Moral Re-Imagination and Grassroots Practices of Re-Worlding: The Work of Religious Rebinding in the Age of ‘Post-Secular’ Capitalism

“Religion,” like “art”, and “politics”, was never a free-standing concept but, rather, a coordinating concept in an interrelated social grammar that underwrote industrial capitalism’s original charter. The cultural and economic changes that have accompanied the turn to neoliberalism in the last almost half-century imply shifts in the borders, definitions, and relationships both within and between categories of religion, art, and politics. Taken together, the panel engages with practices of moral reimagination as constitutive steps in communal analyses of and responses to the coordinates of contemporary power. The papers gathered here reflect on the life and labors of communities of practice that ground their analysis, cultural subvention of, and moral resistance to the social imaginaries and social ontologies of American gendered racial capitalism in artful practices of moral re-imagination and, in so doing, mirror these displacements but also look to somehow exercise political agency within them.