In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, published in 1899 by Charles Godfrey Leland, is the most “political” of the foundational documents of the twentieth-century Wiccan movement. In all, Aradia sets forth several ideas that would shape the new religion of Wicca in the early 1950s. Leland asserts the existence of an Old Religion (and is the original source “The Charge of the Goddess”), paralleling archaeologist Margaret Murray’s claim to have discovered traces of such a Pagan survival in England and Scotland The book describes the practice of ritual nudity, which found ready acceptance with as Wicca developed. Third, it describes Diana as a Moon goddess and Queen of the Witches, patroness of the poor and oppressed, who gave license to use harmful magic against the upper classes. This justification for “anti-oppression” witchcraft one of  Aradia’s most visible legacies.

Matilda Joslyn Gage was a major women’s suffrage leader, collaborating with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. In 1893 she published Woman, Church and State: a Historical Account of the Status of Woman through the Christian Ages: with Reminiscences of Matriarchate, the results of her research into women’s political oppression. She presents a historical overview of structural injustices underlying the current social condition, in which women are oppressed and disenfranchised along-side other excluded persons, including African Americans and Native Americans. Here I investigate her trajectory from ancient patriarchy through present oppressions, including a passionate chapter on to the European witch trials, which, among other influences, is the source of the infamously incorrect assertion that “nine million” people were executed. The text remains foundational for feminist Witchcraft communities and for popular understandings of historical trials, especially the idea that women tried for witchcraft were actually practicing an ancient, Goddess religion.

It is both an honor and a humbling task to review a book as iconic for both Pagan Studies and more generally for New Religious Movements as Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers and other Pagans in America. The book was published on Samhain (Halloween) 1979 by Viking Press; a paperback edition of the original book and three subsequent updated, expanded, and revised editions were published by other presses. This was the first book to present an overview of the, then still nascent but growing, Pagan movement in America. Its importance goes beyond its historic role as it continues to be cited in both academic and popular works. 

In Black Magic: Religion and the African-American Conjuring Tradition (2003),Yvonne Chireau analyzes Hoodoo as an amalgamation of what people remembered from their West and West-Central African homeland, some European Christian and folk traditions, and Indigenous American knowledge of the local land. Here I demonstrate that the label of "magic" is less significant for Hoodoo than the effort to redefine it as a religion. This shift is driven by several factors. First, classifying Hoodoo as a religion offers protection from the racially charged negativity often linked to "magic." Second, practitioners are moving away from the commercially exploited aspects frequently associated with magic, instead prioritizing the re-centering of religious Africana theological elements, particularly ancestor veneration. Finally, redefining "religion" allows Hoodoo to stand apart from Christianity, establishing itself as an ethno-religion, a distinct cultural and spiritual way of life. This reorientation is in conversation with efforts of other magic-using communities, including contemporary Paganisms

When is the political future? Asian American and Canadian politics tend to look to the past for their visions of what is to come, greatly constraining their views of present political agency. This paper argues that Asian North American political thought has been hampered by an ontological problem of time, and that an alternative notion of political futurity is needed. Drawing on Bergson and Deleuze, I argue that the future has been misconstrued as possibility, prefiguring it in what is already known as possible (i.e. past) without asking after the conditions of the radically new. Against this ontological frame, I call for an approach to Asian North American futurities as potentials and desires in the real and undetermined present. Theology, I suggest, allows us to speak this futurity where conventional political language falters, opening our politics to articulations of newness beyond the possible.

We propose a theological rereading of Asian Americanist engagements with the turn in the humanities toward new materialisms. Rereading the work of three Asian Americanist new materialist scholars – Mel Y. Chen, Jasbir Puar, and Michelle Nancy Huang – we argue that the consideration of the concept of ‘animacies’ in Asian Americanist critical scholarship is a tacit exploration of theodicy. What is theodical is the way that Asian American subject formation is, as Mimi Khúc puts it, animated as perpetually unwell. What is indeterminate in these theodicies, we claim, is the animating source of such unwellness and whether other Asian American religious futures are therefore possible by way of switching gods, so to speak. The future liberation from the unwellness associated with orientalizing racism might thus be found in theologies that new materialist scholars in our discipline have alluded to but have yet to fully explore.

This paper asks: Is there a way to use an anti-caste framework within an adage of death as equalizer to develop resistant practices in life. The paper explores how the author's experiential work with regenerative agriculture intersects with scholarship in South Asian American Studies and lived religions to offer some insights on rethinking caste privilege. The author uses an autoethnographic approach, which insists that a centering of self engage with intersections of sociopolitical, economic, and/or cultural dynamics of meaning and change. The paper takes on the privileges of caste status by interrogating such concepts as karma and reincarnation as passed through what is learned through lived experiences among U.S.-based South Asians born into and brought up with the savarna privileges of caste Hinduism.

This paper examines how ancestral ecological wisdom preserved among marginalized women offers alternative visions of human–Earth relations in the context of intensifying ecological crisis. While dominant environmental discourse often focuses on technological solutions or policy reform, this study highlights everyday ecological practices that sustain relational forms of environmental care within diasporic communities.
The paper draws on ethnographic research that includes interviews with sixty-two Korean grandmothers in both Korea and the Korean diaspora in New York. These women maintain ecological practices shaped by intergenerational knowledge, including seasonal attunement, food preservation, seed-saving, water reuse, and relational understandings of land and nonhuman life. Although many of these practices originated in agrarian settings, they are creatively adapted in urban diasporic environments through apartment-based cultivation, community gardens, and church-centered networks of food sharing and care. By foregrounding the lived ecological practices of grandmothers, this paper argues that ancestral wisdom represents a living archive of ecological knowledge that sustains relational understandings of care for land, community, and future generations. These practices reveal how alternative ecological futures may emerge from intergenerational memory, embodied knowledge, and everyday forms of ecological responsibility within diasporic religious communities.

This paper begins by surveying the debate provoked by John Mbiti’s claim that African epistemologies lack attention to the distant future. It argues for the relevance of this debate in our current context of climate crisis and resource depletion. The problems of our day demand a revisiting of Mbiti’s mostly philosophical claim about the value of non-linear models of time. But can this claim be empirically grounded, as demanded by Mbiti’s critics? This paper argues that it can, pointing to evidence from “traditional” rites of passage that, in at least three distinct parts of the continent, may be better termed “rites of return.” The aim of this paper is to provide empirical evidence, mostly lacking in Mbiti’s work, for the needed recognition that non-linear and non-teleological models of time, growth, and development not only exist, but, if taken seriously, would benefit the world at large. 

Time, memory, and the natural world shape how humans relate to the environment and to one another. Qoheleth observes that “Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever” (Eccl 1:4), portraying a natural world that endures while human generations pass away. Within this vision, Qoheleth presents nature as indifferent to human striving, where human achievements fade into forgetfulness. This paper contends that African cosmological perspectives on land, memory, and relational time, as articulated by John S. Mbiti, provide a robust hermeneutic for rereading Qoheleth. In many African traditions, land functions not only as a physical environment but as a living repository of communal memory linking the living and the ancestors. While Qoheleth highlights the fragility of human remembrance, African cosmology emphasizes how land sustains memory and identity across generations. Through this dialogue, this paper offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between time, land, and human identity.

This paper reframes--rather than refutes--Mbiti's seminal argument that African societies had no notion of the "future" by demonstrating how Yoruba religion and philosophy articulate different notions of time which function in relationship as "past" and "present". Through an analysis of language, myth, ritual, and divination, the paper argues that the Yoruba have a clear notion and verbal tense for the "future" but also a more "real" sense of time called igba iwasẹ or metaphorically "Ifẹ"--the source of the Yoruba world. This sacred time/place exists before/outside of time and contains the transcendent archetypes for everything in existence. Thus, Mbiti can be reinterpreted as documenting the interplay between different types of time rather than a perceived lack of a future in African societies.

In many African contexts, the concept of time is understood through patterns of action, response, and consequence. Different views and perceptions of time influence African electoral cycles, voter engagement patterns, and the standards by which democratic performance is judged across various political environments. This paper uses a social ethics framework to explore how African indigenous notions of time and space might be used in politics and activism, not only to guide but also to refine and redefine moral accountability structures and pathways within the body politic.