This panel critically interrogates the relationship between financial economics and religion as they bear on futurity and conceptions of temporality. Over the last several decades, discourse on “financialization” has significantly affected the way that a variety of fields theorize capitalism and its history. Religious studies as a field has been less interested in this discourse. This panel asks how logics of finance intersect with theories and histories of religion. Particularly, we are interested in how regimes and structures of power, sovereignty, race, and coloniality have historically been constituted through this intersection. Panelists pursue this from several distinct, yet intersecting, areas of inquiry: through theorizing the philosophical and theological grounds of financial logics; identifying long durée histories of financialization; resituating these theoretical explorations through the lens of Black radical politics and education; and articulating ways that the political and social impacts of financialization extend beyond the Anglosphere.
Two common sayings about money: “Time is money,” and “Money makes the world go round.” When taking a closer look, these phrases conceal odd logics. What does it mean to suggest that time is equivalent to money? That money generates the world’s movement? What theories of temporality and historical movement allow us to see time, money, and causality in these ways? I argue that the history of financial capital shows how theological and critical articulations of history were both influenced by and determinative of economic logics that lead to financialization. Far from––as Agamben and others argue––beginning in 1971 with the U.S. rejection of the gold standard, I suggest that financialization has a longer history: one which is freighted with more than merely analogical relationships to religious logics, and which implicates the history of religion in relation to the Atlantic slave trade and the colonial enterprises which facilitated it.
Black studies manifestos contain strategies for pedagogical insurgency adequate to the contemporary moment, where the perfection of slavery coincides with the perfection of the university. On the one hand, the right-wing frames higher education as a form of mind-control; on the other, left-wing professors bemoan the ineffectiveness of education all together. The gap between represents a crisis of faith, not only in higher education but also in the aborted project of racial democracy. Instead of shoring up the language of the humanities, the university, and the nation, I reconfigure the rise of fascism, anti-DEI measures, and artificial intelligence through the logic of supersessionism, where the problem of secularizing knowledge and immanentizing God will always require a movement from slavery to segregation to neo-segregation, or “white-over-black.” I close with a call to pedagogical power that transforms educators and students into militant accomplices through opening meaningful occasions for risk and rebellion.