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Spencer Dew

Spencer Dew is the author of The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali (University of Chicago Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Albert J. Raboteau Price for Best Book in Africana Religions. Dew is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Kenyon College and Associated Faculty at the Ohio State University.

 

Essays

Another Nation, Under Law

Just outside Boston on the Independence Day weekend, a stand-off between the Rise of the Moors group and the police was, in so many ways, quintessentially American—offering a dramatic tableau of religious claims about race, about guns, about law, about the state, and, finally, about another classical American concern: the power of the press and the need to control one’s own narrative.

The Revolutionary Church of Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Rather than worry about whether other people will come to the table, whether other people will listen, we must, first, come to the table ourselves, be willing to do the revolutionary work of “listening and talking,” proceeding into the real risk of such encounter with likewise real openness to the experience and its transformative effect. This is, to risk profound understatement, a difficult talk.

The State “don’t own a goddamn thing”: Illiberal Religification of the Legal System

MOVE, while an illiberal religion characterized by abrasive rhetoric, is nonetheless an example of the religification of law and the legal system. MOVE activists refused to surrender the court to the state, seeing the legal system as a potential tool against the state, rightly beyond state control.

Cultivating Justice and Hope amid Different Worlds: An Interview with Silvana Rabinovich

Following this path, I intended to do a non-punitive reading on Cain’s wandering by presenting it as God’s opportunity to cultivate the land while moving around the territory. This view of the nomad seeks to rehabilitate another type of relationality with the Earth by recovering its dignity in different horizons.