This article uses Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, as a case study to interpret how coloniality structured Black Protestant institution-building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Washington, who was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia sometime around 1858 or 1859, was quite literally reared on a plantation, and spent most of his public career trying to work “up from slavery,” as the title of his autobiography confirms. In the “afterlife of the plantation” (to borrow Jarvis McInnis’ term), his Protestant social respectability, Protestant work ethic, and Protestant institution largely recapitulated the plantation system in his embrace of agriculturalism, industrialism, and in his political and ethical commitments to gendered normative order and Black sexual Victorianism. This article sifts through these entanglements to interpret their meanings for the study of Black religion in and beyond historically Black institutional contexts.

This article addresses coloniality’s imposition of forgetting in the Afro-Atlantic world and attends to the gut as a “site of memory” in Afro-Diasporic religions. It opens with a consideration of what forgetting means for communities in which “counter-memories” could have mounted a challenge to dispossession and the establishment of settler-colonial political institutions. It then turns to Black Atlantic religious memory and to the colon as a metonym for gastrointestinal interiority. Building on The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), the author contends that the emphasis on the gut in initiatory Black Atlantic traditions (such as Vodou and Lucumí) reflects the gastronomic and epistemological impact of coloniality and racial capitalism. The article ends on a cautionary note, warning that while the current focus on the head in Afro-Diasporic religious discourses may contest colonized epistemologies, it threatens to reinscribe coloniality’s erasure of the gut’s role in cognition.

This analysis examines dominant conceptual frameworks in world-historical studies of slavery by relocating them within the theoretical and historical development of the capitalist world-economy and of capital itself. It critiques the limitations of existing historiography by demonstrating how world-historical approaches have largely failed to account for enslaved resistance as a constitutive element of capital’s formation, particularly in relation to non-wage labor. The article argues that future research must incorporate acts of resistance—especially those grounded in systems of belief and religious practice—into the historical logic of capital, rather than treating them as external or reactive phenomena. Rethinking the capital-labor relation in this way allows for a more historically accurate theory of capitalism and carries significant implications for understanding both past and present challenges to global capital. In doing so, the study centers the epistemological interventions and religious structures of slave resistance as foundational to Caribbean struggles against colonial domination and subjugation.

The sea serves as an epistemological orientation for understanding Afro-Cuban religious traditions that access divinities and the dead to reinforce group solidarity and produce healing. This article explores how spirit mediums and entities create historical, cultural, and ritual intersections that elucidate an ongoing worlding that carries potent political strategies for sustenance through an enactment of the waters, especially the ocean. In particular, this work looks at synergies between bodily acts like the singing of the song “Mamá Francisca,” the drawing of Palo signatures for kalunga (the sea of the dead), and altar creation in honor of Yemayá. The result is a complex and fluid understanding of spiritual practices and relationships that resist flattening and slip through taxonomic rendering. Further, by continually accessing afterlives that are porous and action-oriented, Afrolatine spiritual communities create spatial and temporal conduits between the living and the dead that are full of a radical social purpose.

Several American Catholic biblical theologians have recently revived an old idea about the priestly laws in the Pentateuch. This view, with roots in antiquity and early modern thought, holds that these laws were a response to the golden calf episode and represent a decline from an earlier, closer bond between Israel and God. While ancient interpretative traditions are often valuable for contemporary Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible, the Pentateuchal narrative resists the notion that these laws were born of failure or punishment. Instead, they should be seen as reflecting a deepening of God’s bond with Israel centered on cultic presence. Far from diminishing Israel’s worship, the priestly laws enrich the covenantal intimacy between God and his people, offering a presence more perpetual than anything known before, even by the patriarchs.

Representations of martyrs are rare in early Christian art and largely render their pain and deaths invisible. Art’s unwillingness to confront devotees with images of violence and suffering contrasts with the visceral descriptions of martyrdoms in contemporaneous texts. These ekphrastic texts, some of which purport to describe violent paintings depicting the torture of saints, encouraged these same devotees to visualize and participatorily reperform the violence of these martyrdoms in their imaginations—spaces free from the dangerous interactivity and immediacy of physical vision. An examination of how these texts conceive of the (material) images they describe and the (mental) images they conjure demonstrates that representations of martyrdom varied fundamentally across text and image, as ekphrastic texts guided listeners to see beyond the literal in response to challenging physical sights. Martyrdoms were, at first, spectacles to be seen with the “eyes of the mind” and not the eyes of the body.

The article contests the prevailing scholarly assumption that the Hebrew versions of the Clavicula Salomonis, one of the most popular magical texts, only began to appear in the late-seventeenth century. Through an in-depth analysis of a recent discovery, this study not only pushes back the timeline for the appearance of Hebrew Clavicula texts but also enriches our understanding of the dynamic process of textual transmission and adaptation. It also introduces the genre of “auxiliary manuals” and highlights their role in the broader context of magical practices.