Symposium Speakers

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Anthony B. Pinn is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University.  He is also director of research for the Institute for Humanist Studies (Washington, DC).  His interests include African American humanism, religion and cultural production, and liberation theologies. In 2003, Pinn accepted an offer from Rice University (Houston, TX), becoming the first African American to hold an endowed chair at the University. While at Rice, Pinn founded and continues to direct both the Houston Enriches Rice Education (H.E.R.E.) Project and the doctoral concentration in the study of African American Religion. Outside Rice, Pinn has served as the first executive director of the Society for the Study of Black Religion, and he is a member of the Meadville Lombard Theological School Board of Trustees.  In addition, he has served in various roles on the board of directors and the executive committee of the American Academy of Religion.  Pinn made his initial mark on the academy with Why, Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology  (1995), galvanizing Pinn as an African American humanist and solidifying African American humanism as an historic, non-theistic religious orientation for African Americans. Pinn also serves as editor of four different book series:  With Katie G. Cannon (Union Theological Seminary PSCE), Innovations in African American ReligiousThought, Fortress Press.  With Caroline Levander (Rice University), Imagining the Americas, Oxford University Press. With Stacey Floyd-Thomas (Vanderbilt University), Religion and Social Transformation, New York University Press, and more recently Studies in Humanist Thought and Practice, to be published by Equinox.

Pinn’s research has always demanded a thorough and expansive use of theory and method.  Pinn took up the task of specifically addressing these issues in Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion  (2003), claiming in it that the black religious impulse is the “quest for complex subjectivity.”  More than simply traditional, organized religiosity, black religion is fundamentally a quest for complex subjectivity in the face of this dehumanization and terror. Terror and Triumph  provides attention to methodological concerns necessary for the flourishing of African American religious studies as a discipline of critical inquiry and investigation through the development of ”˜relational centralism,’ an interdisciplinary methodology combining aspects of traditional religious studies with elements of anthropology, aesthetics and art criticism.  For Pinn, black religious scholarship requires attention to both its form and content. To date, scholars of African American religion have dealt extensively with the content of black religion, but not as fully with the questions of what is  black religion, what is black  religion and what is black religion, the form(s). Terror and Triumph, then, provides a shift in both how African American religion is theorized and a programmatic shift in the methodologies employed in the study of African American religion.

Pinn is the author/editor of twenty-six books, including Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought (2010), and most recently,The End of God-Talk (2012). Other notable edited volumes include Noise and Spirit: The Religious and Spiritual Sensibilities of Rap Music (2003) and with Dwight Hopkins, Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic  (2004). 

 

Patricia O’Connell Killen is Professor of Religious Studies and Academic Vice President at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. An historian of Christianity in North America who received her MA and PhD from Stanford University, she researches and writes about Catholicism in the United States and religion in the West, especially the Pacific Northwest. She explores the intersection of social context, community, and spirituality, especially how, in differing social contexts, communities “think” (or don’t think) with their cultural wisdom traditions in negotiating the challenges and novel circumstances of their time.

 

Cassie Trentaz is Assistant Professor of Theology, Ethics, and Church History at Warner Pacific College in Portland, OR. Her teaching focuses on the interdisciplinary crossroads of theology, ethics, church history, and religions of the world. Her research commitments involve theo-ethical reflections on the ways power differentials and religio-cultural structures influence human experience and community. Her activist commitments build upon her teaching and research to explore how religious communities and responsible fully-alive human beings can speak life and enact social transformation in the midst of those realities in the complex contexts in which we live.

She is married to Perry, a glass-blower and vehicle-lover, and they have a two year old son, Winston, who would spend nearly every moment of everyday outside if given the chance. And, she’s a sucker for free food, good stories, and Chicago Bears football.

 

Susanna Morrill is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Lewis & Clark College. She received her doctorate in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Professor Morrill teaches courses on American religious history, women in American religious history, the intersection of religion and popular culture, and the theory and method of religious studies. These courses reflect her research on women in Mormonism and the religious dimensions of nineteenth-century world’s fairs in the U.S. Professor Morrill’s book, White Roses on the Floor of Heaven: Mormon Women’s Popular Theology, 1880-1920 was published in 2006 by Routledge.  

 

 

From 1985 to January of 2011, Rex was a Priest of Mendes and member of the ruling hierarchy in Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, having resigned his position in that organization to fully develop the Chaos Imperium as the most advanced Black Magickal and antinomian Order in the world today.

As a representative of the Underworld, Rex has made numerous media presentations, from television to radio, to film and documentary work with the discovery channel. He has appeared on Montel Williams as a Church of Satan representative, a black magickal theorist on ground zero conspiracy radio, and has had his art widely covered in print media from books to magazines as well as having exhibited internationally.

Chaos Imperium: A techno-Black Magickal think tank and research group dedicated to experimental work in the strange shadow realm where sorcery and quantum physics meet. Rex is currently writing a book on black magickal physics and quantum sorcery involving fractals, mental entities, and quantum mass entanglement  through optical systems as developed in a project called the “Ragnarok Engine.”

 

  Monica R. Miller is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanistic Approaches to the Social Sciences at Lewis & Clark College in the department of Religious Studies where her research focuses on the intersections of religion & material/popular culture. Miller currently serves as a Senior Research Fellow with The Institute for Humanist Studies (Washington, DC) and is co-chair of a new AAR consultation entitled Critical Approaches to the Study of Hip Hop and Religion.

Among numerous publications, Miller’s forthcoming book, Religion and Hip Hop, is currently under contract with Routledge.