R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Pinn, Anthony B."

Browsing by Author "Pinn, Anthony B."

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At the Cross-Roads: African American Spirituality, Clinical Trials, and Patient-Subject Decision-Making
(2015-04-24) Laws, Terri; Pinn, Anthony B.; Bongmba, Elias K.; Howard Ecklund, Elaine
Published assessments of religion and health scholarship observe the substantial need for the study of African American spirituality, and that what is available has implicated this cultural production as helpful and supportive of good health yet inhibitive in end-of-life decision making. This qualitative study from semi-structured interviews with African American prostate cancer patients finds spirituality as helpful to sustaining patients in their decisions to risk medical research although patients determine their decision to accept risk based on their understanding of the medical science presented to them. They are comforted by the agency available to them through bioethical principles and practices, most notably, informed consent. The findings of this study contest the centrality of the Tuskegee narrative popularly believed to be inhibitive to African American clinical trial participation as well as the over-simplification of the relationship between religion and African Americans’ cancer fatalism widely held among members of the health professions. The study acknowledges that structural issues prevent too many African Americans from access to the option of clinical trial participation. Two constructs are offered: a cultural sociological approach (Jeffrey Alexander; Gordon Lynch) to re-imagining Tuskegee as a sacred rhetoric, and a sociological approach to risk acceptance and risk taking referencing institutionalized religion; both constructs are derived from Durkheimian theory. These solutions are offered as responses to the data that emerged through the qualitative research and existing treatments of religion and health in African American religious scholarship. This study suggests that there is a shifting paradigm in which more African Americans will merge their spirituality with scientific knowledge to increase medical research participation with the long term aim of reducing health disparities. In turn, additional theoretical frameworks will emerge beyond the closed loop epistemology inherent in Durkheim’s theory. The research agenda begun here points to implications for theory and practice in fields including African American Religions, pastoral theology, health policy, health services, and bioethics.
Comparative Analysis of Gift Exchange among a Pentecostal Christian Denomination and an Indigenous Religious Tradition in Ile-Ife, Nigeria
(2014-01-27) Gbadegesin, Enoch; Bongmba, Elias K.; Pinn, Anthony B.; Faubion, James D.
This dissertation is a comparative analysis of the gift and how it impacts on interpersonal relationship among the Yoruba of Nigeria. The dissertation examines gift exchange as it is practiced among the worshippers of Ògún deity usually commemorated as an annual Olójó festival in comparison with Christ Way Church International a member of Pentecostal Charismatic group in Ilé-Ifè. In particular, the dissertation analyses a) the gift, its definition and the theoretical propositions by the anthropologists and sociologists and the principles that govern its practice; b) ethnographically, the Yoruba experience and expression of the gift, at the social, political, economic and ritual levels of interaction among immediate group and with other group of people; c) the patterns of interpersonal relationship that exists between the Òrìsà worshippers and Pentecostal Charismatic Christians using the two focused religious groups in Ilé-Ifè as test case; d) how gift exchange practices can be means of creating and maintaining boundaries, and how that can lead to identity formation between different religious groups; in short how gift and reciprocity can be means of exclusion by bringing Annette Weiner’s Inalienable Possessions in conversation with Marcel Mauss’s The Gift; e) the different senses and contexts in which the religious groups can use gift exchange practices to bring about solidarity and harmony in the Yorùbá society.
Creating Selves: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Self and Creativity in African American Religion
(2011) Guillory, Margarita La Faye Simon; Pinn, Anthony B.
African American religious studies has offered a selective treatment of self. In such discourse, self is equated to a collective identity solely premised upon liberation from multidimensional forms of social oppression, such as racism, sexism, and c1assism. This dissertation, unlike previous treatments, offers a multidimensional model of self. Specifically, it argues that African American religion serves as viable outlets for the expression of multiple forms of self-personal, collective, and dynamical selves. An interdisciplinary approach consisting of social psychology, object relations theory, and anthropology of religion is used to examine various self formations among adherents in African American Spiritual(ist) churches in New Orleans. Results from these analyses reveal an inextricable interconnectedness between religion, creativity, and selfexpression. Namely, New Orleans Spiritual(ist) churches serve as outlets in which individual adherents utilize creative acts/products to express various views of themselves. These results move scholarly treatments of self in African American religious studies beyond a collective point of view by offering a multidimensional model of self premised notions of collectivity, individuality, and fluidity.
Deathlife: Hip Hop and Thanatological Narrations of Blackness
(Duke University Press, 2023) Pinn, Anthony B.
Anthony Pinn examines how hip hop artists challenge white supremacist definitions of Blackness by challenging white distinctions between life and death.
Interplay of Things: Religion, Art, and Presence Together
(Duke University Press, 2021) Pinn, Anthony B.
In Interplay of Things Anthony B. 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. Pinn examines work by Nella Larsen and Richard Wright that illustrates an openness between things, and he traces how pop art and readymades point to the multidirectional nature of influence. He also shows how Ron Athey's and Clifford Owens's performance art draws out inherent interconnectedness to various cultural codes in ways that reveal the symbiotic relationship between art and religion as a technology. Theorizing that antiblack racism and gender- and class-based hostility constitute efforts to close off the porous nature of certain bodies, Pinn shows how many artists have rebelled against these attempts to counter openness. His analyses offer a means by which to understand the porous, unbounded, and open nature of humans and things.
Making the wounded whole: An investigation of healing and identity in African American religious life and thought
(2009) Hicks, Derek Scott; Pinn, Anthony B.
The research approach governing my work is interdisciplinary, including religious history, hermeneutics, theology, and sociology of religion with an emphasis on the intersections of religion and culture. My dissertation uncovers notions of healing through an attempt to transform social and racial reality within African American Christian thought and life. Making the Wounded Whole challenges the dominant assumption that black Christianity, is governed by a primary theological focus on corporate liberation. Accordingly, it uncovers a deep concern with healing---in relation to bodily, political, spiritual, and social restoration---as a theological thrust fueling black Christian religion. I reveal this concern through an interrogation of the bio-political and socio-political significance of enslavement and its consequences. This theme of healing and identity (re)formation manifests itself within various aspects of religious life and activity---among them are ritual and worship, aesthetic presentation, Scriptural interpretation, and general resistance to racial oppression. I argue that such practices are in consequence therapeutic, in that social and political imagination is recast in ways more suitable for a healthy existence. I locate these practices as a particular style of religious life and therefore a way of understanding the nature of black Christian experience. Ultimately, this work connects these ideas to normative Christo-religious practices found within the black enslaved experience during the antebellum period.
Quilting Faith: African American Quilts as Source Material for Study of African American Religion
(2015-10-20) Matthews, Aundrea L; Pinn, Anthony B.; Bongmba, Elias K; Baber, Graham
Scholars of African American religion have done well to note the poignant role of cultural productions in the making, doing, and theorizing of religion and life options. Lacking in this discourse is critical attention to the religious significance of African American quilts, the quilters who make them, and the quilt-making process as source material for the study of African American religion. This dissertation adopts and thinks with the work of Anthony B. Pinn’s definition of African American religion as the quest for complex subjectivity, a desire or feeling for life meaning. Through a multi-disciplinary approach that draws on religious studies, sociology and art criticism/art history, the dissertation asserts that some African American quilters use scraps of mundane materials to craft visual testimonies that link the quest for complexity to everyday life. Research from the analyses allows scholars to gain deeper insight into the role of African American quilts in the expression of religion, and consider the cultural production of quilts as legitimate and viable source material for the study of African American religious life. Quilting Faith: African American Quilts as Source Material for the Study of African American Religion reveals that African American quilts are just as important to understanding African American religion as music, drama, dance, poetry, and slave narratives.
Re-imagining race and representation: The black body in the Nation of Islam
(2009) Finley, Stephen Carl; Pinn, Anthony B.; Bongmba, Elias K.
As a project located in the academic field of the study of African American religion, this dissertation examines the black body in four critical moments of the Nation of Islam (NOI), represented by the ministries of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Warith Deen Mohammed, and Louis Farrakhan. Defined as the material locus of the self and the site of the symbolization of a given collective culture and cosmology, the project argues that the body was the central concern in all four moments in their religious efforts to re-imagine, reform, and re-present bodies that they perceived had been distorted, disfigured, and devalued by racist violence, discourses, and oppression in America. The research contends that the NOI was only partially "successful" in its reformative efforts to reconstitute and valorize black bodies. Utilizing the hermeneutical frameworks of critical social theory, which includes psychoanalysis, philosophy of embodiment (phenomenology) and race, and a theory and method based approach to the study of religion in its analysis and interpretation, the project suggests that the NOI may have internalized many of the dynamics and values of white supremacy and, as a consequence, re-produced and re-deployed its own system of intra-"race" marginalization and hierarchical classification within the NOI and in the greater African American community. Such discrimination was predicated upon an ideal black bodily economy that ranked bodies based on indicators such as gender, sexuality, and skin complexion. As a result of having co-opted middle-class American and African American values and practices, the research concludes that the NOI converted problematic issues of "race" into an ambiguous and indeterminate class system in their response to the exigencies of the conditions of existence for African Americans. The research suggests both the need for greater attention to the body in African American religious studies, analyses of the co-constitutive elements of class, gender, race, and sexuality, and for reflexive consideration of the ways in which systems of domination may be socially reproduced and/or disrupted by marginalized collectivities.
The End is a Beginning: Apocalyptic Aesthetics in Black Religion and Culture
(2021-07-05) DeYoung, Mark Allen; Pinn, Anthony B.
This dissertation examines the apocalypse from the standpoint of black culture and black critical scholarship, which, I argue, posits a mode of theory and practice I call “black apocalyptic aesthetics.” Apocalypse refers to both “the end of the world” and to the literal (Greek) meaning: to reveal, un-veil. I argue that black apocalyptic aesthetics is apocalyptic in both senses: it seeks to reveal the constitutively anti-black structure of what we call the world, and it calls for the end of that world as a prerequisite for black freedom. I offer a critical genealogy of the category of “the world,” demonstrating how it emerged alongside the category of “the human” in the wake of 1492, via colonization and slavery. I construct a functional theory of religion as a “feedback loop” in which the stories we tell about ourselves and the world actually (re)produce our world(s) and our conceptions of human being. What we call simply the world and the human, I argue, was produced by the same narratives that underwrote European colonization and chattel slavery, and continues to be reproduced by the cultural narratives and systems that maintain whiteness as normative and blackness as abjection par excellence; our world was produced (and is constantly reproduced) by a religion of whiteness. Black apocalyptic aesthetics names not only the theory and practice of exposing and challenging both the world and its normative (white) concept of the human, but also the creative practice of imagining otherwise worlds—the creation of new narratives, new ways of thinking/living/being human that challenge the religious (re)production of this oppressive world. As a component of black apocalyptic aesthetics, I call this religious practice of imagining and inhabiting the world otherwise in order to produce an otherwise world: black mysticism in the flesh.
The Moorish Science Temple of America: A Study Exploring the Foundations of African American Islamic Thought and Culture
(2013-09-16) Easterling, Paul; Pinn, Anthony B.; Bongmba, Elias K.; Emerson, Michael O.
One of the reasons religious studies is important to the academic process is because it seeks to understand the intricacies of well known human systems of meaning. Also important is research on those religious systems not well known. Herein lies the purpose of this dissertation, to exam a religious movement within the African American community, which has not received the academic attention it deserves, the Moorish Science Temple of America, Inc. (MSTA). Therefore, the primary thesis for this dissertation: to expand the current study of African American Islam to include the intricacies of the movement and organization of the MSTA through attention to primary materials and secondary literature.
“The Saints Go Marching”: The Church of God in Christ and the Civil Rights Movement in Memphis, Tennessee, 1954-1968
(2014-04-25) Chism, Jonathan; Pinn, Anthony B.; Bongmba, Elias K.; Boles, John B.
Having assumed black Pentecostals are “otherworldly” or detached from politics and this-worldly concerns, many religious and civil rights scholars have ignored black Holiness-Pentecostals’ involvements in the Civil Rights Movement and instead focused on the roles of black Baptists and Methodists. Primarily guided by historical, sociological, theo-ethical, and hermeneutical methods, this dissertation examines Church of God in Christ (COGIC) members’ engagements in the Civil Rights Movement in Memphis, Tennessee, 1954-1968. I chose Memphis as the location to examine these assumptions because the most renowned Civil Rights leader, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., delivered his last sermon at Mason Temple Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the headquarters of the largest and oldest black holiness-Pentecostal denomination. The dissertation argues that Memphis COGIC members were not divorced from the Memphis Movement but endeavored to combat racial injustice and inequality through a diversity of means, including through politics, nonviolent direct action, and spiritual quest. I contend that despite being marginalized and treated as outsiders on account of their race and religious faith, prior to the Civil Rights Movement early saints affirmed their identity as United States citizens, valued American democratic ideas of freedom and equality, and endeavored to advance democratic principles through participating in civic life. Additionally, when the Civil Rights Movement came to Memphis in the 1950s, COGIC members joined and worked alongside black church leaders from other denominations and engaged in nearly every aspect of the struggle, including political campaigns, desegregation efforts, and the Sanitation Workers Strike. Furthermore, I argue that Holiness-Pentecostal theology informed the activism of Memphis COGIC Civil Rights activists. Affirming his Holiness-Pentecostal heritage, Bishop J.O. Patterson Sr., a prominent Memphis Civil Rights activist, sought to persuade blacks in general and to remind black Christian activists in particular of the indispensability of spiritual presence and empowerment for social struggle. My research findings provoke scholars of religion to rethink the meaning and implications of otherworldliness. Additionally, this research indicates that there is greater complexity to black churches involvement in the Civil Rights Movement besides the contributions of black Baptists and Methodists.
The Spirit in Black and White: Early Twentieth-Century Pentecostals and Race Relations, 1905-1945
(2013-12-03) Hamilton, Blaine; Boles, John B.; Matusow, Allen J.; Pinn, Anthony B.
This dissertation is a study of the influence of American racial ideology upon the formation of several Pentecostal organizations in the early twentieth century. While America’s major denominations were racially segregated just after the Civil War, these Pentecostal groups emerged at a moment in which American society was still deciding how to address the contact and conflict between different races. Racial segregation was not a settled issue at the turn of the century and Pentecostals were forced to choose whether they would accept the principles of segregation or resist by forming interracial religious communities. The project examines four different organizations, the Apostolic Faith Movement, the Azusa Street Mission, the Church of God in Christ and the Assemblies of God, which stretch from Tennessee to California, exploring their response to racial segregation and white supremacy. Each of these Pentecostal groups developed their own unique response to racial segregation. These reactions to segregation reflected the racial makeup of the organization, the surrounding society’s endorsement of segregation, and the willingness of the leadership to confront racial inequalities. Whereas previous scholarship on Pentecostalism focused primarily on denominational records and religious periodicals, resources concerned with mainly doctrinal and theological issues, this study examines newspapers and public documents from across the United States to uncover the public perception of these organizations. These sources frequently reflected on the interracial cooperation and racial ideology of these organizations, information that was absent from the denominational materials. In some instances, Pentecostals challenged the trend towards racial segregation by conducting racially integrated revivals and Bible schools or incorporating racial diversity into their denominational leadership. On other occasions, Pentecostals chose social acceptance and respectability over integration, establishing racially segregated institutions. This project provides new insights into the development of racial segregation in American society and the role of religious organizations in its development, both in resisting and acquiescing to the principles of segregation.
Twilight of the God-Idols: Race, Religion, and the Life and Death of Whiteness in Contemporary America
(2014-11-17) Driscoll, Christopher M; Pinn, Anthony B.; Bongmba, Elias; Faubion, James D
White people die. Such a brash statement not only refers to an obvious physical death faced by humans across race, but is metaphoric commentary on literal shifting racial demographics in an increasingly diverse 21st Century U.S. society. This project suggests that certain concepts, such as whiteness or the category of god, what I refer to as “god-idols,” make acceptance of this real or imagined “death” difficult, as it is their function to ignore, deny or fight directly against recognition of human limit and uncertainty experienced through a confrontation with physical and social expressions of death. Though not limited to white Christians, historically, many white U.S. Christians have been unable and unwilling to accept a loss of social control and certainty—a loss that appears on the horizon. Responding to the fears of some and the hopes of others that such a “death” becomes reality, I make use of the trope of death as theme and ontological grounding so as to theorize a death-dealing system of adherence to these “god-idols,” followed by suggestions about how to respond to such a social arrangement. I offer the start of a program of response, calling for white Christians and white people more generally to fully exercise their limited human freedom through a radical embrace of their responsibility to learn to live in an uncertain social world where interdependence and equitable relationships are required in ever-complicated ways.
What meaneth this? A postmodern 'theory' of African American religious experience
(2010) Alexander, Torin Dru; Pinn, Anthony B.
It is the intention of this dissertation to provide a 'theory' of African American religious experience that is guided by postmodern critical thought, with particular emphasis on methodologies attempting to grasp what is referred to as the quotidian, the ordinary, but primarily as "everyday life." It is my contention that this constitutes a promising approach that African American religionists should consider. Indeed, for almost forty years, there has been one dominant interpretative lens for the study of African American religious experience, often referred to as a hermeneutics of liberation. It is my contention that this orientation, with its emphasis on the macroscopic, is markedly inadequate. I maintain that what is needed is a focus on the microscopic. Moreover, I also assert that if there is to be a locus for opposition to oppression, it is to be found on the level of the "everyday" --- that which is often passed over as insignificant or irrelevant.
"Why Can't I Be Both?": Jean-Michel Basquiat and Aesthetics of Black Bodies Reconstituted
(The Pennsylvania State University, 2013) Pinn, Anthony B.
This essay explores the nature and significance of blackness in relationship to an aesthetics of meaning, a method that offers insights into how religion, or the quest for complex subjectivity, is articulated through the visual arts. The essay sketches particular examples of blackness in relationship to aesthetics in a way that involves loose movement through particular periods and locations, ultimately coming to rest on the work of one particular artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat. I explore Basquiat's work in connection to the politics and production of the aesthetic language of identity formation, examining how artistic production articulates or chronicles particular attention to this quest for complex subjectivity. And I offer a sense of this theory of religion's applicability within multiple contexts.
"Why Can't I Be Both?": Jean-Michel Basquiat and Aesthetics of Black Bodies Reconstituted
(The Pennsylvania State University, 2013) Pinn, Anthony B.
This essay explores the nature and significance of blackness in relationship to an aesthetics of meaning, a method that offers insights into how religion, or the quest for complex subjectivity, is articulated through the visual arts. The essay sketches particular examples of blackness in relationship to aesthetics in a way that involves loose movement through particular periods and locations, ultimately coming to rest on the work of one particular artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat. I explore Basquiat’s work in connection to the politics and production of the aesthetic language of identity formation, examining how artistic production articulates or chronicles particular attention to this quest for complex subjectivity. And I offer a sense of this theory of religion’s applicability within multiple contexts.

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