In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

The Christian tradition is called to develop more robust and sensitive ways to approach evil as an enduring locus of theological indefinition and inadequacy. This essay takes up this task by reading of Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, which depicts human cruelty without clarifying whether these representations function within a larger thematic structure; most scholars interpret the novel as amoral or nihilistic. I demonstrate the inverse: that Blood Meridian’s profound moral-theological vision is founded upon its commitment to evil’s illegibility. By highlighting its close intertextual relationship with the Book of Job, and the performative function of the novel’s interpretive difficulty as a mirror of the ethical-spiritual struggle for an orientation towards evil amidst divine absence, I argue that McCarthy follows Job in affirming that theodicy cannot be realized as a rational proposition, but it can be literally realized, made real, in practice. 

Martial imagery appears to favor the language of fighting evil, resisting evil, and defeating evil, but arguably the focus of Christianity is the transformation of evil. The present paper aims to recover the language of martial metaphors for the purpose of transforming evil by examining the spirituality of Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) and Chen Weiming (陳微明 1881-1958), two fighters intent on spiritual development. The comparison yields a fresh look at martial training as a means for the transformation of evil. A comparative reading of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises with Chen’s martial practice serves to revive Loyola’s martial tradition in Christian spirituality. Far from proposing a recipe for Christian triumphalism or militarism, the reading demonstrates that the transformation of evil in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises can be deepened through martial practice.

This paper offers possibilities for a baptismal ecospirituality that reclaims baptized persons as earth creatures, submerges them in the suffering of all creation (human and more than human), and equips them to recognize and articulate diverse forms of evil as a way of practicing resistance. 

This paper investigates the “Paradox of Friction”: the tension between the necessity of struggle for moral formation and the traditional ideal of a "frictionless" teleological end. While the virtue tradition, beginning with Aristotle’s notion of enkrateia, often frames friction as a temporary instrument to be outgrown, this paper challenges the desirability of a totally frictionless state. By re-examining the “rest” of the heavenly beatific vision, through the lens of a New Creation, I argue for an eschatological ideal defined not by the absence of resistance, but by a “friction without suffering.” In this view, friction is not a sign of imperfection to be bypassed, but a constitutive element of finite creaturely life, even in its glorified state.

Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985) is a speculative ethnography of the Kesh, a place-bound, multispecies community whose ceremonial life, ecology, and non-linear temporality enact what this paper calls "earthbound wisdom." Drawing on Le Guin's lifelong engagement with the Tao Te Ching (Le Guin's preferred transliteration), the book performs what Donna Haraway calls an autremondialisation, a bringing of other liveable worlds into existence. This paper uses Haraway’s string figuring method to pass threads between several key thinkers (Deborah Bird Rose, Bruno Latour, James Clifford, and Kim Stanley Robinson), asking what wisdom the Kesh might offer to those Latour calls the Earthbound, those gathered in response to an Earth that is acting now. Rather than advocating for a new religion, the paper concludes by wrestling with the inherited categories of religion and the secular themselves, asking how they might be refigured in the Chthulucene.

Gene Wolfe (1931-2019) remains one of speculative fiction's most theologically sophisticated—and critically under-discussed—voices. His magnum opus, the "Solar Cycle," draws upon Jewish angelology, Christianity, Greco-Roman polytheism, Western hermeticism, and Neoplatonism to project what future faiths might look like in a far-future dying earth. Whether in the Book of the New Sun's figures of the Increate and Conciliator, which refract Christian theology through a temporally complex loop, or in the computerized pantheon of the Book of the Long Sun, Wolfe uses science fiction's imaginative power to explore how religions emerge, mutate, and persist across vast stretches of time. These future faiths, this paper contends, are central to Wolfe's sustained meditation on time, technology, and transcendence—one that invites meaningful conversation with two fellow mid-century Catholic visionaries: the poet-artist David Jones and the priest-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

This paper analyzes themes of disposability, sacrifice, and moral agency in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2019 novel Klara and the Sun. What are the ethical implications of programming AI agents behave in servile, self-effacing ways? To what extent does this AI programming reinforce existing forms of social programming that relegate certain groups of people to lives of undervalued service work and disposability, and what forms of moral agency are available within this social order? I argue that critical reevaluations of Christian ethical frameworks—which, in my reading, play a subtle but significant role in shaping the novel’s moral imagination—provide conceptual resources to analyze issues of structural harm and moral agency that have arisen in the secondary literature. In my analysis, the novel resists straightforwardly optimistic or pessimistic prophecies while offering resources for hope and resilience in the face of our potentially bleak future.

The paper reads Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale alongside Agustina Bazterrica’s Las indignas (The Unworthy). In each book, religion has a complicated relationship with gender and specifically womanhood. The first two novels are often discussed side by side in the context of the future of gender, particularly in dystopian settings. In Atwood’s Gilead, gender norms are dogmatically enforced by religious leaders. In Butler’s Earthseed, Lauren establishes a religious community where change is divine, allowing for societal roles assigned not by gender but by capacity. Newcomer to the discussion, Bazterrica’s Sacred Sisterhood offers a deeper critique of a religion’s strict gender roles, exposes a monstrous future for gender, and reinforces—more than Atwood and Butler—gender’s performative nature. The paper then reads these three works of speculative fiction to highlight how practice, theology, and ecology factor into the future of gender.

Oriented by critiques of Christian eschatology emerging from liberation theology, this paper argues that the imagination of liberative futures can be facilitated by thinking alongside the temporality of resurgent life. Drawing upon abolitionist thought, this paper suggests that resurgent life takes place and makes place within the future anterior of abolition time: a temporal orientation involving practices that work against carceral logics and cultivating present forms of life that anticipate liberative futures not yet existent. Abolition thus involves quotidian practices of building communal relations that make liberation partially present now, organizing life around what should or must be. As such, this paper suggests that everyday practices of abolition instantiate a temporal grammar that parallels an eschatological expectation for life’s persistence amidst devastation and harm. 

In this paper, I attempt to move Kathryn Tanner's work in Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism in a new direction by developing what I call anti-capitalist virtues: character traits that are developed over time and enable a person to live in ways that challenge and disrupt finance-capitalist structures and the forms of life that they seek to foster. I begin by giving an overview of the critique of finance-capitalism that Tanner develops in Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism. I then develop a brief theory of virtue in conversation with Jennifer Herdt’s Assuming Responsibility: Ecstatic Eudaimonism and the Call to Live Well. I conclude by bringing the two into conversation by explicitly articulating anti-capitalist virtues that allow one to resist the malforming effects of finance-capitalism. 

This paper places developments in Open and Relational Theology (ORT) into constructive dialogue with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas through a reading of Luke 13—here termed the “Little Job.” Confronted with suffering, Jesus offers no ontological explanation for evil, much like the divine in the book of Job. Instead, Luke 13 redirects attention toward ethical urgency: tears over Jerusalem, the parable of the fig tree, and Sabbath healing all signal an open future charged with responsibility. Drawing on Levinas’ priority of the ethical, asymmetrical responsibility, and the irreducible alterity of the Other, this paper argues that the face of the Other is the stage of possibility, which continually reopens a future seemingly foreclosed by suffering. ORT’s vision of a genuinely open future (LOTUS) provides the cognitive and theological space necessary for liberative action bound by responsibility for the Other and their future.

This paper argues that moral disorientation holds an ambivalent potential for imagining and inhabiting liberative future(s). Focusing on disclosures of moral disorientation among Christian leaders responding to antiblack violence and racism, I read these accounts through Sara Ahmed and Ami Harbin’s phenomenologies of (dis)orientation to show how moral disorientation unsettles inherited theological bearings, disrupts our relations to our (divine) others, and conditions the potential for liberative imaginations of the future(s). I then engage Simone Weil’s account of affliction and decreation to illuminate the ethical and spiritual ruptures inherent in moral disorientation, while critically interrogating her understanding of divine providence. Returning to everyday disclosures of moral disorientation, I contrast moments when disorientation is closed through logics of divine providence to moments of sustained, generative moral disorientation that reimagine divine participation in open and liberative future(s).  

This paper examines how transformed experiences of time during incarceration can generate new orientations toward liberative futures for both incarcerated individuals and the societies to which they return. It places the sociological insights of The Cage of Days: Time and Temporal Experience in Prison (2021) in conversation with anakainosis-desmios, the concept of “spiritual renewal of consciousness while incarcerated” introduced in The Word Confined (2020). While The Cage of Days analyzes how prison restructures temporal experience through rhythms of suspension, repetition, and reflection, anakainosis-desmios interprets such disruption as a context for moral, spiritual, and cognitive renewal. Drawing also on qualitative research from the forthcoming book I Am Unconfined, the paper argues that carceral time can become a transformative arena in which individuals reimagine identity, responsibility, and possibility, opening new pathways for dialogue about justice, rehabilitation, and shared social futures.

As scholars have begun examining how AI is reshaping religion, one question often goes unnoticed: How have religious practices and institutions legitimated AI infrastructure? This paper examines how Naver, South Korea's dominant platform company, appropriated a 750-year-old Buddhist heritage to legitimate its AI infrastructure, revealing religion and AI as co-constituted in ways invisible in Western-centric discourse. This paper analyzes how Naver named its data center "Gak" after Janggyeong-gak at Haeinsa Temple, the 15th-century depositories housing the Tripitaka Koreana, constructing an imaginary that recast economic protectionism as cultural patriotism and AI sovereignty. The paper traces how this imaginary became self-contradictory through global expansion and raises questions about the Jogye Order's strategic silence. It concludes that religious communities risk losing interpretive power over their own traditions when those traditions are instrumentalized as legitimating infrastructure for corporate AI ambitions.

This essay focuses on two key Korean values and applies them into the context of virtuous AI and pro-social robots. Jeong (정, 情), a traditional Korean emotion, represents a deep sense of solidarity, bond, self-motivated sacrifice, and self-sacrificial love for others based on empathy for both humans and nonhuman things. Hongik ingan (홍익인간, 弘益人間) means ‘to benefit the world widely.’ Drawn from the founding myth of the ancient Korea (Gojoseon), it provokes emotional and spiritual empathy for people and things. When properly implemented, the principle of jeong and hongik ingan have the potential to mitigate the risks posed by AI and foster more harmonious relationships between humans and robots. When the interaction between humans and AI robots becomes more important, the Korean concept of jeong may offer an ideal model of good and meaningful collaboration. Hongik ingan contains the vision of creating a beneficial world with non-human beings. 

Most existing discussions of AI within data capitalism focus on technological and economic dimensions. This paper instead proposes to understand AI as a political actor operating within the infrastructures of data capitalism. In particular, it explores how algorithmic governance reshapes social memory. This paper engages the political theology of Johann Baptist Metz, especially his concept of dangerous memory. Metz argues that Christian faith preserves the memory of historical suffering and the victims of history as a critical force that challenges dominant political and economic systems. Metz’s theology provides a powerful framework for critiquing data capitalism, which often reduces human experience to decontextualized data while marginalizing historical suffering and structural injustice. By bringing Metz’s concept of memory into dialogue with AI-driven data capitalism, this study develops a political-theological critique of algorithmic systems and reflects on the ethical responsibility of preserving the memory of injustice in the age of artificial intelligence.

This paper examines theologies of the mystical body of Christ articulated by Catherine of Siena and Simone Weil, respectively, towards a mystically-informed political orientation to sickness, disability, and vulnerability that neither theodicizes suffering nor issues an imperative to perfect, productive cure. I contend that the mystical body in Catherine’s Dialogue is urgently relevant as a theological underpinning of what Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant call “extractive abandonment” – the process of statemaking by which the sick and disabled, those deemed unhealthy (unproductive), are necessarily abjected as surplus profitable to capital. I therefore read Weil’s critique of the mystical body as a critique of this political economy of abjection, arguing that Weil re-envisions the mystical body towards a political theology of disability justice that demands, as Adler-Bolton and Vierkant write, a “radical abundance of care.” 

Both mystical theology and disability theology frequently celebrate vulnerability as a site of divine encounter and relational transformation. Mystical traditions portray vulnerability as openness to God, while disability theologians such as Thomas Reynolds reclaim vulnerability as a shared human condition that fosters interdependence and belonging. Yet when vulnerability is universalized as a spiritual virtue, its political and structural dimensions can disappear from view. This paper argues that the theological valorization of vulnerability risks romanticizing conditions of marginalization if it fails to distinguish between vulnerability imposed by injustice and vulnerability freely embraced in solidarity. Drawing on disability theology, liberation theology, and the writings of Julian of Norwich, the paper proposes the concept of costly vulnerability—a chosen relinquishment of power undertaken for the sake of justice. Julian’s prayer for the “three wounds” provides a mystical model of vulnerability that links spiritual transformation with ethical participation in the healing of the world.

This paper examines Jean Vanier’s mystical theology of vulnerability in light of recent revelations of his tainted legacy of sexual abuse. To do so, I interrogate Vanier’s depiction of people with intellectual disabilities as uniquely revelatory due to their visible vulnerability, inviting nondisabled persons’ to recognize their own hidden vulnerabilities. Drawing on the findings of the independent study commission on his abuse, I trace the inheritance of a mystical theological worldview valorizing spiritual poverty, humility, and vulnerability, which enabled Vanier to discover in disabled people inspiration for L’Arche and a theological cover for his abuse. Ultimately, this paper explores how appeals to vulnerability often inadvertently mask power relations and abuse and reflects theologically on the broader valorization of vulnerability within disability theology and contemporary Christian thought.

This paper brings intellectual disability studies into dialogue with Christian mysticism to challenge the assumption that human personhood, knowledge, and strength are only found in rational autonomy. Such an assumption begets a negative view of disability where it is seen as nothing but limit. Voices from the Christian mystical tradition, however, claim that reality can only be truly known through a process of self-emptying that leads beyond individual rational thought and capacities. In this paper I consider intellectual disability in the light of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous fourteenth-century text on contemplative prayer. I suggest that intellectual disability’s status as loss and limit correlates with the state of unknowing in The Cloud. This correlation suggests a transformative view of the human person and of intellectual disability in which a state of vulnerable unknowing that seems at first life-denying can become a path to true strength in interdependence and communion.

This paper examines how the colonial classroom reconfigured the Rāmāyaṇa as an educational “textbook” (pāṭhya pustaka) in nineteenth-century Bengal. I argue that the religious neutrality clause in East India Company educational policy, implemented through institutions such as the Calcutta Schoolbook Society, introduced a new pedagogical framework that separated the moral from the religious. Within this framework, epic narratives were adapted to extract universalizable ethical lessons while bracketing divine explanatory structures. Focusing on textbook retellings of Sītā’s life, the paper shows how authors in the second half of the nineteenth century such as Nilmani Basak and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar reworked miraculous elements—particularly Sītā’s divine disappearance into the earth—into narratives of feminine resilience and female suffering. These adaptations reveal how colonial educational discourse transformed divine exegesis into moral criticism, producing a new interpretive grammar through which the Rāmāyaṇa would later be morally evaluated in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with animal caregivers in Kolkata, India, to examine how religious and cosmological frameworks function as resources for meaning-making in the everyday work of caring for street dogs, and how intimate relationships with dogs are actively reconfiguring those frameworks. Moving between the institutional and the intimate—from a municipal public health official who grounds Kolkata's non-lethal dog management policies in Hindu cosmological belief to caregivers who improvise with concepts of moksha, karma, transmigration, and ahimsa in the face of daily encounters with animal suffering and death—the paper argues that South Asian religious concepts are living and capacious, being actively remade through interspecies contact. These concepts do not travel alone or stay fixed: Hindu frameworks intersect with Jainism, Islam, and with transnational animal-welfare cosmologies such as the "rainbow bridge"—a vision of a peaceful animal afterlife traceable to a poem by Scottish artist Edna Clyne-Rekhy—all of them absorbed into and reshaped by the same encounters. Engaging with scholarship on Hindu animal ethics, ordinary ethics, and immanent ethics, the paper contributes to conversations in the anthropology of religion about what gives concepts life through practice, and what the study of human-animal relations reveals about the elasticity of religious traditions.

This paper proposes a new framework for considering divine embodiment through the figure of Jagannath, tracing the deity’s pilgrimage from Odisha to the Hindu diaspora of the San Francisco Bay Area. Rather than privileging the god’s "original" wooden mūrti and temple in Puri, this dissertation research focuses on the experiences of Bay Area devotees. Employing ethnography along with art history and material culture studies, the paper argues that Jagannath’s seemingly all-encompassing body exists as a network of more particular material bodies, an overlapping series of avatāras manifested across mūrtis, home shrines, and even souvenir images and artist re-creations. Each one, however unofficial, authentically establishes the deity's presence while expanding his body to encompass the experiences of ever-new devotees, as well as the material realities of their time and place. Jagannath offers a new model for the old material biographies: an expanded body that can be traced across various materialities.

Jahangir’s memoirs record numerous strange and seemingly marginal episodes: the unusual cry of a dying antelope, the creation of a temporary garden from soldiers’ flower-laden turbans, and a numerological coincidence linking a written date to its Hijri equivalent. Why are such oddities preserved alongside accounts of imperial governance and conquests? This paper argues that these episodes are not marginal but central to Jahangir’s self-representation and religiosity. Drawing on Travis Zadeh’s work on wondrous narratives and scholarship on enchantment, I read these passages as moments of textual witnessing that validate and interpret extraordinary experience. Through translation and analysis of three accounts, I show how Jahangir frames strangeness through corroboration, aesthetic intervention in nature, and numerological knowledge. These accounts reveal a Mughal religious sensibility grounded not primarily in scriptural discourse or imperial ideology, but in affect, perception, and aesthetic engagement with a world understood to be meaningful, enchanted, and full of signs.

Aniconism in India has been studied primarily through the lens of early Buddhism and, comparatively, through Islam and ancient Israelite religion. Yet within Hinduism, a largely unexamined tradition of aniconic worship persists across Tamil Nadu, where deities are venerated as formless presences in empty shrines, without a liṅga or mūrti. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted during a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, this paper documents numerous aniconic shrines across the region and proposes a framework for understanding Hindu aniconism grounded in South Indian theologies of space (ākāśa), emptiness (śūnya), and formlessness (arūpa, niṣkala). Building on Richard Davis’s 2017 study of Śaiva aniconism (perhaps the most recent scholarly treatment of this topic), the paper argues that Hindu aniconism demands attention as a living tradition rather than an ancient artifact, and that its study opens a genuinely new direction for the field of South Asian religions.

Pope Francis’s ecclesiological vision is best understood as a prophetic ecclesiology of dreaming for the church as well as for the city and the world—urbi et orbi. To explore the future of Francis’s vision, this paper argues that his ecclesiology is ad intra dependent on Henri de Lubac and his sense of the past, and at the same time ad extra oriented to the future by way of Michel de Certeau. Out of these (and certainly other) influences, Francis envisions a future consisting of sharing dreams. In this exchange, the guidance of the Good Spirit becomes manifest. Of note, this paper deliberately focuses on de Certeau, not to downplay Francis’s Argentine sources in la teología del pueblo, but to bring to the foreground his commitment to the plurality of voices who are called to dream, and to facilitate a more thoroughgoing North American reception of Francis’s entire project.

This paper engages feminist ecclesiology as a critical resource for prophetic imagination and ecclesial futures. Drawing on one co-author’s forthcoming publication, the first half of the paper introduces the four marks of the feminist church, holistic, incarnate, utopic, and apostolic, which function as prophetic counter-visions to patriarchal and colonial ecclesial history. The second half extends these feminist marks toward an ontological re-imagining of the church as a living organism embedded within an interconnected ecosystem. Engaging feminist, womanist, queer, and decolonial perspectives alongside living systems theory, the paper argues that futures-oriented ecclesiology requires not merely new strategies, but a fundamental shift in how the church understands its being, knowing, and purpose. Rather than preserving institutional life, a vision of church as a living organism within an ecosystem calls the church towards practices of humility, relationality, and collective flourishing amid planetary crisis.

Churches often frame conflict as “resistance to change,” casting younger generations as disruptive and older generations as entrenched. This paper argues that such framings misdiagnose the problem and constrain the church’s prophetic imagination. Instead, what is labeled as resistance is more accurately grief over loss, of status, meaning, tradition, or belonging, and that prophetic futures depend less on argumentation than on pastoral practices that engage story and emotion. Bringing Walter Brueggemann’s prophetic imagination into conversation with adaptive leadership scholarship that identifies the power of narrative in change management, the paper challenges technical approaches to change that bypass empathy, lament, and other affective dimensions. It argues that storytelling, ritual, and pastoral care are not ancillary but constitutive of prophetic ecclesiology. Through case studies from congregational contexts, the paper shows how narrative-based pastoral practices can transform conflict, foster intergenerational and intercultural connection, and open space for more just and imaginative ecclesial futures.

The Lilly Endowment's Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative represents the largest institutional investment in North American theological education in living memory. This paper argues that its structural limits illuminate, with unusual clarity, what Walter Brueggemann means by prophetic imagination. Drawing on Charles Taylor's account of the secular age, a proposed mixed-methods research agenda measuring Lilly's outcomes across denominations, with my own denomination as a primary ecclesiological case, the paper contends that the ecclesial futures North American churches most urgently need cannot be funded into existence. They require a prior act of prophetic imagination — one that institutional investment is structurally incapable of producing. That imagination, the paper argues, is most powerfully provoked by communities the North American church has persistently positioned as recipients of mission rather than as teachers: Indigenous and other marginalized communities whose wisdom has never been organized around the assumptions of Christendom.

This paper focuses on a brief yet profoundly significant Confucian revival in Maoist China in 1962. Following the disastrous Great Leap Forward and widespread questioning of the Party’s political trajectory, the Chinese Communist Party moderately relaxed its ideological control, leading to a rapid resurgence of Confucian discourse and ritual traditions across official and popular domains. Crucially, rural society witnessed a nationwide grassroots fervor for recompiling genealogies, restoring ancestral halls, and resuming Confucius worship ceremonies. However, hardline aversion quickly halted this resurgence, triggering the Socialist Education Movement and foreshadowing the Cultural Revolution. Integrating elite political discourse with grassroots research, this study challenges the unilinear narrative of total cultural eradication during the Maoist era. It reconceptualizes Confucianism as a resilient tradition and symbolic shelter for communities, enriching Cultural Revolution historiography and providing an indispensable context for the CCP’s contemporary reappropriation of Confucian symbols.

This article explores the tension between the dual roles of Neo-Confucianism in contemporary China—as a state-sponsored cultural ideology and as a living religious tradition—through the revival of the Wang Yangming cult in Jiufeng, Fujian. In response to the nationwide promotion of Wang’s Neo-Confucianism, local residents reconstructed Wang’s shrine and revived his worship as a local deity in the fashion of popular religion. This contemporary practice departs from premodern conventions and stands in tension with the state’s framing of Wang as a secular symbol of cultural nationalism. This case study reveals the dynamic interplay between state power and local society in shaping religious life, while also highlighting the porous boundary between cultural heritage and popular religion in contemporary China. It argues that the secularization of a religious tradition may paradoxically facilitate its re-religionization, generating forms of religious practice that are unexpected from the perspective of the state.

This paper examines a recent phenomenon in the global development of Confucianism: since around 2010, a small number of individuals who self-identify as Confucians have enrolled in multi-religious divinity schools in the United States, including Harvard Divinity School, the University of Chicago Divinity School, and Boston University School of Theology. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and autoethnography, the paper analyzes seven representative cases from 2013 to 2024. It explores how these students understand their Confucian religious identity, why they seek ministerial training in divinity schools, and how theological education shapes their spiritual practice and professional trajectories. The study argues that entering divinity school is not merely an academic choice but part of a broader effort to cultivate Confucian spirituality and gain institutional legitimacy. At the same time, the encounter with Western theological education introduces new possibilities as well as tensions for the future development of Confucian religiosity.

Is Confucian filial piety (xiao) still relevant to contemporary society? Moving beyond the interpretation of filial piety as an interpersonal morality, this paper redefines xiao as a religious virtue that bridges humans, spirits, and Heaven. By juxtaposing classical ritual theories from the Liji and Neo-Confucian internal cultivation with contemporary cases, including the institutionalized Confucianism of Indonesia (MATAKIN), the internalized discipline of the Kongyang Academy, and spontaneous emotional eruptions in end-of-life care, this study reveals how filial piety functions as a prolific emotional root that could flourish in various cultivational paths. It argues that the religious efficacy of filial piety provides essential spiritual resilience against the anxieties of modernity and mortality.