In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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This paper maps Albertson’s “measure without measure” onto synodal preaching at the Council of Basel (1431–1449). Feast-day sermons to the general assembly used geometric, proportional, and formal analogies as more than rhetorical flourish: they served as disciplined structures of mind and imagination, mediating encounters with divine transcendence. Three Basel case studies extend Albertson’s argument. Two sermons by a Cistercian present a macro-scale pedagogy in which ordered time and cosmology trained cognition through the intelligibility of creation, while an anonymous sermon on the Conversion of Paul supplies a micro-scale hinge, describing the inexhaustible complexity of an atom. Lastly, a Corpus Christi sermon treats the Eucharist as a “surface” where finite elements meet infinite realities. 

David Albertson’s Geometry of Christian Contemplation dances along the boundary between those who frame the divine in terms of the radical absence of form and those who would prefer to speak of absolute form or something like a ‘form of forms.’ In his Contra Eunomium, Gregory of Nyssa states that, where God truly abides, there is no “form, no place, no size, no reckoning of time, or anything else knowable.” And yet Gregory too shares the insight that a correct appreciation of form and figure—even as instantiated in matter, like the bush that burned or the cleft of rock from which Moses peered out—might prove a crucial stepping stone in our ascent to the divine. This paper aims to continue the dialogue about form and formlessness with figures like Gregory initiated by Albertson in his latest book. 

David Albertson’s The Geometry of Christian Contemplation breaks the normative lock that radically apophatic approaches have held over the study of Christian mystical theology by recovering Tradition B — an aesthetics of supreme Form, of God as forma formarum — and developing a constructive retrieval of measure, geometry, and figure as theophanic traces of divine Form within the visible world. This paper engage Albertson’s project from the perspective of the liber naturae tradition, arguing that his geometrical counter-tradition runs parallel to — and helps clarify — the broader tradition in which the created world was understood as a book written by the finger of God, legible only to those properly formed for its reading. While Albertson’s recuperation of Tradition B draws primarily on Platonic form-theory and Pythagorean number-theology, the liber naturae tradition locates the “outscape” of divine presence not only in geometrical structures but in the symbolic density of creatures apprehended through contemplative paideia.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The goal of this paper is to set the stage for a conversation that brings tantric studies into dialogue with emerging theoretical research on religious experience in social context. But how should scholars of tantric studies speak about the category “experience,” given the vexed reception of the term religious studies scholarship in recent years? In light of these critiques, this first paper begins by disambiguating the aims of the panel, raising questions for further interdisciplinary research. Outlining key examples of how the category “experience” has been conceptualized in premodern tantric traditions, the paper explores how tantric studies can offer emic vocabulary relevant to understanding the social, political, and embodied impact of experience across cultures. In particular, the paper explores tantric theorizations of the relationship between language and experience, and the role of “training” in regularizing experiential phenomena in social context.

In the Tantrāloka, Abhinavagupta offers a unique portrayal of the yoginīmelaka, a collective ritual that goes by many names and involves the ritual invocation of deities, an array of aesthetic elements, and the formation of a “circle” (cakra) of advanced female and male initiates culminating in spontaneous erotic revelry. This paper considers why Abhinavagupta’s description of the rite eschews essential details, and instead portrays the phenomenological unfolding of a charged intersubjective field of experience from the viewpoint of a participant. It will also consider what Abhinavagupta’s experiential account of the ritual might tell us about the kind of knowledge it is intended to generate, in light of parallel depictions of the yoginīmelaka in Vajrayāna and Śākta sources.

This paper argues that Pāñcarātra texts complicate the notion that the “limited subjectivity” of a practitioner must be experientially expanded through tantric sādhana to the point that it becomes synonymous with the subjectivity of one’s target deity. I argue that texts including the Jayākhya Saṃhitā, Ahirbudhnya Saṃhitā, and Parama Saṃhitā articulate an enduring relationship of service (kaiṅkarya) between devotee and Viṣṇu as superseding other types of ritual concerns, especially the adoption of divine identity. I argue that these texts respectively demonstrate how such relationship is integrated into: (1) ritual practice such as bhūta-śuddhi; (2) cosmology and creation (sṛṣṭi), especially concerning Viṣṇu’s realm Vaikuṇṭha where specific classes of beings including former tantric practitioners reside; and (3) daily contemplative practices that cultivate serviceful affection to Viṣṇu over other ritual aims. I conclude that such examples present dynamic and embodied devotion as the ultimate religious experience that is coterminous from Earth to Vaikuṇṭha.

This paper challenges the assumption that religious experience is necessarily private and individual by examining mid-thirteenth century tantric Buddhist rituals in Tibet. It analyzes how the Tibetan visionary Guru Chöwang (1212–1270) orchestrated large-scale communal rituals centered on relic pills purportedly incorporating the bodily flesh of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara to elicit a range of shared experiences. Focusing on two vignettes from Guru Chöwang’s Maṇi Kabum, the paper argues that producing in crowds the sensations of heightened energy, bodily purging, and vulnerability was central to these ceremonies. Applying the kinship theories of Carsten and Sahlins, it interprets the shared sensations generated by the pills and their associated rituals to foster a sense of kindred belonging thought capable of indexing rebirth in a pure land and addressing social fragmentation, epidemic, military threat, and other collective crises of a “degenerate age.”