My paper examines how Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes)—Amanda Strong’s stop-motion film—visualizes sacred landscapes and Indigenous futures through its portrayal of Biidaaban, Sabe, ancestors, and multispecies kin reclaiming maple-sugaring practices within a suburban neighborhood. Drawing on Indigenous visual sovereignty, sensory film analysis, and decolonial theories of land-relation in dialogue with religion and ecology, the paper reflects on the film’s textures, contrasts of light, and spatial layering to show how cinematic form becomes a mode of ceremony and ecological imagination. Strong’s film reveals a sacred geography that persists against erasure, rendering land not as backdrop but as a living network of ancestral presence and multispecies relationality. Its aesthetic strategies display the interweaving of past and present and how future sacred geographies emerge through acts of care and multispecies belonging. Ultimately, this paper interprets Biidaaban as a visual, ceremonial practice of ecological homemaking—an Indigenous futurity that refuses erasure.

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 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.

This paper proposes an Orthodox feminist theological framework for addressing the destruction of land in Palestine-Israel through the category of desecration. Drawing on trauma theory and ecofeminist theology, it argues that ongoing devastation in the region cannot be adequately understood solely through juridical, political, or even ethical paradigms of injustice, but must also be named as a theological rupture in the sacramental vocation of creation. In Orthodox theology, land is not a neutral backdrop for human conflict nor merely an object of possession or symbolism; it is a liturgical and iconographic participant in divine-human communion. The systematic destruction of neighborhoods, agricultural land, water systems, cemeteries, and religious sites thus reveals itself not as collateral damage but a form of contemporary iconoclasm and theological violence. 

This paper explores feminist theological intervention against transnational Korean Christian Zionism by interrogating the various factors that have shaped it, including the interplay of the Korean, Israeli, and American/U.S. exceptionalisms, which serves as a mechanism that sustains resolute support of Israel at the expense of Palestinians. At the center of Korean evangelical Protestant Christians’ unwavering support of the State of Israel lies Christian Zionism, defined as a racist, Islamophobic, and heteropatriarchal theo-political ideology that supports the State of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy of God’s promise. What is inextricably interconnected with transnational Korean Christian Zionism is gendered racism against Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians, as the feared and ungrievable Others. Furthermore, when transnational Korean Christian Zionism supports Israel’s genocidal and omnicidal war against Palestine, it is also perpetrating reproductive injustice and environmental injustice against Palestinians, injustices that cannot be separated from one another.

This paper highlights the intersection between Israeli forces’ sexual torture of Palestinian men and Qur’anic theological masculinity of the qawwamun, the Muslim male ‘protector’.  While violence against Palestinian women is frequently reported in the Gaza Genocide, a hallmark of this genocide is an inversion of the womanist framework of sexual shame: rights agencies have cited that Palestinian men were overwhelmingly subjected to sexual abuse through “specific persecutory acts” by Israeli forces. This paper addresses the discussion of qawwamun beyond the existing feminist rubrics, to demonstrate how the concept theologically functions as a de-colonial stabilizer of Muslim selfhood against Israeli sexual excesses. While acknowledging the deep patriarchal inflection of qawwamun, the aim of the paper is to show how masculinity norms specific to Muslims are weaponized and destabilized by racist-imperial collusions to endanger Arab men and, relationally, cause further disempowering of Arab women. 

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.