Online June Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

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. 

This paper argues that Tao Yuanming’s work provides distinct methodological resources that we can employ as we face challenges in our lives. The first is the creative use of moral exemplars from the past; the second is grounding ethical reflection in everyday experience. Tao never arrived at a single definitive resolution to human problems. What he did develop, however, was a distinctive way of living with these challenges.

This paper builds on previous scholarship that sees Tao as a philosopher of humanistic endurance by arguing that Tao makes an important and distinctive contribution to ethical and existential thought through his orchestration of methodological approaches. Tao draws on multiple philosophical traditions as well as his own lived experience to develop responses to the vicissitudes of life. While I do not argue that Tao’s conclusions are universally applicable, I do argue that the methodology he employs is worthy of emulation.

The role of common people within the ethical and socio-political framework of early Chinese thought remains largely underexplored, partly because they are often assumed to have been treated merely as passive subjects within a meritocratic order. Yet the two major early Chinese traditions, Confucianism and Mohism, propose markedly different forms of meritocratic governance. Mozi portrays ordinary people as participants in political life, arguing that the ruler should be a virtuous worthy whom everyone can recognize and endorse. By contrast, Confucian thinkers such as Xunzi emphasizes the ruler's duty to ensure the basic welfare of the common people instead of recognizing their political agency. Many scholars attribute this difference to their distinct ethical theories. I argue instead that the key divergence lies in their political epistemologies—specifically, whether ordinary people can understand the proper organization of socio-political life in accordance with Heaven’s processes.

There is a plurality of work dealing with the concept of moral progress, but from among these texts we can isolate two main camps. On the one hand, you have teleological conceptions of progress. Moral progress, these thinkers, involves transformations in social practices that move us closer to some defined end. On the other hand, you have pragmatic conceptions of progress, which see moral progress as movement away from problems into an open-ended future, not constrained by definite ends.

My paper seeks to bring Confucius into the scholarly debate, in order to complicate the narrative of progress. Specifically, this paper posits that Confucius’ relationship to the Zhou dynasty provides a model for thinking about progress that is not cleanly captured by either the teleological or the pragmatic models of moral progress.

Aaron Stalnaker states in his book, Mastery and Dependence, that many people question the existence of “ethical experts” (Stalnaker, 2). Stalnaker pushes back on this sentiment and argue for the existence of (also the need for) ethical masters. Even with the existence of moral experts, however, the question of “what motivates people to want to learn from them” remains to be answered. I argue the answer is in seeing moral teachers as idols.

Agreeing with Stalnaker on the belief that moral teachers are important for society, I explore the gravitas of moral excellence, which some ancient Greek and Confucian thinkers see as motivation to follow moral teachers. This attraction evolves into idolization for one’s teacher, which is key to moral pedagogy.