This article uses the case of hazanim, nonordained Jewish religious functionaries, to explore how religious work operated as a market activity in the nineteenth century. Building on recent work at the intersection of religion, class, and capitalism, it recasts ministers, rabbis, and other religious leaders as contracted workers who sought ways to acquire wages through the specific marketing of ritual authority. Scholars have described the history of the American ministry as a path toward professionalization, seen as the outcome of clerical self-assertion in the aftermath of disestablishment. These accounts, however, ignore the everyday social and economic factors shaping the development of American religious institutions, which were particularly challenging for Jews, who had specific needs for religious labor, no existential distinction between ministers and congregants, and no institutional infrastructure to oversee qualifications and placement. As Jews founded congregations in the United States, they required particular human resources, which were acquired through unregulated contracts and unreliable credentials. These complex conditions contributed to the possibility of religious exploitation, personal fraud, communal instability, interpersonal distrust, and social conflict, which shifted in meaning and intersected with notions of religious authenticity. In this context, Jews increasingly prioritized preaching and teaching and founded national institutions, which together would make religious work more specialized, labor markets more efficient, and the resultant professionals more reliable in their work. Understanding religious workers in this way encourages us to see how religion was, and is, labor.

This essay considers American Catholics who, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, reflected seriously on the religious significance of technology in general, and space science in particular. American Catholics, while no more immune from the belief that space science would create fundamental changes in human life than their Protestant, Jewish, and secular counterparts, nevertheless sought to understand the Space Age in their own distinctive terms. Catholic discussion of these issues revolved around the contributions of two theologians. From the earliest moments of the Space Age, Thomas Aquinas provided a justification for the work of Catholic scientists and astronauts within a Cold War framework. However, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's cosmic vision helped American Catholics integrate feelings of wonder and hope with darkly realistic fears about the military consequences of the space race. Thomas and Teilhard, fundamentally optimists, helped Catholics elaborate a vision of a way forward through the very real threats Americans confronted in the “long 1960s,” a vision they developed in books, articles, and speeches, but also in art, liturgy, and fiction. Ultimately, however, both extreme hopes about cosmic unification and extreme fears about total annihilation modulated, and like their fellow Americans interested in space flight during the 1960s, American Catholics turned in the early 1970s to a renewed focus on the Earth.

According to most historians, the majority of northern urban Catholics before Vatican II (1962–1965) were ensconced in their parish boundaries, viewing their existence through the lens of the parish and focusing the majority of their attention on matters within their particular geographic location. As African Americans moved north during the Great Migration (1910s–1960s) and the racial dynamics of cities changed, some black Catholics began to organize for what they called “interracial justice,” a term that reflected their belief that black equality would benefit African Americans and whites. This article argues that the parish boundaries paradigm for understanding Catholicism prior to the reforms of Vatican II fails to account for the efforts of black Catholics working for interracial justice. This article considers four ways black Catholic interracialists moved beyond their parish boundaries: (a) the national networks they cultivated with white priests; (b) the theological doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ they used to support their work; (c) the local relationships they developed with non-Catholics; and (d) the connections they made with young white Catholics. By advancing this argument, this essay highlights the relationship between race and religion—both how the institutional Catholic church reinforced racial hierarchies and how black Catholics leveraged their faith to tear them down. Finally, this article reorients the history of Catholic interracialism by focusing on black laypeople and connects two bodies of literature that rarely comment on one another: that of Catholicism and the long civil rights movement.