This year’s conference centered around the theme of “Shifting Identities and Fractured Communities.” Student paper topics ranged from the theocratic turn in US anti-abortion politics to a sentiment analysis of religious texts. Their international research took them to the south of Spain; their rigorous methods included ethnographic interviews and visual analysis of the Billy Graham Library; and their conclusions contributed to important conversations about Judeo-Christian nationalism in US higher education and the ramifications of abortion abolitionist legislation.

The American Academy of Religion is the largest scholarly organization in the world dedicated to the professional study of religion. Roughly three hundred scholars working at colleges and universities in this region regularly participate in the annual meeting. The regional meeting also offers limited spots for undergraduate students to present their academic research and engage with professional scholars from across the region.

Four sessions were held to showcase undergraduate research, and ������Ƶ students garnered five of the 16 highly competitive undergraduate slots. One of the five students was also an ������Ƶ College Fellow and a member of ������Ƶ’s Multifaith Scholars program, led by Director Amy Allocco. Two students were presenting research for the Honors and Lumen programs, and two students took the initiative to craft their own credit-bearing undergraduate research project for ELR. All five students were closely mentored in their discipline by an ������Ƶ faculty member who helped to guide their research and prepare their presentations over the course of their junior and senior years. The papers will also be delivered before ������Ƶ audiences at the Spring Undergraduate Research Forum, Tuesday, April 28, 2026.

Support for travel was provided by the Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society, the Department of Religious Studies and the Office of Undergraduate Research. The funding also supported a small student group of conference observers as well as group co-organizer Amy Allocco, professor and distinguished scholar of religious studies.

Undergraduate Research Presentations

Alyssa Carney (MFS, ECF), “Echoes of Al-Andalus: Islamophobia and Migration in Spain” (Sandy Marshall, mentor)

Mallory Fahrlender, “Abortion Abolition Extremism: The Theocratic Turn in US Anti-Abortion Politics (Toddie Peters, mentor)

Kelsey Golden, “New Crusaders, Old Problems: Crusade as Cognitive Domain in the Billy Graham Library” (Lynn Huber and Evan Gatti, mentors)

Bunny Ingram, “Faith and Feeling: A Sentiment Analysis of Religious Texts” (Heather Barker, mentor)

Ben Kaplan, “Judeo-Christian Nationalism and Jewish Ethics in American Political Myth” (Andrew Monteith, mentor)

������Ƶ Faculty Presentations

Andrew Monteith, “‘Hatred Is the Right Response to Evil’: Judeo-Christian Nationalism, The Heritage Foundation, and Donald Trump’s War Against Higher Education”

Geoffrey Claussen, professor of religious studies, Lori and Eric Sklut Professor in Jewish Studies and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at ������Ƶ, edited a special issue of the Journal of Jewish Ethics honoring his long-time mentor, Louis Newman.

Newman, the John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies, Emeritus, at Carleton College and former dean of academic advising and associate vice provost for undergraduate education at Stanford University, is one of the world’s leading scholars of Jewish ethics and one of the founders of Jewish ethics as an academic field. He was the founding president of the Society of Jewish Ethics and founding coeditor of this journal.

In his editor’s introduction to the special issue, Claussen recounts how studying with Newman at Carleton College first kindled his interest in Religious Studies and Jewish Studies and eventually inspired him to also become a scholar of Jewish ethics.

In the issue, thirteen scholars engage, respond to and build on Newman’s work. Claussen’s article in the journal is titled “Lessons in Intellectual Honesty and Humility: Studying Jewish Ethics with the Guidance of Louis Newman.”

The collection, edited by Jonathan K. Crane, Emily Filler, and Mira Beth Wasserman, is titled “Modern Jewish Ethics Since 1970: Writings on Methods, Sources, and Issues” and published by Brandeis University Press as part of the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought.

Claussen’s article, “Musar in a White Supremacist Society: Arrogance, Self-Examination, and Systemic Change,” was first published in 2021 in “No Time for Neutrality: American Rabbinic Voices from an Era of Upheaval,” edited by Michael Rose Knopf with Miriam Aniel.

Amy L. Allocco, professor of religious studies and director of the Multifaith Scholars program, presented a paper titled “Divine Snakes, Sneaky Planets, and Remedial Rituals in South Indian Hindu Traditions” featuring new field research she recently carried out at the Srikalahasti temple in Andhra Pradesh, India. Allocco and the other scholars presenting in her session are developing their papers into chapters for an edited volume titled “Catching Sight of a Snake: South Asian Nāgas in Ancient and Modern Life Worlds” to be submitted to SUNY Press.

Lynn Huber, professor of religious studies, presented on a review panel for Trans Biblical: New Approaches to Interpretation and Embodiment in Scripture, edited by Joseph Marshall, Melissa Harl Sellew, and Katy E. Valentine. Huber also hosted an event, sponsored in part by the Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society, celebrating the book series, “Sexing Scripture,” which she is co-editing for Bloomsbury/ T&T Clark.

Pamela D. Winfield, professor of religious studies, served as the respondent to a panel dedicated to “Encountering Buddha in Museums: Modern Expressions of an Ancient Tradition,” sponsored by the Association of Public Religion & Intellectual Life. Winfield also participated in an all-day pre-conference workshop on Religion & Museums at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Judaism in Five Minutes provides an accessible and lively introduction to common questions about Jews and Judaism. Claussen’s chapter, titled “What Does Jewish Tradition Say About War?” explains how “Jews in diverse historical contexts have constructed a wide range of Jewish traditions about war, framing their ideas with reference to Jewish identities, histories, and texts.”

The volume was published by Equinox Publishing as part of the “Religion in 5 Minutes” series. More information about the volume can be found .

The chapter is titled “Character and Musar,” and explores diverse Jewish approaches to questions about moral character, especially within the genre of “musar literature” focused on character and virtue.

Claussen is the author of books focused on moral character, including Modern Musar: Contested Virtues in Jewish Thought and Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Simhah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar. Miller is the author of books focused on character including Moral Character: An Empirical Theory and Character and Moral Psychology.

“The Routledge Companion to Jewish Philosophy” brings diverse perspectives to bear on the key topics, problems, and debates in Jewish philosophy and philosophical theology. The 37 chapters were written by an international team of experts from different traditions in philosophy and beyond.

Winfield’s paper, entitled “From the Misai-e to the Mishuhō: ‘Making Sense’ of Ritual Structures in Heian, Japan,” examined the evolution of imperial state-protecting New Year’s rites beginning in the early ninth century. The pre-existing Misai-e ceremony took place in the imperial palace’s large public Daigokuden Hall and focused solely on sutra recitation and analysis, but after 835, a concurrent Mishuhō ritual was inaugurated in a new private Shingon’in chapel near the emperor’s residence that involved all the senses.

This latter secretive Buddhist rite required vibrantly colored images of mandalas and protector deities (sight), chanted mantras and Sanskrit prayers (sound), incense offerings and smoky fire ceremonies (smell) and altar objects and ritual implements (touch). Moreover, the esoteric Buddhist patriarch Kūkai (784-835) metaphorically likened these sensational elements to the flavor of medicinal ghee (taste), which, he claimed, would protect and preserve the emperor’s body, and by extension, the larger body politic.

By recovering the embodied, lived experiences of pre-modern Buddhist and Shintō practitioners, the English- and Japanese-language papers of this conference contributed to the current trend in Religious Studies that investigates the role of sensory perception in religious experience.

The Journal is the scholarly journal of the Society of Jewish Ethics, of which Claussen is a past president. Published biannually by the Penn State University Press, the journal publishes outstanding scholarship in Jewish ethics, broadly conceived. It serves as a location for the exchange of ideas among those interested in understanding, articulating and promoting descriptive and normative Jewish ethics. It aspires to advance dialogue between Jewish ethicists and ethicists working through other religious and secular traditions.

Claussen joins Emily Filler of Drew University as co-editor of the journal. He previously served as an associate editor and has been a member of the journal’s editorial board since 2015.

Claussen joined the ������Ƶ faculty in 2011 and was named Lori and Eric Sklut Emerging Scholar in Jewish Studies in 2012. He has served as chair of the Department of Religious Studies since 2018 and was named Lori and Eric Sklut Professor in Jewish Studies in 2023.

The presentation emphasized the role of reflexivity—the practice of recognizing and reflecting on researchers’ own experiences and identities—in shaping the Abortion & Religion study. The study, which has gathered more than 200 personal narratives from Jewish, Christian and Muslim individuals who have had abortions in the United States, seeks to document and elevate the voices and experiences of religious people having abortions, given the erasure of their stories and experiences from the public debate. Ultimately, the study seeks to counter widespread cultural assumptions that religion is inherently opposed to abortion and to educate the public about the complex realities and ethical decision-making of people having abortions.

Earlier in the month, Peters also participated in the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics meeting in York, England, Sept. 4–6, in her role as President of the Society of Christian Ethics. Representing the largest guild of Christian ethicists based in the United States, she joined international colleagues to address pressing ethical questions and foster dialogue across global contexts.

Professor of Buddhist Studies Pamela D. Winfield was invited to give two talks on Buddhist art to large, general audiences this summer.

For the fourth year in a row, Winfield was invited back to the Animazement Comicon as a featured speaker in the “Culture” category. This annual regional event draws between 11,000-13,000 enthusiasts of Japanese popular culture to the Raleigh, NC Convention Center every Memorial Day weekend.

In keeping with this year’s literary theme, Winfield’s talk on “Buddhism, Art, and The Tale of Genji” introduced an SRO audience to the world’s first fiction novel by 11th century Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu. Winfield focused on the novel’s profound Buddhist teachings on the nature of desire, impermanence, and karmic retribution, and she also examined the imagery inspired by the classic tale’s Buddhist themes, aesthetic values, scriptural references, and real Kyoto temples. Winfield’s previous talks at Animazement have focused on Buddhism and kabuki drama, the films of Studio Ghibli, and the epic Tale of the Heike (a version of which was published in Tricycle Buddhist magazine in 2024).

In addition, Winfield also delivered a talk on “Buddhist Art Through the Ages” this summer in New York City, after serving as faculty director of the ������Ƶ in NY summer program. Winfield was vetted by the founders of Lectures on Tap, a new and rapidly expanding floating lecture series that brings professors, experts and storytellers before general audiences in major US cities. Winfield’s talk explored how Buddhist symbols of wisdom and compassion shaped the dharma throughout four major historical developments. After examining select examples of Theravada, Mahayana, Zen and Esoteric (tantric) Buddhist imagery, and explaining how artists have imagined and reimagined these enlightened virtues across various cultural contexts, she encouraged audience members to create and share their own visions of wisdom and compassion, regardless of their faith perspective or lack thereof. Her talk expanded upon the general themes of the February 2025 Ripple conference on campus.