Candler’s Black Church Studies program, in partnership with the Religion in the Americas Colloquium at Emory, will host Josef Sorett, dean of Columbia College and Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor and Vice President for Undergraduate Education at Columbia University, as the presenter for this year’s Howard Thurman Lecture. Sorett’s lecture, “The Art and Politics (and Afterlives) of Afro-Protestantism,” will take place on Thursday, October 16 from 5:00–7:00 p.m. in Room 252 of Candler’s Rita Anne Rollins Building. A livestream option will also be available. The event is free and open to the public with advanced registration required.
Register to attend the Thurman Lecture in person or online.
A description of the lecture is below.
“The Art and Politics (and Afterlives) of Afro-Protestantism”
Drawing upon anecdote, everyday observations, and archival evidence, this lecture will explore the complex inner workings, the historic power and persistence, of Christianity in the making of individual Black lives and social worlds. Tracking Black culture, politics and intellectual life from the final years of the eighteenth century through the first decades of the twenty-first century, the lecture maps how religion—namely Protestant Christianity— has animated and been encoded in Black life in North America.
As an interdisciplinary scholar of religion and race in the Americas, Sorett employs primarily historical and literary approaches to the study of religion in Black communities and cultures in the United States, straddling the disciplines of history, literature, religion, art and music. He is the author of Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2016), Black is a Church: Christianity and the Contours of African American Life (Oxford, 2023), and the editor of The Sexual Politics of Black Churches (Columbia University Press, 2022). He is currently working on a fourth book, There’s a God on the Mic: Hip Hop’s (Surprising) Religious History.
Sorett is a recipient of Columbia’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award (2018) and Presidential Award for Teaching Excellence (2022). Prior to joining Columbia’s faculty in 2009, he was a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, where he also completed his PhD in African American Studies. He earned an MDiv in religion and literature from Boston University and a PhD in African American studies from Harvard.
Register here to attend the Thurman Lecture in person or online.