Join us for a conversation with author and professor Josef Sorett, Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education at Columbia University, and Professor of Religion and African American and African Diaspora Studies, who will discuss his recently released work, Black is a Church: Christianity and the Contours of African American Life.
He will be in conversation with Andrea White, Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Union Theological Seminary, and Obery Hendricks, Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Religion and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Sorett's scholarship explores the vital and complex role that religion has played in shaping Black communities and movements with insights and research that straddle the disciplines of history, literature, religion, art, and music. Sorett employs primarily historical and literary approaches to the study of religion in Black communities and cultures in the United States. His first book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics, illuminates how religion has figured in debates about Black art and culture across the 20th century. In addition to editing the recently released volume The Sexual Politics of Black Churches, Sorett is working on a new treatise, There’s a God on the Mic: Hip Hop’s (Surprising) Religious History.
This program is presented by the Burke Library in partnership with Barnes & Noble, Columbia University Bookstore, and moderated by Nkosi Anderson, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Seton Hall University.
The event is free and open to all, but due to space constraints registration is required -- click "RESERVE YOUR SEAT" below.
LOCATION: the Burke Library Reading Room. Enter the building at 3041 Broadway (at W 121st Street), follow signs for the Burke Library down a hall and up one floor. Enter the library and take library stairs or elevator to level L3.
