Anthony B. Pinn

Office: 213 Humanities Building
Phone: 713-348-2710
Email: pinn@rice.edu

Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies
Director of Graduate Studies
Associate of Wiess College
Ph.D., Harvard University, 1994

Areas of Teaching
African American Religion; Black Religious Thought; Black Theology; Womanist Theology; Black Religious Aesthetics; African American Humanism.

Anthony B. Pinn is the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies. His professional commitments also involve work as the Executive Director of the Society for the Study of Black Religion and co-chair of the American Academy of Religion's Black Theology Group.

Much of what has been written within the study of black religion avoids two fundamental questions: What is black about black religion? What is religious about black religion? In part this results from a reluctance, particularly on the part of black theologians, to address issues of theory and method. That is to say, little attention has been given to "how" one should study black religion and "what" is actually being studied. His recent work seeks to address this shortcoming through attention to the nature and meaning of black religion. Through an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis, his recent research projects have attempted to explore the "quest for complex subjectivity" as the fundamental nature of black religion.

His most substantive presentation of this research interest is Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion (Fortress Press, 2003). In addition to that text, Pinn is also the author/editor of fifteen other books, including Varieties of African American Religious Experience; The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era; Why, Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology; and African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod (Palgrave Macmillan) . He is currently working on a book dealing with the aesthetics of black religious experience and a co-edited volume on theoretical and methodological considerations related to the study of religion in popular culture.

Selected Publications

Authored Volumes

Becoming 'America's Problem Child':  An Outline of Pauli Murray's Religious Life and Theology, Princeton Theological Monograph Series (PickWick Publications), in press.

The African American Religious Experience in America, Greenwood Press, (Winter 2005).  Paperback by University Press of Florida (October 2007).

African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod, Palgrave Macmillan (Fall 2004).

Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion, Fortress Press (Spring 2003).

The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era, Orbis Books (Spring 2002, 2nd Printing May 2003, 3rd Printing May 2004).

Coauthored with Anne H. Pinn, The Fortress Introduction to Black Church History, Fortress Press (Fall 2001).

Varieties of African American Religious Experience, Fortress Press (Fall 1998).

Why, Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology, Continuum Hardcover (1995),  Cassell Paperback (1999). Chinese Edition by The Institute of Sino-Christian Studies (Hong Kong), 2006.

Edited Volumes

Anthony B. Pinn and Allen D. Callahan, editors. African American Religious Life and the Story of Nimrod, Palgrave Macmillan (Winter 2007).

Anthony B. Pinn and Dwight N. Hopkins, editors. Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic, Palgrave Macmillan (Fall 2004; Paper, Fall 2006).

Anthony B. Pinn, editor. Noise and Spirit: Rap Music's Religious and Spiritual Sensibilities, New York University Press (Fall 2004).

Rebecca Moore, Anthony B. Pinn, and Mary R. Sawyer, editors.  Peoples Temple and Black Religion in America, Indiana University Press (Spring 2004).

Anthony B. Pinn, editor. Moral Evil and Redemptive Suffering: A History of Theodicy in African American Religious Thought. The University Press of Florida, (Spring 2002).

Anthony B. Pinn, editor.  By These Hands:  A Documentary History of African American Humanism, New York University Press, (Fall 2001).

Anthony B. Pinn and Benjamin Valentin, editors. The Ties That Bind: African-American and Hispanic-American/Latino Theologies in Dialogue, The Continuum Publishing Group, (Spring 2001). 

Stephen Angell and Anthony B. Pinn, editors. Protest Thought in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1862-1939, Vol. 1, University of Tennessee Press, (Spring 2000).