In the face of ubiquitous inequalities and anti-Black violence, spiritual cultivation became paramount to African Americans’ emotional survival and stability…
Crystal ball gazers, dream books, and the occult
Year: 2022
Uranus and I are pretty good friends
Mumford’s embrace of Africana esotericism invites us as scholars of Black religions to return again and again to two pivotal…
Rastafari women’s early-twentieth-century world-making
Rastafari women not only innovated ways to critique the dominant societal structure, but also gender oppression within the Rastafari movement.…
Tuning the religio-racial mind
The religio-racial metaphysical imagination, however varied, was particular to the conditions of Black people. The goal was to detach them…
Out there: Perspectives on the study of Black metaphysical religion
This forum offers “Black metaphysical religion” as an analytical historical frame to bring into view the widespread and varied occult…
Political life after death: Racial violence in North Carolina
In recent years, the political and social activity of racialized Muslim American communities is transforming alongside the widening powers of…
Abolition and the stock market
The abolitionist movement is primarily a response to the prison industrial complex, but it speaks to issues beyond punishment and…
The ethic of discipleship in East Harlem
In 1948, three Union seminarians hatched the idea for one such program: an experimental urban ministry, dubbed the East Harlem…
Religious publicity and transnational minority politics
Building on earlier work, I show here that transnational Coptic Christians are remapping indigenous narratives of persecution and martyrdom in…
On parable, truth, and true and false reconciliation
Scholars across multiple disciplines have offered a variety of accounts of reconciliation—what reconciliation is, under what conditions it should be…