Engaging New Ideas: A Conversation with Harvard Theological Review's New Co-editor Terrence Johnson
For 115 years, Harvard Theological Review has been at the forefront of theological scholarship. HTR is one of the longest-standing theological journals in America and serves as a forum for the ever-evolving study of religion. Published by Cambridge University Press, the quarterly Review issues can be found both online and along the shelves of thousands of libraries across the globe.
This past summer, the journal’s editorial team welcomed Terrence L. Johnson, Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School, as the co-editor of HTR. The Harvard Divinity School alumnus (MDiv ’00) is a fairly new addition to HDS, having joined the faculty only a year earlier, in July 2022. Johnson will work alongside Giovanni Bazzana, Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion and Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies at HDS, who has served as the editor of HTR since 2020.
In the following interview, Johnson explains his academic interests, changing times in theological and religious studies, and how he sees the journal reflecting these changes under his co-editorship and beyond.
HDS: Can you briefly describe your research interests and how they relate to your new role with Harvard Theological Review?
TLJ: My background is very interdisciplinary in nature. In a nutshell, my primary interests are in African-American religious studies, political theory, and ethics. I attempt to raise new questions in debates on religion and politics based on my historical examination of key thinkers within Black thought.
At Harvard Divinity School, I studied with a range of thinkers—from Sarah Coakley and David Lamberth to Cornel West, Leila Ahmed, and Karen King—and I established a deep interest in theology and the philosophy of religion. While at Brown for my PhD, my interests grew tremendously in Africana philosophy, ethics, and political theory, as well as thinking about political liberalism in the context of religion and African American religious studies. There, I was provided with a rich interplay of great thinkers, sources, and questions about human flourishing, which led me to be captivated by questions of how we understand the divine through tradition, practices, and habits; how social structures reinforce our understanding of the divine and normative beliefs and commitments; and how issues around race, anti-Blackness, and misogyny play into this understanding. These all help frame who I am as a thinker. My interest in this idea of how we create and sustain new knowledge undergirds my own research, my pedagogy, and the way I engage with life outside the academy. This all played into why I decided to work with Giovanni—to contribute to the curation of knowledge within HTR.
I co-founded a series at Duke called Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People and a series at Georgetown University Press called Race, Religion, and Politics. In part, I took on those ventures because I wanted to make sure that there were enough resources for people who are producing the sort of new work in religion that historically has been overlooked and rejected by the academy. Even 20 years ago, most presses were thinking about African-American religion in strict terms of Anglo-theology and American Christianity. The work I've tried to do is to say, look, there are many more traditions besides Christianity within African American religious traditions that need exposure. The ways in which African Americans have grappled with religion and religious ideals have been overlooked and compartmentalized into one category of this either/or binary. I really want my work, especially my work with authors and students, to grapple with the varying ways we can retrieve buried norms and traditions to create new knowledge and resources for understanding human existence. It's very easy to point out the problems that are preventing us from doing this new research or engaging new questions, but I try to engage the world by determining in community how best to solve the problems at hand.
HDS: What about the Review inspired you to join Prof. Giovanni Bazzana as a co-editor? Is there anything in particular that you are looking forward to while working alongside him?
TLJ: When Giovanni approached me about coming on board and working with him on the journal, I grew really excited in part because, as an alum, it's always important to find meaningful ways to give back. This is an important journal with a wide reach, and it's an honor to sit as the co-editor with Giovanni.
I also wanted to work with him to figure out how we can ensure the journal’s longevity by continuing to engage new ideas and theoretical approaches to the study of religion. We want to connect with these new ideas and new ways of thinking about religion for the sake of improving scholarly approaches to the study of religion.
It's so important to find ways to collaborate. Particularly at the Divinity School, many of us are textual and philosophical creatures who don't often find easy ways to collaborate with our colleagues. Giovanni is incredibly intelligent and gifted, and I'm interested in figuring out how we can collaborate in ways that benefit our own research, the Divinity School, and the broader community. I would say that this was really the prime attraction: working with a colleague who is interested in the history of the journal, but also deeply committed to finding creative ways to expand it. When I was a student at HDS, my friends and I would often read the journal to find out what was happening in the field, but we read it as if it had dropped from the heavens. I never imagined I would ever, ever co-edit the journal.
HDS: Since its founding in 1908, HTR has historically been at the forefront of the scholarly pursuit of theological studies. How have you seen the journal evolve in recent years? Do you foresee it continuing to change with yourself as co-editor?
TLJ: We are still trying to figure out new directions and themes to explore, but clearly, we want to show our readers that we are equally as committed to the New Testament and Judaism as we are to areas such as Africana religions, contemporary debates on religion and law, and textual criticisms within Islam. We want to reflect the multireligious diversity that we have embraced at the Divinity School and find ways to attend to new methods and questions that are being raised alongside ongoing concerns around scripture, systematic theology, and other areas that we have been rooted in historically. Finding ways to mend these with new approaches is critical and something we are anxious to pursue. Of course, this will take time; because we publish quarterly, I suspect we won't fully see the fruits of our work for several years.
HDS: On the inside cover of previous issues of HTR, there is a blurb that states,
“The scope of the Review embraces history and philosophy of religious thought in all traditions and periods — including the areas of Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Christianity, Jewish studies, theology, ethics, archaeology, and comparative religious studies.”
Are there plans for the journal to expand further into religious scholarship beyond the aforementioned Judeo-Christian traditions?
TLJ: When working collaboratively, we strive to ensure that we don't simply remake the journal in our image, but rather deepen and expand the journal so it reflects the debates and conversations happening in the field. I suspect that we will change the blurb, in part due to our deep commitment to thinking about religion through a multireligious lens, beyond the traditional Judeo-Christian framework.
I've been playing a role in terms of soliciting new writers for the journal and expanding our review process. As we think about expanding the reach of the journal, part of the issue is convincing new scholars to review journal articles. There are so many steps in this expansion, but we are trying to ensure that we truly reflect the best of how we study religion at this current moment.
We do recognize that we have limits in terms of our reach and the degree to which we can be successful if we are all things to everyone. Still, I think we will remain committed to our historical strengths broadly construed in philosophy of religion, textual analysis, and theology and archaeology. We have a lot of work to think through, but I think over time, you will see the fruits of our labor.
HDS: With changing times, the field of theological studies is delving much more deeply into waters than, historically, HTR might have waded (such as alternative spiritualities, gender and sexuality studies, racial and social justice, etc.). Is this changing under your co-leadership with Prof. Bazzana?
TLJ: As we think about expanding the journal, it is critical to ensure that there are core questions that we keep in mind that speak to these new concerns, but also point to the traditions that we are grappling with. Part of that must involve bringing in the questions raised by our graduate students, in varying ways to the conversations we are having at HTR. I'm convinced that our graduate students are the ones who will keep our ideas alive; they often bring new questions to the classroom and force us to see texts and examine perennial debates in very different ways. Experimentally, I engage students in my courses with my own developing scholarship to encourage their feedback and to normalize critical dialogue. Moving forward with the journal, we want to increase student involvement, such as adding student interns beyond our current doctoral student workers.
HDS: Academic journals are shifting more and more to publishing articles with full open access. What is HTR’s practice around that?
TLJ: Before we think about paywalls, I want us to grapple with who we are as intentional thinkers managing the journal. What do we want from our readers? The answer to this today is not the same as, say, maybe 15 years ago. Everything's changing so rapidly. We are concerned with how we produce a product that is as rigorous as our standards have been over the years and yet recognize the new ways scholars and students consume knowledge.
Now it's a matter of how we can make the journal a bit more coherent and concise so that students, alumnx, and people outside of the Divinity School can access new information. We are rapidly moving away from the model I embraced 20 years ago in graduate school; when I was in grad school, you wrote a journal article because you needed to have it approved by your colleagues. You were really concerned about knowledge within the confines of the academy, and if you ventured beyond that, people were skeptical of you in terms of what you wanted from this enterprise. Now, that particular concern has become problematic; part of how we're trying to reimagine the journal stems from our trying to imagine who we are as intellectuals, scholars, and teachers in light of all the rapid technological changes that we're facing.
I want to see our co-editorship reflect the concerns of the field and the questions that haunt us: Are there core principles and concerns of the journal that reflect the vision of multi-religious divinity schools like HDS that we can actually address? It's not about creating a static strategy but allowing the journal to grow in ways that will unfold into something that we have not defined or imagined. What unfolds should reflect deep questioning, nuanced interventions, and all the guiding principles that, I think, distinguish HDS from other schools.
HDS: How has your experience as an alum of Harvard Divinity School shaped your leadership approach to Harvard Theological Review?
TLJ: Harvard Divinity School was an incredible place to discover, to ask questions, to dive into areas that I never thought to consider. To spend time in a place like Widener Library and discover the bounty of knowledge before me was extremely overwhelming yet reinforced in very subtle ways the idea of intellectual engagement as a vocation.
My experience at HDS allowed me to go beyond traditional intellectual borders and to bring in new conversation partners to debates that had been going on for generations in African American religions. With that backdrop, I approach the journal as an opportunity to learn from the entire editorial staff, and as we talk with each other about the pros and cons of publishing one essay versus another, our collective vision will unfold. We can't engage everyone in the day-to-day activities of the journal, but we want to ensure that our community is proud of the product we produce.
Lastly, this is a bit trickier: How do we then think about the journal's relationship to communities beyond the academy? We're just beginning those conversations. They're very much in infancy form, but I suspect they will gain traction over time as we try to figure out the best way to imagine what the community might look like and determine how we can best approach it. Maybe we can start by thinking about our ministerial alumnx and produce a special print or web issue of current themes in ministerial studies across traditions. Those are the things that we're contemplating.
HDS: In the past, Harvard Theological Review has published occasional thematic issues or issues centered on themes coming out of conferences. Are there any plans to return to that model?
TLJ: Yes, there is a plan to bring it back. We haven't discussed them all, but there is one in particular in the works: My colleague, Mayra Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies, sponsored an incredible colloquium, titled “Coloniality, Race, and Philosophy of Religion.” Those conference papers are now in the process of being assembled for a special issue of the Review. There's also a big conference on Charles Long and the study of African and African American religions, which we’re talking about publishing as part of a special issue. These are two of the big items we’re looking at now and hope to expand on in the future.
In general, I'm excited to work with an incredible colleague and terrific editorial staff to bring to light the best of what I learned at HDS in terms of rethinking theological education to meet the needs of a complicated world and reflecting new theoretical trends within the Review, while also attending to historical concerns. In my teaching, I believe one can't understand questions about the loss of existence, for example, without understanding the historical origins of civilizations and colonialism. I don't think it's an either/or, but rather an ongoing interrogation of tradition in the context of historical and contemporary concerns. This is what I find most important in the co-editorship.
—by Scarlett Rose Ford