# Video: Art and Religion as Technology January 02, 2023 ![Anthony B. Pinn](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/hds2/files/8778781df930396a506ebb435a33d85e_xl.jpeg?itok=akVKGRHN) On November 7, 2022, Professor Terrence L. Johnson facilitated a conversation with Professor Anthony Pinn, Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religion at Rice University, who is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School for the academic year 2022-23, focused on Professor Pinn’s most recent book, *The Interplay of Things*. In this book, Pinn theorizes religion as a technology for interrogating human experiences and the boundaries between people and other things. Rather than considering religion in terms of institutions, doctrines, and creeds, Pinn shows how religion exposes the openness and porousness of all things and how they are always involved in processes of exchange and interplay. Full transcript: SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. SPEAKER 2: Art and religion as technology. A conversation with Anthony B. Pinn. November 7, 2022. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Good, evening friends. I'm Terence Johnson, professor of African-American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School. And I'd like to welcome you to this Zoom conversation and in-person conversation with Dr. Anthony Pinn. For the record, we are recording this conversation. So on behalf of HDS community, I want to thank you all for coming to hear our son, Dr. Anthony Pinn, who's a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. He is currently the Agnes Cullen Arnold distinguished professor of humanities, and Professor of religion at Rice University. And he's also the founding director of the Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning. He's also founding chair of the Center for African-American Studies at Rice University. As we all know, Dr. Pinn has a long list of accomplishments, so I'll only note a few here. He's author of more than 35 books, including a novel, as well as the Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era, Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion, and Noise and Spirit: Rap Music Religious and Spiritual Sensibilities. Tonight, we will discuss his new work-- Interplay of Things: Religion, Art, and Presence Together. So on behalf of the-- Divinity School, let us give Dr. Pinn a warm welcome to Harvard Divinity School. ANTHONY PINN: Thank you. \[APPLAUSE\] Well, thank you all for coming to hang out with me. There are a couple of things I'd like to say to start out. First, Dr. Johnson, thank you for this. Dean Hempton, thank you for the very generous invitation to serve as a visiting scholar. I have a long and complicated relationship with Harvard Divinity School. But it is a delight to be able to hang out in this new place-- new in a variety of ways. So thank you so much. The first person I ever met who had any relationship with Harvard Divinity School was Reverend Fred Lucas, who was my father in ministry during an earlier phase of my life. The second person I met was Dr. Preston Williams. We drove from New York to Cambridge as I was applying. And the idea was just to meet this man. I read some of his work and heard conversations about him because I was at Columbia, but I would hang out at Union. It was a more interesting place. And his name came up, and I got to sit in his office. And he was just matter-of-fact about this. He said, well, it looks like you're going to go-- it looks like you're going to get in so the conversation makes sense. And I just thought this is fantastic. But the thing you really have to understand about Dr. Williams is the way he looked out for students without the demand for recognition. I was able to buy groceries and get books because Preston Williams looked out for me. So I will eternally be grateful for all you did, not only get me through but a whole lot of folks who look like me. \[APPLAUSE\] And to my friends and family in the room, what's up? It's good to see you as always. Dr. Johnson asked me to just make some opening remarks concerning the book, but I thought what I would do was provide a bit of context for it. So, early on in my work, it was somewhat apparent to me that the study of Black religion was under-theorized, that we did not give sufficient attention to issues of theory and method. There was the brilliant Dr. Charles Long, but it seems to me what held sway was the conversation initiated by folks like James Cone, who argued, look, we don't have time for this. Black folks are dying, and you want to talk about issues of theory and method? That we under-theorize this. And for me, this was telling because I was a humanist trying to find space for humanism within the study of Black religion. And as my grandmother would say, that was more than a notion. Trying to find space for it, trying to articulate a sense of what this constitutes within the context of Black life, and why it makes sense to talk about humanism in relationship to this larger arena of Black religious studies. Theory mattered. And so I was trying to wrestle with this as best I could as an assistant professor trying to gain some ground at Macalester College. And my first effort was varieties of African-American religious experience that, for me, has been traditionally misread. That what has occupied the attention of both folks who like it and folks who hate it is the conversation concerning the four traditions. And for me, this conversation concerning the four traditions was an opportunity to raise questions concerning issues of theory and method. If you cannot restrict the nature and meaning of Black religion to the Black church, what is it, and how do you study it? So if you think about theory as how you wrap your mind around this idea and method, how you handle it, how do you think Black religion beyond the confines of the Black church? And how do you handle Black religion beyond the confines of the Black church? Those first four chapters are an opportunity to wrestle with those questions. I thought I was following the lead of folks like Charles Long, who argued theory follows data. So I'm giving you a sense of these traditions, but for me, the most important work are the final two chapters in that book, in which I try to outline a Black comparative theology. The name of the book is not what I intended, but it's what the press insisted upon. And I'm happy to get published. So I'm like, OK, that is not a fight I need to have. You want to call it that for whatever reason, cool, but it misses the point. What I wanted was toward a Black comparative theology, because this is what I was trying to do. And so I was wrestling with method, but the issue of theory, I hadn't adequately turned attention to. So I was figuring out a way, based upon my training, to handle this thing called Black religion, but I needed to give more and more consistent attention to how you go about naming it. And this is what Terror and Triumph was meant to do. Again, not my title, but the content of that book was an effort to wrestle with this-- how do you theorize this. And so, again, wanted to move beyond any assumption that to name the Black church is to name Black religion. But I also wanted to push against any assumption that Black religion really revolved around doctrine, creed, institutional forms, and priesthood. That it was something, there was something underneath this. And so my way of naming that was the quest for complex subjectivity. This is what religion is-- it is the quest for complex subjectivity. It is not the capturing of that subjectivity. It's the yearning for, the desire for more life meaning. A desire that is never fulfilled. I was beginning to seriously read Camus. And so this was compelling for me that this isn't a completed project, this effort to secure this meaning. And so my argument was that what we have been preoccupied with in the study of Black religion is the residue of this yearning. These doctrines, creeds, these institutions tell us something but they don't cut to the core that there's something undergirding them, there's something that motivates them that is really religion. And I could fit humanism in this because this quest for complex subjectivity doesn't require God or gods. You can have them, but they aren't required. And this worked for me for quite some time. And my effort then was to build this out. So I was in conversation with a couple of presses, and my idea was I was going to take this idea of relational centralism and terror and triumph, and build that out in conversation with popular culture. And I started working on that, but I couldn't get very far. The chapters were flowing. And I've never really experienced writer's block, but I couldn't get it done. It just was not coming together. Conversations with colleagues, friends, family, and students kind of forced me to rethink some of this. And what became evident to me is what you get in Terror and Triumph, is the ethical response to disregard, to anti-Black racism as a debt dealing enterprise. But that I hadn't really captured the theory of religion. I provided the ethical impulse. I'd misnamed this. And so interplay of things changed. It was the prequel. I had to give a sense of the theory of religion that was assumed in Terror and Triumph. As I thought this through, what became clear to me was that my understanding of religion, my theorization of religion really involved an understanding of it as a mode of interpretation, my hermeneutic. And I borrowed from Foucault that it is a technology. It's a device we use for interrogating and exploring human experience. And the vocabulary and grammar we have attached to it helps us to name certain dimensions, but these are not the only dimensions found within human experience. It is simply a hermeneutic, a tool, a method for interrogating human experience. And what this method highlights is a kind of openness, the poorest nature of things. And so in this book, I try to use the arts, literature, the visual arts, performance arts as a way of unpacking and presenting the kind of openness that this hermeneutic presents. But also, I turned to the boys and Nella Larsen and Richard Wright and Camus to get a sense of how social mechanisms seek to close off, to encourage us to privilege wholeness, fullness, to see as right boundaries. So that's what the book tries to do. That's what it attempts to explore. That's how it relates to the earlier projects. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Oh, great. Dr. Pinn, this is a really great kind of opening. And I'm wondering can you say more before we dive into the actual text, your starting point as you were trying to sort of \[? problematize ?\] religion. I'm wondering, was the issue that you were starting with the Black church and then trying to decipher from this historical creation what religion is? In other words, had you turned to, say, Du Bois' return to Zora Neale Hurston, or along in terms of the concept of Africa, would that have taken you down a different route? Because seems as if starting with the nitty-gritty of Black suffering, and trying to logistically account for Black emancipation right through laws and legislation and through religion, then necessarily force you into a project that was always prone to be very ethical and practical in that sense, which then will foreclose opportunity to actually theorize about religion. ANTHONY PINN: I don't know that that's the case. It didn't have to be the Black church. But we could take the nation of Islam and the Five Percenters, and my argument is it is an intellectual lie to assume that this is the only manifestation, that this captures everything we mean by Black religion. I start with the Black church because it dominated the conversation. And it seemed to me that if I could detangle the Black church from this basic impulse of Black religion, the rest is easier. TERRENCE JOHNSON: But we're still, I think, leaving out some of the African-derived traditions that Roberts and others point out if you focus on the Black church as this institution. ANTHONY PINN: Well, but then you-- but if you look at varieties of African-American religious experience, it's not restricted to the Black church, right? But I wrestle with these-- my argument in that book is we need a kind of common ground. What allows us to interrogate these traditions without reducing any of them to the Christian church? How do we develop a vocabulary and grammar for exploring these traditions that doesn't restrict us to the sensibilities of any one tradition? And so my argument was if you look across these traditions, if you look across African-derived traditions, if you look across all of them, it seemed to me that all of them, regardless of differences in ritual, regardless of differences in thought, all of them wrestled with the existential concern of suffering. And so for me as a theologian, this was a way into all of them that didn't require me to privilege any of them. But it wasn't-- no, I don't think I've ever restricted myself to the church. TERRENCE JOHNSON: No, that's a fair point. And so I want to move now into this idea of religion, in terms of as a way that the very process of interpretation is what is religious. So tell us more about that in terms of how that now is sort of framing your approach, particularly to art. And we'll go to a few images in a moment to think through this. ANTHONY PINN: I think, for me, one of the things that surfaced in this turn to religion as a hermeneutic and strictly as a hermeneutic is what's lost to this move? Why the resistance to this? What is it we have associated with that category of religion? What have we associated with Black religion that makes this move traumatic? So I don't have a full answer to that, but it seems to me a useful question. What have we invested in this that makes a shift away from stuff as a way to understand religion? What makes that difficult? What's lost? On some level, my concern here was a way to figure out humanism within the context of the study of Black religion because much of the early resistance I got to this was, Black people don't do this. This is not what we do. The number of AAR presentations I gave early on when I still had hair, the response was, this isn't what Black people do. Black people are not this. And it came from a variety of locations. So Preston Williams argued-- not Preston Williams. Peter Paris, my bad. Peter Paris argued this with me, that this is an imposition. This is not how Black people understand the world. That Black people are theist. The rest is an imposition. It is not us. That is just-- looking through African-American experience and looking at personalities, this was just not the case that this is embedded. Sure, you have the spirituals, but you have the blues. And don't think 1920s race records. The blues are as old as the spirituals, and they push against the theological assumptions that are made within the spirituals. Now, where the humanist? It wouldn't be fair for me to say that. But do they have a sensibility, a posture towards the world that is, in many ways, consistent with what we now call humanism? Sure enough. TERRENCE JOHNSON: So let's move to Romare Bearden. And help us think through in terms of how this piece of art is distinct from, say, what some people may call sacred, as a kind of material culture that then-- you're saying this kind of opens up possibility-- opens up the possibility not for particularly in result, but the very process of-- it's not discovery, but it's the process that unfolds to you what is religious. So let's walk through this with Romare Bearden. Why were you so drawn to his collages in particular? ANTHONY PINN: Yeah. And I was going to say that only the collage series because it seems to me there are ways in which this effort to pull pieces and make them do a different type of work and to-- what he highlights is the roughness, the tears, the unevenness. And for me, this kind of speaks to a profound sense of life as degraded, and that's a good thing. Life as degraded-- a deep awareness of messiness, of openness, of overlap. I see this within the art and it provides a way of re-imagining this. And so my thinking about Bearden, Basquiat, Angelbert Metoyer, the thinking about these folks is tied to a question by Arthur Danto that has just fascinated me for decades now. What is art? \[INAUDIBLE\] argues that pop art ends art history. It raises profound questions concerning what constitutes art. If this Brillo Box is art, what isn't art? What is art? It raises that philosophical question. It just seemed to me that within the study of Black religion, this was an important question to ask. What is Black religion? What is Black about Black religion? What is religious about Black religion? And so my looking at Basquiat, my looking at Bearden, my looking at \[? Metoyer, ?\] I kind of tied to this wrestling with this sort of question. In terms of what we put together, the ways in which we've configured life, what in this constitutes the religious? TERRENCE JOHNSON: Sure. And so-- ANTHONY PINN: Yeah. And for this, it's-- for me, it's the way in which this collage series speaks to overlap. It speaks to openness. It speaks to presence together to pull from Camus. TERRENCE JOHNSON: And so for folks who are at home saying, well, look, but what about some of the material aspects of say of either African-derived religions, whether it's divination, whether it's this idea of being sort of capturing the spirit? What's interesting about the three artists you used, they all seem to, in some ways, go back to some notion of sacred, which is not constant but is shifting. And so I'm curious in terms of how then does that push us in terms of how we understand religion, when in fact they're using the very same categories we use as intellectuals to define religion, but then in some ways, you're saying it pushes beyond Western conceptions of religion in terms of how we lock them in these categories? ANTHONY PINN: There's more than one way to understand the sacred. You can have this sense of awe and wonder, and not tie it to anything that is theistically derived. Yeah. TERRENCE JOHNSON: But if you're trying to create sort of a theory that is about openness and challenging-- some of the presuppositions of these atheistic claims-- does it matter then that folk keep going back to terms that we traditionally then define within a very theistic way? In other words, should we think about, I don't know, some other sets of categories to really dismantle the theistic code that really do allow for this humanistic project? Like soul life, for example. Soul life might give us a possibility of moving beyond certain theistic claims in terms of Du Bois that the sacred thing keeps us-- even in terms as a symbol, we keep going back to the cross or going back to the tour or going back maybe to water, things that are defined with thick religions. ANTHONY PINN: Yeah. I'd say a couple of things. That their turn to the sacred is your language. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Well, no. You mentioned this in terms of angel heart or-- ANTHONY PINN: Angelbert Metoyer. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Yes. ANTHONY PINN: Yeah. But for him, this turn to the sacred is secular. It is. Sure enough, it is. We can text him and find out, but it's-- for him, this is \[INAUDIBLE\]. TERRENCE JOHNSON: It doesn't matter what the author thinks if, in fact, the author is relying on categories that are pre-existing, that we have defined, and they carry this hegemonic kind of tone to it. ANTHONY PINN: A couple of things, brother Johnson. One, yeah, there is the need to develop an alternate vocabulary and grammar, but I resist and will always resist the assumption that simply because theists have used these categories, they are owned by theists. No. You can't have all of these. That has been my argument within-- And I spent a lot of time in humanist circles. And I think there are lots of things that humanist circles do well, like the American Humanist Association. One thing they do not do well is the ritualization of life. And part because they have surrendered so much good stuff to theists, with the assumption being theists are passionate about this language. They own it. No, you don't get to keep all of this. That these categories, some of them still function, some of them still work. I think this has been my argument, in large part, from very early on, that the category-- for me, the category of God no longer works. But some of these categories tie to the theology I was trained to do still have function. They still work so I hold on to them. Arguing against the underlying assumption that theists have used them with such poetic prowess, that they get to claim them, and no one else can use them, no. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Well, I don't believe the point. So let's look at Angelbert because-- and I do want to go back to this idea in terms of how we can appropriate language because when we talk about, say, Blackness, it seems as if we use Blackness in a very static way that signals back to the ways in which it locks us into this dread. It locks us into the Negro problem. So whether it's Afro-pessimism, whether it's, as you mentioned here, in terms of the Middle Passage writing, and thinking through that. And even these artists are then responding to anti-Blackness in very critical ways, but it's going back to the ways in which the social structures have defined it. And so then how then do we get out of that life? So if we can do it with the religion, why aren't we doing it with race? ANTHONY PINN: But here's my point, you can't get out. I mean-- TERRENCE JOHNSON: But you can get out of religious categories? ANTHONY PINN: You cannot get out of this dilemma. I made that argument with varieties. I made the argument with Terror and Triumph. And I hold on to it tenaciously here that we do not get out of this. That what we do is continuously say no to modes of injustice knowing we will not win. What Du Bois say 1962-- and we disagree on this, yeah-- but he argues-- 1962, before heading to Ghana, he writes to a friend and says, chin up, fight on, what? Knowing the Negro can't win. So this is one of the things that I find deeply compelling about Albert Camus. And I read him in relationship to Richard Wright and Nella Larsen-- think Quicksand and think Helga Crane at the end of Quicksand-- that we don't win this. Outcome-driven strategies have not been productive. That there is something of our humanity to the extent that category even makes sense in our no to injustice, but we don't win this. So getting outside of this restrictive notion of Blackness, I don't know that we do that. TERRENCE JOHNSON: I think Du Bois's Double Consciousness gives us a hint in terms of striving towards something. It's not simply the dilemma of the two-ness it's driving towards. And also what's the point of this art if we can't-- you said it's about discovery. What are we discovering? That we're not Black? That we're not-- ANTHONY PINN: Listen, what I have always said-- and it's laid out in Terror and Triumph and it moves forward, perpetual rebellion-- this is consistent with Du Bois's Striving. Perpetual rebellion. We don't win this. And so this is one of the reasons I find Afro-pessimism useful. I think it's asking the right questions. And I think it's interrogating and calling us to task on some of our assumptions. This works for me. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Sure. So let's talk about this piece here in terms of-- I may cut out life-- in terms of how this allows us for discovery, sort of the openness that you're wanting us to think and imagine. Can you say more? Because I think it's a rather compelling piece. Can you set us up what this is, what we're looking at here? ANTHONY PINN: Well, let me tell you a bit about Angelbert Metoyer in more general terms. So Angelbert Metoyer understands himself as an Afro-futurist. But an Afro-futurist who is somewhat suspicious of notions of future? And so within his work, what he's trying to call us to do-- and many of these pieces are drawn from an exhibit I curated for him at University of Texas. That was all about wrestling with what it means to be human within the context of our current circumstances-- still yearning for something that is not the circumstances. What most folks will call future. And for him, you get some sense of this by a kind of awkward placement of bodies in time and space. That this awkward placement of Black bodies in time and space raises certain questions concerning present, past, and future. And for him, this need to wrestle with the awkwardness of this placement. And what it tells us in terms of past, present, and future, kind of speaks to a sense of openness, a porousness, a vulnerability. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Sure. This is powerful. And it actually connects to a brilliant point you make towards the end around social coding. This idea that social coding imposed upon the body is not designed to entrap us, as you say. In some ways, we can use religion as a way of moving beyond the social coding potentially. Or at least the very process of interpreting social coding is what is this openness. ANTHONY PINN: Well, religion allows us-- religion is our interrogation of this. But get us beyond it? No, that's you. It doesn't get us beyond this. It just helps-- it's a mechanism for interrogating human experience. And it points out this openness that social regulations and social codes and social practices seek to close off. But the book ends with this turn to Du Bois, Richard Wright, Nella Larsen, and Camus. The idea again being we struggle against this effort to close things off, but we are unsuccessful. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Sure. And you close with this idea-- again, almost like an ethical turn. You return back to the psychosocial ethical, correct? ANTHONY PINN: Mm-hmm. TERRENCE JOHNSON: But before we get there-- and I want to open this up to the audience as well-- I just want to go through two other pieces here I found very fascinating, in terms of-- can you set up Yoko Ono for the audience and then explain this piece here? ANTHONY PINN: Yeah. So this is from the chapter on human waste. I don't know what kind of language I can use. So basically, this is the chapter that looks at how shit functions within the context of art, and what this tells us about bodies as open, as porous, as penetrated. And so I talk about Yoko Ono's work in relationship to the cover of a Rolling Stones album-- a cover that was rejected by the label, that shows a well-worn and stained toilet. And so, for me, what I was trying to understand with this is again, another example of how bodies are open, their pores. And how this gets played out in terms of not only what goes in bodies, but what we make of those substances that come out of bodies. And I'm kind of drawn to theorists who argue that there are segments of our population-- there are segments of our population-- the marginalized-- who for the context of this country, have become shit. So how do we wrestle with this? Not necessarily resolve it, but highlight it, make it visible, and wrestle with it. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Sure. And would you say this type of wrestling-- I mean, could one argue that Du Bois and others and Ida B. Wells wrestled with the same thing in terms of the context of lynching? Right wrestling with that image, with the smell, with that living kind of memory? ANTHONY PINN: Sure. You were looking for a longer answer to that. TERRENCE JOHNSON: No, but-- so, in other words, I see the connection. And also I want to clarify the terms. I think it's a really interesting intervention you're making in terms of how to use or how to think about Black religion as very central to this not really theorizing, but this kind of a cultural assemblage, as you called it, in terms of helping us make those connections for us. ANTHONY PINN: And there are other ways in which the body is brutalized. So someone I found deeply compelling is Ron Anthony. And Ron Anthony is a performance artist who grows up in a Pentecostal environment. He's a child preacher, Pentecostal. And through performance art, rather brutal and bloody performance art. He's working through these-- he's working through Pentecostal theology in a way that is deeply embodied. And for me, that is extremely compelling. What is really-- we often do this sort of work in a way that is sanitized and safe. But here you have this performance artist who is wrestling with these theological categories in a way that is disturbing, that is violent, that is messy. And something about that, for me, is just deeply compelling. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Sure. ANTHONY PINN: And I think there are ways in which this plays out in, take, Black theology. That Black theology has done this work. It has explored and explained Black misery, but in a way that is somewhat abstract and safe. And for my mind, in a way that often involves nobody. So there are some-- I'll take Kelly Brown Douglas, for example, who works against this, but it strikes me that Black liberation theology and womanist theology, in more general terms, has worked on the Black body in a way that disembodies it. And so Christology-- if you argue that Black theology has been an extended Christology, this is a Jesus without a penis. So we wrestle with Jesus without full awareness of and sensitivity to Jesus' presence in the world. Jesus had a penis. And the question becomes-- a theological question becomes, what did Jesus do with this penis? Who was pleasured by it? And these are not questions that we typically ask within the context of Black theological studies, which it seems to me, for a mode of conversation that understands itself as being deeply connected to the church, has done a disservice. This conversation has not enlivened and produced a mature understanding of \[? bodyment ?\] pleasure in the erotic within the context of the churches that it says it's all about. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Sure. And so does this then lead to this idea that you said, look, sort of the thing things and the naming things are, in some ways, prevent or lead to a certain kind of openness. But also this idea of the thickness of the Black church that you're trying to return to. ANTHONY PINN: Well, also, I want to argue that the proper posture for Black religious studies in particular and religious studies in general terms, that the proper posture involves an embrace of discomfort. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Sure. But then that openness that you called for, which I think is really powerful-- ANTHONY PINN: I'm not calling for it. I'm saying that it's there, that this is what-- that's what this hermeneutic surface is. TERRENCE JOHNSON: And does this openness then, in any way, erase Black suffering or create a kind of bad faith? And I know you try to account for that with the grotesque, but is there a way-- how then do we not fall into the trap of our openness just to sit with the artwork, that we don't potentially fall asleep \[INAUDIBLE\]. ANTHONY PINN: Because this openness is fought. That we live within the context of a social world that works hella hard to close off this openness, that seeks boundaries. And so you mentioned lynchings. And it seems to me that on one level, this is a ritual of reference that involves a deep effort to close off, to constitute boundary. TERRENCE JOHNSON: And yet the very institutions you've studied have always transgressed the very boundaries that were put upon them. ANTHONY PINN: I don't know that that's the case. And I'm not throwing shade at the Black church. But if you think about the Black church, there are ways in which it has done the issue of race well. So in terms of openness, it has tried to maintain a kind of openness, a porousness with respect to race. But it has done an embarrassingly poor job with respect to issues of gender, class, and the list goes on. So I don't know that these-- and so I cannot say that with you that these institutions have been about that business. But again, my argument is this isn't a battle we win. TERRENCE JOHNSON: But I'm also thinking in terms of at the lived experience of religion. I think of our colleague, Tracey Hucks, in terms of folks who say I'm Yoruba Baptist, preachers who are also diviners, or the AME preachers who are also hanging out with Marcus Garvey. ANTHONY PINN: A different issue. Dr. Hucks, see how we trying to pull you in. See how we're trying to pull you in. That's a different issue. My argument isn't that there isn't messiness and overlap in terms of-- TERRENCE JOHNSON: It is more than messiness, though, but it speaks-- ANTHONY PINN: But this is a different issue. TERRENCE JOHNSON: OK, how is it different? ANTHONY PINN: Because-- TERRENCE JOHNSON: Because speaks of the openness of the very lived experience. In other words, I think we read certain aspects, either of conjure or Black church, in a very sort of static way, assuming that what people articulate resembles how they behave, which is often not the case. ANTHONY PINN: So many people have done that. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Well, by not naming those traditions as a part of being-- that allow for the openness that you want to call for in the interplay, it seems as if you're denying that those traditions or those possibilities-- ANTHONY PINN: That would be the case if I hadn't written Varieties or Tear and Triumph. TERRENCE JOHNSON: But this seems that you-- ANTHONY PINN: But to the stats I have-- TERRENCE JOHNSON: This seems a rebuke or at least challenge with your reference-- ANTHONY PINN: No, man, this a different context. This is the theoretical project. No, it doesn't do that at all. TERRENCE JOHNSON: You said it changes how the rituals are referenced. That rituals are referenced for-- limited to the body. The ways in which we looked at the body. And now you want to open it up. ANTHONY PINN: I'm not trying to open it up. I'm saying that this hermeneutic, when applied, demonstrates this openness that social code, social mechanism, and categories seek to close off. I'm not trying to win today. I'm simply saying, this is what this hermeneutic surface is. What you get is an effort to close that off. I'm curious and intrigued by the look of that effort. That's all. I'm interested in exploring and seeing the look of that effort to both maintain openness and to close off. TERRENCE JOHNSON: And with the maintaining of openness, there's no-- tell us. There's no-- you're not looking for a result. You just want to examine. ANTHONY PINN: The openness is the win, to the extent it remains. But no. Remember, for me, this is the rebellion is perpetual. This does not end. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. This understanding from Camus works for me. Why do I turn to art? On one level because I agree with Camus that if we had all the answers, we would not need art. Secondly, that art both affirms and denies. That it speaks a word, and at the very same time, negates that assertion. I find that compelling. TERRENCE JOHNSON: What a powerful way, I think, to end this part of the conversation. \[APPLAUSE\] Let's give him a round of applause. \[APPLAUSE\] And I want to-- ANTHONY PINN: We'll continue that later. TERRENCE JOHNSON: Yeah. And I want to thank Dr. Pinn for the liveliness of the conversation. I've admired his work for over 25 years, and so I appreciate your honesty and depth. So now I want to open it up. You may type in questions in the chat room. And open up to our in-person audience. Oh, yes, sir. Professor Jacob Olupona. JACOB OLUPONA: Yeah. Thank you. ANTHONY PINN: Hello, sir. JACOB OLUPONA: Thank you for coming to Divinity School and Terrence for organizing this very, very stimulating conversation. Hopefully, we'll be able to have more of this. We can only comment on your work we have read. This is not-- this is new. This is just coming in. But I like to raise a couple of questions which would be in responses to some of the issues you also raised. I'm surprised to hear that you say that Black religion or Black theology is on under-theorized. What I'm hearing looks like an African Proverbs who compares a old man with those ancient agbadas and \[INAUDIBLE\] that are no longer available in the \[INAUDIBLE\] period. And the younger ones who are, you know, blowing the more modern one and the Africans who say that the younger one may have more clothes that look flamboyant and good, but they are not as ancient as the old ones. You know, what I'm trying to say is that Cone also theorized Black theology in his own way and responded to questions and issues of the time to such an extent that his work now became even a model for South Africa and Black theology. So I think it's very important that we put things in context. Yes, a number of them fail to talk about gender, just as civil today they would accuse some African scholars of not discussing sexuality. So things have changed. That is the work of religion, ever responding to changing situation and existential concerns that lead us to this enterprise in the first instance. So I would like to see that in context. The second has to do with this notion of Black church. I keep hearing about the limitation of the word Black church, Black church. It seems to me that if you take that church in a sociological term as \[? trollish, ?\] as extended, which is a body of community, of faith that believes in certain things, that practice certain things-- so the \[? woman ?\] itself may be a church in the sociological context. Maybe that will help us to have a better understanding of the kinds of varieties of Black religious experience that you are talking about. It has to do with, quote, unquote, as an African myself, the word "Black," quote, unquote, I think we need to theorize it a little bit. So thank you very much. I mean, you have stimulated us to think about some of these issues that we have been trying to struggle with. So I'm really, really appreciative of your contribution. ANTHONY B. PINN: Well, thank you for that. We still have to figure out a time to have coffee and we can chop this up some. TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: \[LAUGHS\] ANTHONY B. PINN: I think where I would disagree with you in terms of Cone is on this. I think if you look at the first two books and then skip to God of the oppressed, what you get is Cone doing methodological work, right? He's providing a methodological map. I don't think he theorizes the categories that-- I'm hard-pressed to see within Cone, for example, a clear-- a kind of clear and explicit theorizing of Black religion. AUDIENCE: What is theory? ANTHONY B. PINN: Theory-- so this is the way I understand it. Method is how you handle the issue. Theory is how you wrap your mind around it. And Cone assumes that if you name Black church, you have named Black religion. I'm hard-pressed to see in these volumes any attention to doing more than that. Methodologically, yes, he has helped generations internationally figure out how to do Black theology. But for me, that is not the same as saying he has theorized. In terms of the Black church, my argument has been from the very beginning that there's an inconsistency between what Black churches claim and what they do. And I have simply tried to point that out, right? And to get folks who are committed to the Black church as the central mechanism for uplift within Black communities to hold the Black church accountable for being more consistent, to having greater continuity between what it claims and what it actually does. AUDIENCE: Thank you. TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Yes, Janet? AUDIENCE: Just to push one thing a little further, that maybe what Terrence was trying to get at, or maybe it's just my own question, but to the degree that you name this openness-- and I understand that for you, openness also means, well, lack of closure, lack of expectation of closure, recognition that things are not going to be one, that we're not-- it's not going to be all perfected and ideal, and it's actually staying with the real messy situation. To the degree that you are theorizing that and you are naming that, and that people somehow incorporate or understand or embody those principles, is there something liberatory about that? In other words, no, it's not going to take us to this promised land where everything is 100% fixed and closed and perfect, but is there something-- is there something helpful or useful simply to stay situated in that place of being able to tolerate and work with that openness? I mean, that's the kind of thing that I would want to press. I'm wondering whether that's what you would agree to something like that as well. And I'm not coming out of Black religion. You know, I'm coming out of other sources, but I think it's friendly towards the things that you're saying. ANTHONY B. PINN: So there are certain categories that no longer function for me. So I don't talk in terms of hope. I don't talk in terms of future. I'm troubled by the category of liberation. What I will say is this effort on the part of folks, however they name their community, the effort on this part of folks helps to keep real the persistence of possibility. I'm not quite certain how to name it beyond that. I'm uncomfortable trying to name it beyond that. But I think the effort to maintain openness, to say-- saying no to boundaries keeps alive the persistence of possibility. And for me, if there is something that constitutes a win, that's it. AUDIENCE: And that's a positive. You don't want to use the word positive. \[LAUGHS\] ANTHONY B. PINN: I don't know what I'd gain with it. AUDIENCE: OK. ANTHONY B. PINN: Right? Because I also want to be-- and again, one of the things I find so compelling about Camus is the humility of thought, right? The idea that our assertions have to be negated. This is one of the reasons he can't really get with the existentialist, right? He is not an existentialist, that there is a kind of certainty with the existentialists that troubles him, that our affirmations have to be negated. I find that deeply compelling, and I try to make use of that posture. So I-- which accounts for some of my discomfort with these categories. AUDIENCE: I'm still holding the mic here, so I don't know-- I could press you further, but I-- \[LAUGHTER\] TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: We have a question over here to the right. ANTHONY B. PINN: \[INAUDIBLE\]? Ah. TERRENCE JOHNSON: That's \[INAUDIBLE\]. ANTHONY PINN: It may be \[INAUDIBLE\]. AUDIENCE: Thank you. I hope this question is relevant. \[LAUGHS\] So my name is Aaliyah Collins. I actually heard you speak before. I went to Fisk University for undergrad and I was a Mellon fellow, and you spoke at our keynote address at Rice. ANTHONY B. PINN: Ah! AUDIENCE: So I do remember you from there. And then I also know Reverend Dr. Jason Curry. He was one of my mentors when I was at Fisk, so he talks about you a lot. ANTHONY B. PINN: I saw him recently. AUDIENCE: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I feel like this conversation is really timely. It's something I've also been thinking about. So over the summer-- so I study pan-Africanism, and so over the summer I heard a lot of scholars or activists talking about-- so there was a pan-African scholar who was a nationalist, another one who was a socialist, but they both agreed on the fact that they were atheist. And so they kind of went through all of these reasons of why religion was bad from Islam and Christianity all the way to African traditional religion of how this was kind of like an obstacle in terms of Black liberation. And I think what both of them were missing is that they weren't thinking about spirituality more broadly, kind of where I feel like more of what you are getting to. But I'm thinking about when it comes to building community, when it comes to organizing and building towards some kind of political agenda or just sort of building community with people who are faith-based and who people are humanist or who believe in other different things but also within Black community, what can humanism teach us in terms of how to build community with people who belong to a faith tradition, who don't belong to a container or institutionalized faith tradition, if that makes sense? ANTHONY B. PINN: Well, thank you for that. I think on one level, humanism at its best offers those who are not theistically inclined a soft place to land. And I think this is what humanism in general has not done well. It has not offered people a soft place to land. It has assumed that a belittling and a critique of theism was sufficient. But folks need a soft place to land. Life is hard, and there are issues we encounter that produce trauma. How do you help folks understand and move through that? I think one of the things that is missing is real and genuine conversation between Black theists and Black humanists, that we haven't learned to talk together. But one thing is for sure. Developing connections that are robust and affirming is a better process than us going at this alone. But we've got to learn how to communicate together. So I'm trying to learn how to do this, yeah? That much of my early work is really kind of confrontational, and I will admit that, right? It's confrontational. But in part, I'm trying to carve out a space. But now I'm trying to figure out how to communicate in a way that allows me to maintain the integrity of my system, but hear and recognize what is compelling about the others' system. So I'm working on a project with Brad Braxton, new President of Chicago Theological Seminary. It's a collection of conversations we had using email over the course of COVID, and it will come out this coming summer. And what we're trying to do is model conversation that is rigorous, that is respectful, but that holds no punches, right? And I think this is one of the things that's missing. What can humanism offer? One, it offers a renewed sense that we are our best option. It privileges and it celebrates horizontal relationships, and it recognizes that there is something about human effort that is of fundamental importance here. It also provides a way to embrace failure. It provides a way of rethinking discomfort. For my mind, another value in humanism with respect to social justice movements is the way in which it de-centers outcome-driven strategies and privileges process. I sense some of that in Black Lives Matter, that process matters. Less outcome-driven strategies, right? And so for me, this is one of the distinctions. This is one of the difference is between the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter, a preoccupation with process and more complex agenda, but a recognition that failure is not the end. Failure is an opportunity. But first, we've got to learn how to talk together. TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: That's a great response. Oh, please, Dean. Please. AUDIENCE: I'm struggling for an intelligent question. I really enjoyed the conversation a lot. I guess what I'm struggling for is a sense of what the ultimate goal is of your enterprise. You know, whether it's to dismantle the certainties and failure to deliver of the Black church, or whether the project is really to somehow drive to the center of human subjectivity outside religious categories. And that therefore, you're using any way, any technology, any technique to poke around at that. I mean, it reminds me a little bit of-- we grew up in a very different contexts, but an early book I read, which transformed the way people thought about things-- and there was at least five people read it. \[LAUGHS\] My mother and two others. No, I'm joking about that. But it was an attempt to try and get at the heart of-- it was a debate back in European religion those days of what popular religion was and how you could interrogate it outside the beliefs and institutions and rituals, and so on. And then one way of doing that for me was to try and look at many, many different kinds of sources. So it was oral history projects, literature, art, you know, especially trying to get to rural popular religion, which had a very different set of connections to the land and to the Earth and to warding off demons and bad luck, and so on and so on. So the point of that I think was to try and get at, what's going on here? And what sources will help? But the aim of it I think was relatively clear-cut to try and get at the heart of, what was going on in these relatively humble people's lives, especially in rural environments that clearly institutional churches were by-- nothing much to do with it? So I guess, you know, to come back to the framing of the question. That's my question, really. Is the ultimate aim to really penetrate as far as one can to human subjectivity around these eternal kinds of questions or thoughts? Or is it to-- or is it both, to also poke around at the way in which the Black church constructs, set up boundaries that make it difficult for you to do that work? Or is it a bit of both? Or is that even an intelligent way of thinking about it? ANTHONY B. PINN: Thank you. Brother Johnson keeps trying to pull me back to the church. TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: \[LAUGHS\] ANTHONY B. PINN: But for me, my goal is rather simple, to enhance awareness and lucidity, to enhance our awareness of our circumstances. For me, that is it. To enhance our awareness of our circumstances. That's all I can do. AUDIENCE: So I guess what I'm struggling for is to see, does that relate to any religious categories at all, or would you rather just be done with those and start from different kinds of principles to get at that? In other words, all of this religious stuff is simply a set of false-- it's a railway track with many tracks, all of which go nowhere. And therefore, it's better to start from a different train station altogether. ANTHONY B. PINN: I think some of the vocabulary and grammar should remain. It still has utility. We hold on to that. There are other elements that don't. But the fundamental question is, what are we willing to give up in order to develop greater awareness of our circumstances? What are we willing to give up in order to produce that? So again, some of what we've traditionally called religion, some of this, sure, it should remain. Other elements of it really need to go away. But again, I understand my contribution to this to really involve developing a mechanism that allows for a greater understanding of where we are in this process, what we're facing, what we are encountering. TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: And I wonder if Black death forces us to make certain changes. I wonder if we're not always observing. But-- ANTHONY B. PINN: What do you mean by Black death? Oh, but you said-- TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: There's a question here, so I'm going to go back to this. Our colleague, Professor Raymond Carr, who's a Visiting Scholar at HDS for this academic year, we'd like to welcome you and thank you for the question. It reads, it seems to me that Dr. Pinn is criticizing abstractness in Black theology and hiding behind a kind of abstract modality of exploration at the same time. Does he acknowledge that Cone's Black theology in its affirmation of sex in the Black spirituals and in other Black music understood as secular spirituals represents a mythological response to Black religion? I notice, for instance, that he did not mention Cone's book, The Spirituals and the Blues, in his reference to methodology. ANTHONY B. PINN: Well, again, I will admit that what Cone offers us is really insightful conversation concerning method. But saying that doesn't mean that Cone has offered us something as substantive in terms of theory. Yeah. But again, my argument would be those first two books and then God of the Oppressed are the more robust treatments in terms of method. Spiritual in the Blues is responding to Gayraud Wilmore and his brother Cecil Cone who were saying, all you've done is given us this stuff. You've given us European theological categories and you painted them Black. What about Black cultural resource? So within that slim volume, he's toying with Black cultural resources for the development of a Black theology. This is methodological work. And I have acknowledged that several times now. TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Yes, Phil? AUDIENCE: First of all, thank you so much for coming and this incredible discussion, Dr. Pinn. And I was wondering if you could talk about the class you pioneered at Rice, Black Lives Matter in a Religion, and how the students are receiving that and how they're having discussions with you. ANTHONY B. PINN: Oh, see, I thought you were going to mention religion and hip-hop culture, but that's OK. TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: \[LAUGHS\] ANTHONY B. PINN: Yeah, so for me, it has always been the case for me that at Rice we had an opportunity to rethink education, that we needed a very different relationship to the larger city of Houston than was traditionally the case, that much of Rice's work within the larger city of Houston was premised on a missionary impulse. We have all of this wonderful stuff, and now we're going to give you some of it. And for me, that was just wrong that there is a wealth of know-how, of knowledge, of capacity within the larger Houston community that ought to be brought to bear on anything we call a Rice education. That one of the unique elements of a Rice education ought to be the ways in which students get to interact and be informed and influenced by this wonderful city. And so my students were wrestling with Black Lives Matter. What to make of this, right? How to think about this. And I had a couple of graduate students who were involved in the Houston dimension of that movement who are trying to make sense of their academic study and the demands of community. And this is-- oh, folks have mentioned James Cone, and James Cone is wrestling with this, yeah? He thinks about dropping out of PhD training and being about the business, and realized you can actually do both. And so I had to figure out a way to be useful to my undergraduates and my graduate students, to give them a space in which to wrestle with these issues. But it had to be done differently. That for me, it was an opportunity to rethink pedagogy, that we needed to not only talk about Black Lives Matter, but I needed to be informed and influenced by this movement that rejects a kind of traditional hierarchy. So the classroom had to be different. And so I worked initially with two of my graduate students, one who is now at Virginia Union University and the other's at Colgate University, and said, OK, we're going to map this together. But by the way, we are not in charge of this course. The students are in charge. Now of course, I've got to put something together, but that syllabus is negotiable, that students will determine what matters here. They will determine what the most substantial elements of that course are. They will determine how things get graded. Might that-- I won't, and you won't. We had to privilege conversation. I could not talk at the students. My graduate students could not talk at the students. We had to talk together. And I had to kind of figure out, how do we do this in a way in terms of physical space and conversation that is true to this alternate model? I also wanted-- I thought it was important to move away from the traditional markers of success. So no long paper at the end, no test. What we did was this. One of the centers I directed at that point, the Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning, gifted the class every time it was taught $5,000. And the students were to come up with ways to bring what they were learning in the classroom to the larger public, and everything they programmed had to be available to everybody who wanted to participate. I was willing to make introductions for them if they wanted to bring in speakers, but that was it. They had to plan this thing out. Not the graduate students, not me. They had to do this. Whatever they decided to do with that money, however they decided to represent what they had learned during that semester, I had to be good with. And I tell you, it was hard. \[LAUGHS\] This is my classroom, right? I've at least suddenly come to understand that I am responsible for this. I give them something. I am opposed to the banking model, but I give them something. So it was hard to reevaluate that, to release control and recognize that we are. We're learning this stuff together, learning it together. But it has-- it's gone well. And my commitment to the students has been the course will be taught every year I teach for as long as it is necessary, right? For as long as the course is relevant, it will be taught. TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: That's a great response. I wonder, can you say more about in terms of really wrestling with categories that emerge in Black religion writ large? And so in thinking about how this openness either aligns with it or you're pushing against it. So I'm thinking of-- you know, Cornel West says, look, if we want to understand what genius looks like in terms of Black life, we look to Black preaching, look to jazz in part because of the internal mechanisms through which Black folk defined it outside the normative white gaze. For Toni Morrison, it's about the assumption that, well, I am already at the center, right? And now trying to translate for people. So I'm curious in terms of, what do categories, say, like the double consciousness or even The Talking Book, for example, how do-- I think-- how do those categories actually in some ways speak to what you're saying? Maybe we'll push further because with The Talking Book in particular in terms of Allen Callahan, there's this notion of which the slave did not imagine the text as being whole at all. It was simply an encounter that was dialogical. One literally tried to hear and sit and listen and respond. And from that then, they began to digest, reframe, rethink, and sometimes just sit, right? Because maybe the answers weren't presented, but they were-- in other words, they're using the Bible as a kind of art, right? That they engage. How might the Talking Book, for example, or even double consciousness push this idea of openness? Because with these categories we see how it's both rooted in history, but still giving people the possibility of challenging these thick categories of Blackness, right? Which seem to always overshadow our ability to be open because structures keep us locked in this state of degradation. ANTHONY B. PINN: Yeah, I think there's something to be said not only for Allen Callahan's take on this, but also Vincent Wimbush's more recent work. But yeah, the interpretation of scripture on the part of our ancestors at its best might be understood as an effort to maintain openness. I have no problem with that. No problem whatsoever. In terms of Du Bois, double consciousness, that's you. I mean, I prefer the category of the problem soul, right? This is the way I would frame it. And it seems to me that what you get with Du Bois, if you look at Souls of Black Folk, and you look at Dusk of Dawn, if you look at Souls of White Folk, if you look at these materials, you get a sense of incompleteness. You get a sense of project as unfinished. TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Sure. ANTHONY B. PINN: And I'd tie into that what you get with "The Coming of John." There's an incompleteness there, that there is a terror and there is a tragedy that is already and always. That I find compelling. And that tragedy that is already and always that Du Bois is helping us to understand is the social world's effort to close off openness. TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Sure. Sure. Yeah, I agree. And the genius of the slave to piece together these different fragments of life, to make sense of these categories, but also to in some ways, I think, implicitly lend themselves to this openness. Because again, I don't think double consciousness is about ending at one place. You're constantly striving. It's that ongoing struggle that you talk about in terms of the struggle for freedom. ANTHONY B. PINN: Yeah, but that's the category that animates your work. It's not me so much, right? That I'd move in a different direction with Du Bois. But I get what you're saying. I think on some level we're here. TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: \[LAUGHS\] Any other questions from the audience? Oh, sorry \[INAUDIBLE\]. Yes, it looks like we have a colleague, Tracey Robertson Carter. Dr. Pinn, thank you for this timely conversation. I look forward to reading your book. Let's see. What's the question? Is this idea-- I'm an enthusiastic and social justice activist who works in and supports the arts as a catalyst for social change. I'm drawn to your statement, quote, "the art both affirms and denies that it speaks to the world and at the very same time negates that assumption." Contemporary artists like Kehinde Wiley, Wangechi Mutu, and others speak to this. Could you say-- could you please share other contemporary artists that you follow and why? I guess as it relates to how art both affirms and denies. ANTHONY B. PINN: So more recently, I've been spending time in conversation with Houston-based artists. And so one that I've been in conversation with is Jamal Cyrus. And Jamal Cyrus, one of the things I find fascinating about him is the way in which he uses place to trouble categories. So there's an installation that involves remnants of a jazz club that used to be in Houston, situated in relationship to but over against a church-based reality, right? Church pew with the hymnals. And for him, this is a way of working to bring into the orbit of conversation what he understands as these diametrically opposed orientations, and I find that compelling. There's another, Lanecia Tinsley, Houston-based but splits her time between Richmond and Houston, who helps us to kind of re-imagine civil rights moments. And rather than pulling out kind of grand development, she's more preoccupied with everyday manifestations of resistance, right? What is the nature of rebellion lodged within play? I think that's fabulous. TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: That's amazing. Any other questions before we close? Great. Well, let's give Dr. Pinn another round of applause. ANTHONY B. PINN: Thank you all. \[APPLAUSE\] TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: And we want to thank you again for coming out. We're very thankful for Dr. Pinn, but also to the Office of Academic Affairs and to our IT colleagues for helping pull this off. Have a good night, everyone. \[APPLAUSE\] \[MUSIC PLAYING\] SPEAKER 3: Sponsor, Professor Terrence L. Johnson. SPEAKER 4: Copyright 2022, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.