Moral Disorientation and Liberative Futures

This paper argues that moral disorientation holds an ambivalent potential for imagining and inhabiting liberative future(s). Focusing on disclosures of moral disorientation among Christian leaders responding to antiblack violence and racism, I read these accounts through Sara Ahmed and Ami Harbin’s phenomenologies of (dis)orientation to show how moral disorientation unsettles inherited theological bearings, disrupts our relations to our (divine) others, and conditions the potential for liberative imaginations of the future(s). I then engage Simone Weil’s account of affliction and decreation to illuminate the ethical and spiritual ruptures inherent in moral disorientation, while critically interrogating her understanding of divine providence. Returning to everyday disclosures of moral disorientation, I contrast moments when disorientation is closed through logics of divine providence to moments of sustained, generative moral disorientation that reimagine divine participation in open and liberative future(s).