Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Mindfulness meditation, a practice that originated in Buddhism, has grown exponentially over the past thirty years both in the U.S. and across the globe. This growth is due, at least in part, to scientific studies documenting the health effects of meditation including positive effects of meditation on brain function. As a result of this research, medical practitioners are increasingly encouraging their patients to explore mindfulness meditation practice to help with a variety of physical and mental ailments. The new mindfulness courses have roots in Tibetan Buddhist traditions, but are wholly secularized treatments of meditation that are advertised through health care providers and covered by many insurance plans. My research will document and discuss the significance of the rising popularity of mindfulness meditation in the U.S., and will explore how this trend highlights growing tensions at the boundaries of science and religion. My core theoretical questions investigate how Buddhist contemplatives and scientists who are studying meditation negotiate the tensions between spirituality and rationalism.

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: Traditional deterrence is not an effective approach toward terrorist groups bent on causing a nuclear catastrophe. Preventive strategies, which call for the elimination of an enemy before it is able to attack, are highly risky and often difficult to implement. The United States should instead consider a policy of expanded deterrence, which focuses not on the would-be nuclear terrorists but on those states that may deliberately transfer or inadvertently leak nuclear weapons and materials to them. But threatening retaliation against those states, the United States may be able to deter that which it cannot physically prevent.

Publication Type: Session Paper

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: For more than 50 years, the United States has depended on deterrence for defense against its principal adversaries. Though deterrence has never been as fulfilling as denial - - that is, preventing an enemy’s access to the homeland - -deterrence has worked or, more precisely, not failed to work. But deterrence can be trusted no longer. Today’s adversary values his life less than our death. This adversary is not a candidate for deterrence. Moreover, while he lacks a ballistic missile delivery system, he has such a variety of other means to deliver a nuclear weapon, from commercial airliners to trucks to container ships, that the United States cannot have any confidence in its ability to mount a sustained
defense by denial.

In light of this vulnerability, we might ask, can this adversary plausibly acquire a nuclear weapon to attack the United States? The argument here is that, unless many changes are made, it is more likely than not that Al Qaeda or one of its affiliates will detonate a nuclear weapon in a US city within the next five to ten years. The loss of life will be measured not in the thousands, not in the tens of thousands, but in the hundreds of thousands. The United States is, then, at once extraordinarily powerful and tragically vulnerable.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: Spirit can be understood as available for resourcing inventive, responsive, nuanced communicative proceduring for dialogue. I’m interested in the human capacity to bring attention to the action/movement/prompting of spirit. If one had a practice of considering communicating, verbing, broadly defined, as an invention for coordinating gap bridging with other individual humans, then one might release the hold on the habitual communicative procedurings that are no longer useful in coordinating actions with others. A benefit of attending to the spiritual is its potent availability and location in the present moment, the present situation, such that it is resource for suggesting and enacting nuanced and responsive ways of bridging the gaps of individual and collective human sense-making and step-taking in the present moment.