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This article offers a description and critical reflection upon two recent exhibits on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC): Spirit in the Dark: Religion in Black Music, Activism, and Popular Culture and Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures. The article explores the interplay of mutually reinforcing themes of faith, freedom, and futurity that emerge when examining the exhibits together. This article also demonstrates the public significance of the curation of religion and culture in museums and other cultural spaces beyond the academy and religious institutions. It further shows how religion becomes a site of critical meditation upon and creative manifestation or materialization of Black futures. As such, this article contributes to more expansive discourses on the interplay between Black studies and the study of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the significance of the Muhammad Ali Center as a site where meanings associated with "race" and "religion" are constructed, contested and potentially transformed. The Muhammad Ali Center is examined as an example of an increasing number of cultural institutions (i.e., cultural centers, museums, arts spaces etc.) engaged in the strategic re-presentation of issues of cultural difference and socio-political conflict, towards the ends of promoting social justice and/or human rights. The article draws upon theories and methods in cultural studies, religious studies, and museums studies in order to explore the significance of the representational and curatorial strategies of such cultural institutions for understanding alternative approaches to influencing and/or intervening in public discourses and practices surrounding issues of racial injustice and religious intolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the relationship between worship and theory in African American religious thought and practice. It situates this inquiry within longstanding debates among black intellectuals concerning the contested relationships between black worship and political activism. While contemporary scholarship has resisted reductionist accounts of black religious worship as antithetical to activism, there has been little exploration of the links between black worship and the political activism of the hip-hop generations. As such, the essay turns to theoretical perspectives developed within Cultural Studies in order to examine the ways that the representational politics and "moral panics" surrounding contemporary black youth culture inform recent black rituals of resistance. The theoretical inquiry in the essay is grounded in the concrete case of Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou's recent performances of religious ritual on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. The essay argues that Rev. Sekou's account of the links between ritual, representation, and resistance demonstrates a theoretically informed religiopolitical praxis deployed on behalf of black youth who have been marginalized, criminalized, policed, and executed in post-Civil Rights America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]