Annual Meetings
Held in Conjunction with the American Academy of Religion
The society’s annual meetings are held in conjunction with the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion, typically scheduled the weekend before the Thanksgiving holiday.
The format of our meetings typically consists of two or more sessions, the first on Friday evening and the others on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, with a business meeting (open to all members) in the final half-hour of one of the latter sessions.
The 2025 AAR Annual Meeting will be held November 21-25 in Boston, Massachusetts.
The Society for Hindu-Christian Studies will be conducting its 2025 meeting in conjunction with the AAR, with session dates, times, and places currently being arranged. All sessions will be in-person. Participants will need to register for the Annual Meeting of the AAR to attend.
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At this time, the program for November 2025 has not been finalized. Please check back for updates. Meanwhile, the Call for Papers is below. |
The Society for Hindu-Christian Studies invites panel proposals for the 2025 Annual Meeting, to be held in Boston, MA, from November 21-25. We appreciate and recommend complete panel proposals rather than individual papers.
If you are interested in presenting a paper on one of the following topics, please contact the person listed below. We also invite you to organize an alternate panel proposal with colleagues on a topic that interests you. Please send panel proposals (title, panel description and rationale, participants, paper titles, and paper abstracts) to Bhakti Mamtora at mamtora@arizona.edu by April 11, 2025.
Syriac Christianity and Hindu Christian Dialogue – Brian Butcher brian.butcher@agora.edu
The tradition of the Suriyani/Nasrani, or Mar Toma Margam (“way of St. Thomas”), continues to be little known, despite the increasing presence of Malayali Christians around the globe. The Churches of Kerala, today a spectrum of confessions, trace their common history back to the first century C.E., witnessing to a longstanding and variegated interaction with the wider environment and ethos of the subcontinent: their Syriac language— lingua franca for a uniquely Asian expression of Christianity found not only on the Malabar coast, but for centuries all along the Silk Road—is a form of the Aramaic spoken by Jesus, a shibboleth marking the distinctiveness of the Nasrani as Middle Eastern in origin and orientation, even while Hindu in custom and conviction. The panel welcomes papers probing the unique vistas and vantage points of the Nasrani, including but not limited to:
- 20th c. experiments in inculturated ascetical/monastic life (e.g., Kurisumala Ashram, Saccidananda Ashram Shantivanam)
- Malayali Churches and caste (cf. the Knanaya community; Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things [Random House, 1997])
- Interfaith observance of festivals, pilgrimages, sacraments/sanskaras
- Christian influence upon Keralite Hinduism
- Nasrani and/vs. Hindutva
- Catholic/Orthodox saints and Indian devas
- Satsang, arti, bhajan, darshan, yoga…. in Suriyani liturgical and devotional practice
- Malankara iconography/statuary: whence and whither?
- Kerala and the world: e.g., theologian Paulos Mar Gregorios (1922-1996); novelist Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things [Random House, 1997]); Mollywood cinema
The Swaminarayan Tradition and Christian Theology – Frank Clooney fclooney@hds.harvard.edu
From the pioneering work of Raymond Williams (1984) to the authoritative introduction to Swaminarayan theology by Sadhu Paramtattvadas (2017), awareness has grown in the scholarly world of the importance and significance of this still-young Hindu tradition. It can also be a distinctive conversation partner for scholars of Christian tradition. This panel proposes to bring Christian discourse into conversation with Swaminarayan discourse through a consideration of doctrinal and ethical, historical, and contemporary points of similarity and difference. The focus of the panel will be crafted in light of the proposals made by members of the Society.
Hindu-Christian Chaplaincy – Anuttama Dasa ad@iskcon.org
This panel invites papers on the topic of chaplaincy across Hindu and Christian traditions. Paper topics can address one or more of the following questions: What are some of the challenges that chaplains see their respective students facing today as young people of faith at universities? What are some of the impacts that large numbers of students of other faiths have on their own faiths as Christians or Hindus? What are the challenges or opportunities they face in interfaith relationships? What are the impacts of nationalism and anti-immigration policies on students and their faith? While the focus is on universities and chaplaincy, the panel also welcomes papers that address chaplaincy more broadly.
Engaging the Subaltern in Hindu Christian Dialogue – Maharshi Vyas mvyas@ucsb.edu
This panel foregrounds subaltern voices to reconsider what Hindu-Christian dialogue might entail when viewed from the margins. By centering the perspectives of Adivasis, Dalits, transgender communities, and other marginalized groups, it explores interreligious engagement at the grassroots level. Rather than limiting dialogue to the institutional level, this panel asks what Hindu-Christian studies might gain by engaging everyday interreligious experiences, vernacular narratives, subaltern cosmologies, local histories, and micro-relationships within fragmented communities. How can we creatively use ethnographic and archival material to examine the kind of worldviews and imagined religious boundaries—particularly about Hindu-Christian interactions— found in the lived practices and worldviews of subaltern communities?