Conjuring Life Abundant: Making a Way Out of No Way
A little – and depending on your definition, fun – fact about me: I’m a full-time PhD student in religion.
How I got here is a winding road of full-throated yeses, even when my feet moved timidly forward. That’s not the subject of this post, though maybe it will be one day. What is connected is my enduring curiosity about conjuring as a practice of world-making.
I was raised in a deeply Christian family, where anything that smelled like conjure was often labeled “witchcraft” or “demonic” – the opposite of what Christianity was supposed to be. But as I’ve deepened my study and my spirit, I’ve come to see that Christianity and conjuring are not as far apart as I was taught. Both reach for the same mystery – the longing to touch the unseen, to participate in the sacred work of transformation. What once was called “magic” by those who misunderstood it was, for many Black Christians, simply the evidence of a God who still moves through our bodies, our breath, and our becoming.
Conjure, sometimes called root work or hoodoo, was often the work of community healers – those who mixed herbs, offered prayers, and created rituals to protect and sustain their people. With trust and intention, they turned everyday materials – stones, roots, water, songs – into tools for survival and renewal. These were acts of embodied resistance, of imaginative survival. And more often than not, the ones who held and shared this power were Black women – called upon when protection, healing, or hope was needed most.
Black women have long used conjure to create new realities or disrupt existing ones. That’s what we do, refusing despair, remixing what the world gives us into something livable, holy even. Our mothers, aunties, and sisters have always been alchemists: turning scraps into sustenance, silence into story, protest into prayer.
Before pews and pulpits, before ministry was a résumé line or hashtags became prayer circles, Black women were conjuring – calling life out of the wreckage, humming hope into hollow places, making a way out of no way.
On November 13, Faith Matters Network will host its first Womanism Around the Table, a public program series that attends to global struggles of injustice and oppression while seeking liberation and community through a womanist lens. This inaugural gathering, “Making a Way Out of No Way,” is our sacred pause, a moment to breathe, to remember, and to witness what we’ve survived.
This past year has stretched our spirits thin. We’ve seen daylight kidnappings and deportations of our neighbors, military occupation of our streets, and genocide streaming through our timelines. The chaos of empire tries to drown us, but we remember:
We come from people who made vessels from ruin, who coaxed beauty from the earth’s red bones, who sang so fierce the sky had no choice but to open.
We may not always know the way forward, but we know how to make one.
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy knew something about conjuring. As a trans rights activist, community organizer, and veteran of Stonewall, Miss Major imagined a world where trans folks could live in safety, joy, and self-determined possibility. Her life is a testament to what it means to hold kinfolk accountable for the sake of collective survival. She reminds us that liberation must be large enough to hold every body and every sacred life.
Rev. Prathia Hall knew something about conjuring, too. A womanist theologian, civil rights activist, and preacher of sacred fire, Hall stood before the charred ruins of Mount Olive Baptist Church in Terrell County, Georgia, and dared to speak life. In that moment, she began to pray, declaring again and again, “I have a dream.” Her words rose through the smoke and sorrow, conjuring a vision of freedom so powerful it later echoed through Dr. King’s most famous address. Hall’s prayer was conjure work, the transformation of devastation into divine possibility. She reminds us that sometimes the holiest act is to speak the world we need into being, again and again, until it takes root.
Assata Shakur knew something about conjuring, too. A revolutionary, poet, and freedom dreamer, Assata transformed exile into prayer, turning distance into devotion. She proclaimed “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.” May it ripple like a spell across generations. From behind walls both literal and political, she conjured a vision of Black freedom that refused to die, reminding us that survival itself can be a sacred act of creation.
And the brilliant souls who participated in our Making Meaning Now research are conjuring meaning and new worlds every day. They named the wounds: genocides, the rising cost of living, the hunger for meaningful connection, and the exhaustion of principled struggle. Yet they also named what keeps them alive: the beauty of community, the creativity of artists and wordsmiths, the quiet sermon of the natural world. They are using the wisdom of the ancestors, and the brilliance of those still here, to conjure worlds where life can flourish, full and free.
Their witness reminds us that conjuring is how we remember forward, weaving what was, what is, and what must be into one continuous breath of becoming.
As we move into a new year, we ask: what wisdom will carry us through?
Maybe it’s this — that making a way out of no way has never been about perfection. It’s about possibility. About trusting that the ancestors are already whispering the blueprint in our ears. About refusing to let cynicism eclipse imagination. About remembering that conjure doesn’t only resist destruction – it builds new worlds in its wake.
This year, may we conjure rest as resistance, laughter as liturgy, and love as liberation.
May we, like our grandmothers before us, keep shaping tomorrow with our hands and our hope.
May we continue the holy work of making a way out of no way – not just to survive, but to live, to love, and to flourish in abundance.
Because we’ve been doing it since way back before everything.
