Online June Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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This paper theorizes memoir as womanist methodology by examining how Black women's personal narratives of grief constitute authoritative sources of theological and phenomenological knowledge. Drawing from my forthcoming book Mourning in the Margins, I argue that integrating lived experience with scholarly analysis enacts Alice Walker's womanist principle that "the personal is political." Through phenomenological attention to my grandmother's death and my anticipatory grief, I demonstrate how embodied storytelling disrupts Enlightenment epistemologies that privilege "objective" knowledge over experiential wisdom. This methodology centers Black women's tears as sacred texts, the body as archive, and grief as an epistemology that reveal what systematic theology and trauma studies have rendered unintelligible: that Black women's grief is simultaneously personal, historical, political, psychological, physiological, and spiritual. By employing a "bookend" narrative structure—opening and closing each theoretical exploration with personal anecdote—I show how womanist scholarship refuses the false binary between rigor and vulnerability, between academy and ancestor.

This paper examines contemporary iterations of Carnival in the U.S. and Global South as diasporic spaces where Black femme sensuality, spirituality, and aesthetic performance converge on grounds of both the sacred and secular. While often understood as near exclusively secular cultural festivals, Carnival traditions remain deeply rooted in African and Afro-Caribbean religious cosmologies. I argue that these sites function as spaces where Black women renegotiate embodiment, spirituality, and relationality within the conditions of late-capitalist empires.

Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, scholars of Black religion and womanist thought, and scholars of queer, feminist, and sexuality studies, the paper considers the Caribbean and the Black American metropolis as interconnected diasporic sites for rethinking Black ontology and African(a) womanist theology. Through attention to embodied performance, diasporic music cultures, and festival practices, I suggest that Carnival and what I regard as “Carnival theologies”  permeate through popular culture today and operate as forms of cultural technology through which Black women articulate alternative modes of being and relating to the human, earth, and divine, often expanding the conceptual boundaries of womanist religious thought across the African diaspora.

“This is not a time for business as usual.” In the Black Church, this claim feels especially urgent. Although Black women make up about 70–80 percent of active members in historically Black congregations, they remain underrepresented in senior pastoral and denominational leadership. This gap reflects deeper problems in church structures and beliefs that shape who is seen as qualified to preach, lead, and represent God.

Drawing on interviews and survey responses from Black women clergy across several denominations, this paper explores how they navigate these barriers while creating new possibilities for leadership, community, and theology. Using a womanist framework, I center Black clergywomen’s lived experiences as a source of theological insight, describing this work as “womanist futuring.”

Their stories challenge narratives of despair by offering forms of God-talk that reimagine authority, calling, and community. Rather than accepting marginalization, these leaders build networks of support and model justice-centered leadership, offering powerful visions for the future of the church and religious scholarship.

Sacred Feminine theologies and iconographies are trans-religious - fluidly summoned,
transmitted, reflected, and reinforced across multiple contexts in liturgy and praxis. The synchronous "seeing" of the Sacred Feminine as a theistic vision of sovereignty, empowerment, embodiment, protection, justice, and hope is a defining characteristic of Her presence and a method of Her endurance.

The Sacred Feminine as a trans-religious theology of liberatory hope is a divine counter-narrative that transgresses hegemonic dis-embodiments). Embracing a womanist/Black feminist theo-ethical and spiritualist lens, this presentation weaves theologies and theodicies of the Sacred Feminine in African/a Heritage Religions (AHRs), Sakta Hinduism, and the Black Madonna of Catholic Christianity to "midwife" a shared telos of justice on behalf of the most structurally vulnerable in our societies. The Sacred Feminine is an audacious hope - a theistic vision of justice and liberation embodied as womn, as Black, as wholly Divine. Midwifing a shared teleological see-ing of Divine Feminine as a justice ethos is an urgent function of a theology that meets the needs of the times we face.