Terrence L. Johnson, Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies

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Terrence L. Johnson, MDiv ’00, wants his students to leave the classroom transformed. Johnson, the Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies, explains, “I believe firmly that my job is to trouble the waters so that we don't leave the classroom the same way we entered. That probably speaks to my background at Morehouse and the Black church, where there's an assumption that when you enter these spaces, there will be a moment where the preacher or the singing inspires you, gives you a different way of thinking about the world, and also a sense of hope."

Johnson has long been interested in thinking critically about God, ethics, and spirituality. Growing up in northeastern Indiana, Johnson regularly attended church with his family, and he remembers a day that would forever change how he thought about religion. “I remember hearing the pastor say that women should remain silent and should be obedient to authority. And I just paused and thought, ‘All the women I know are very powerful. They're generous, kind, and very smart.’ And I was trying to figure out why the pastor was encouraging women to basically stay in their place.” This memory resurfaced when Johnson was an undergraduate majoring in English at Morehouse College. While taking a feminist theory class with renowned Black feminist scholar Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Johnson began to think more critically about gender and the role of God, writ large, in the African American experience. “From that moment,” he says, “I knew that religion and questions of God and social conditions were things I wanted to wrestle with.”

After graduating, Johnson worked as a reporter, and while he enjoyed it, he longed for a more fulfilling career. “I needed to take a different route professionally,” he remembers, “and I believed in my heart that I needed to go to divinity school.” He applied and was accepted to HDS, not realizing at the time how profoundly the next few years would impact his career and his life. As a first-year student, he took classes with Professors Karen King and David Lambert, worked as a researcher for Professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and attended Professor Sarah Coakley’s silent prayer group. “I came to Harvard Divinity School to find a voice that I had started to develop in undergrad,” says Johnson, “and this place really allowed me to find that voice and connect it to so many different academic concerns, and social issues as well.”

Inspired by his exceptional teachers and their meaningful impact on his intellectual development, Johnson began applying to PhD programs to become a professor. He asked Professor King for a letter of recommendation and she enthusiastically agreed, saying, as Johnson remembers it, "I’m writing you this recommendation not only because I think you’ll be a great professor, but because I think you can help create new knowledge.” That, for Johnson, was a life-changing moment.

The notion of creating knowledge stuck with Johnson and continues to influence his scholarship and teaching to this day. It informed his recent lecture, “Memory, History, and the Ethics of Reparations,” the fourth installment in the Religion and the Legacies of Slavery online series, in which he invited parallels between Henry Ossawa Tanner’s artwork and memory, accountability, and repair. It also guides his teaching. In courses such as “Racial Liberalism and the Ethics of Law and Justice,” and “Behind the Veil,” Johnson uses a “multi-sensory” approach, bringing in literature and music alongside judicial and philosophical texts. "At this particular moment, it is really critical for our students to see the ways in which religion intersects with so many other aspects of our lives,” he explains. “And I want them to be able to see how an artist or musician can have something as powerful to say as a theologian or philosopher, and how those two can be engaged with each other.” He adds that Professor King’s comment still inspires his approach to teaching: “Now I tell my students, ‘I have the expectation that you are creating new knowledge.’ And I reinforce that all the time.”

—by Sarah Rubin; Photo credit: Sarah Rubin