Anthony B. Pinn

‘Gettin’ grown’: Notes on gangsta rap music and notions of manhood

Richard Majors and others provide, using the “cool pose” an invaluable way of understanding black manhood. This article expands that category by exploring notions of manhood as presented in gangsta rap music, using the term “gangsta lean.” I suggest that the gangsta lean is in keeping with the historical quest by black men to define themselves in light of and regardless of white America. It is argued that gangsta rap provides a notion of manhood that, on one level, mimics the dangerous norms and principles espoused by white America. On another level, it offers creative ways of surviving against the odds.

Rap music, culture and religion: Concluding thoughts

In this brief essay, I argue that the type of attention to rap music suggested by the various contributors to this special issue requires a rethinking of the shape, content, and proper vocabulary and grammar for marking and describing the religious. That is to say, when critically examined for their take on religion and religious experience, rap artists force theoretical complexity and methodological comfort with tension. They express this desire for a fuller sense of meaning through the felt reality of their bodies, as they take up time and space and force their recognition. It is through this forced recognition – involving a certain hold on the world – that they express the renewal of self that marks religious life. Rap music as a terrain for the articulation of religious struggle and redemption forces a re-examination of the assumed cartography of religious engagement.

Introduction: Intersections of culture and religion in African-American communities

As a child of the blues, hip hop culture and rap music bring together the ‘best of both worlds’ of culture and religion respectively. The interrogation of cultural production by African-American scholars across fields is not a new phenomenon, however, a rigorous examination of the religious and theological contours of hip hop culture, such as rap music, are slowly beginning to take shape. In this Introduction, we contextualize one such attempt as expressed in this journal you hold, to think religion and hip hop together in new and exciting ways. Here, we give thought to the multifaceted ways in which the changing syncretic cultural cartography of hip hop in general and rap music specifically push and force a re-thinking of religious sensibilities and the quest for life meaning. More than that, we take the position that not only does the genius of hip hop culture and rap music call and yearn for a more complicated terrain of the religious, but likewise, offers a rich opportunity to rethink the rugged terrain of the cultural. Here, we not only interrogate rap music from the corners of religion, more than that, we open ourselves up to be confronted and gripped by the rugged terrain of African American cultural production.

Creating ourselves : African Americans and Hispanic Americans on popular culture and religious expression

Creating Ourselves is a unique effort to lay the cultural and theological groundwork for cross-cultural collaboration between the African and Latino/a American communities. In the introduction, the editors contend that given overlapping histories and interests of the two communities, they should work together to challenge social injustices. Acknowledging that dialogue is a necessary precursor to collaboration, they maintain that African and Latino/a Americans need to cultivate the habit of engaging “the other” in substantive conversation. Toward that end, they have brought together theologians and scholars of religion from both communities. The contributors offer broadly comparative exchanges about the religious and theological significance of various forms of African American and Latino/a popular culture, including representations of the body, literature, music, television, visual arts, and cooking. Corresponding to a particular form of popular culture, each section features two essays, one by an African American scholar and one by a Latino/a scholar, as well as a short response by each scholar to the other’s essay. The essays and responses are lively, varied, and often personal. One contributor puts forth a “brown” theology of hip hop that celebrates hybridity, contradiction, and cultural miscegenation. Another analyzes the content of the message transmitted by African American evangelical preachers who have become popular sensations through television broadcasts, video distribution, and Internet promotions. The other essays include a theological reading of the Latina body, a consideration of the “authenticity” of representations of Jesus as white, a theological account of the popularity of telenovelas, and a reading of African American ideas of paradise in one of Toni Morrison’s novels. Creating Ourselves helps to make popular culture available as a resource for theology and religious studies and for facilitating meaningful discussions across racial and ethnic boundaries. Contributors . Teresa Delgado, James H. Evans Jr., Joseph De Leon, Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, Angel F. Mendez Montoya, Alexander Nava, Anthony B. Pinn, Mayra Rivera, Suzanne E. Hoeferkamp Segovia, Benjamin Valentin, Jonathan L. Walton, Traci C. West, Nancy Lynne Westfield, Sheila F. Winborne

Rope Neckties and Lynchings: A Discussion of Terror as an Impetus for Black Religion

Abstract Elsewhere I have suggested that Black religion as a historically manifest push toward a liberated existence is in fact a response to the terror and dread of dehumanization experienced by Blacks from the period of slavery to the present. In making such a claim, several things are important. One of the most crucial is a discussion of the nature and source of this terror and dread, and in this essay I give attention to this point. I do so by discussing the manner in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century lynchings provided an existential and ontological terror that Blacks responded to through the formation of liberative doctrines, institutions and practices.

Sweaty Bodies in a Circle: Thoughts on the Subtle Dimensions of Black Religion as Protest

Abstract Carrying a Black body through this rather absurd world has not simply involved negative socio-political and economic arrangements for African Americans. Those who give careful consideration to the manner in which Black bodies move, occupy space, as well as the fluids issuing from them, will have noted the way in which the bodies also give off signs of resistance. In this article I pay attention to the manner in which sweat has served as a theological marker, as a sign of interaction with the divine. This sign in turn has served to signify popular depictions of Black bodies as having little beauty and value.

‘Black Theology Then and Now: A Second Generation Assessment’

Book reviewed in this article: Dwight N. Hopkins, Heart and Head: Black Theology Past, Present and Future

Martin Luther King Jr.'s God, Humanist Sensibilities, and Moral Evil

This essay attends to the nature and meaning of moral evil through an interrogation of Martin Luther King Jr.s personalism and African American humanism. Combining his modality of personalism with African American humanist sensibilities provides an opportunity to think about moral evil and theodicy in ways that do not collapse into redemptive suffering. This is done through a theological turn toward a doctrine of God that recognizes and appreciates Gods ongoing and fundamental concern with human welfare, but a concern that often involves divine missteps and the need for God to redirect effort.

Introduction: Setting the Context and Agenda

While many nontheistic organizations are opposed to theological and ritual structures of theism as practiced in private, personal belief is a minor consideration in comparison to what they perceive as the potential damage to progressive policies and quality of life represented by theistically driven takes on public life. Framing this situation as a challenge to the constitutional separation of church and state, many of these organizations see theism’s encroachment into the public sphere as a fundamental threat to a democratic and reasonable life.

Naming What We Want: Thoughts on Religious Vocabulary and the Desire for Quality of Life

President Obama’s inauguration address briefly mapped out a geography of belonging that included a fuller range of religious and philosophical perspectives running from nontheists to the-ists. To the extent that it forced a momentary reckoning with the competing life orientation claims lodged in the United States, this “opening up” has been of some value. Yet, it did little to address the vocabulary and grammar used to shape and present the sense of “life, liberty, and happiness” operative in so many quarters. How does one present “life, liberty, and happiness” within the context of competing faith claims with differing perspectives on, for example, the nature of the humans who are undertaking such pursuits and claiming these rights? For instance, much of the undergirding thought for these pursuits and claims rest on a soft theism; yet, what is the “look” of this pursuit (and the nature of happiness) when not buttressed by theism but instead by the “non-belief,” as President Obama put it, of some citizens?