Contested spaces of catholic power

We often think about Catholic spaces as those linked to institutional sites that support formal ritual: churches, convents, shrines.  This panel disrupts expectations by examining Catholicism in the action-oriented practices of hunting and farming, dancing, exercising, and waging war.  In so doing, these papers reexamine the emergence of new sites of sanctification and political contestation. Papers on this panel: Reconsider how natural environs are made more Catholic by nineteenth-century indigenous practices of hunting and farming; reconfigure the dance club as a site wherein the queer dead contest Catholic political theology; posit the gym as a site wherein masculinist Catholic norms are shaped by weight-lifting; and, remap the war-torn European front by examining how American Catholics' purchasing of "Mass kits" put them "at the front" in a different kind of imagined community.