Search

Framed in terms of the problems associated with traditional thinking on gender within humanism, this chapter sets about the task of carving out an approach to humanism that would enable flexible, fluid, and malleable understandings of social difference, such as gender, by calling for a re-orientation of humanism that can account for human variability over time, space, and place. Essentially, the chapter argues that humanism’s reliance on fixed categories of reason and human nature has reinforced a White, male logic of domination. First, it suggests a rethinking of humanism as a constructed concept, rather than an idea that somehow metaphysically emanates from some universal core of “human nature.” The chapter suggests a charting of humanism that moves beyond essences insomuch that free-floating “essences” (e.g., gender) collapse the construction (of humanism) back onto, and within, the domain of metaphysics. Next, it looks at origins, attempting to disrupt the science-based situativity in Enlightenment notions of (white, male, objective) “rationality” that were constructed over and against “irrational” categories of difference, such as gender.

Designators of diasporic travel used within African American religion are seldom interrogated for the manner in which they rely on and reify sacred/profane thinking. These designators also attempt to recuperate a past identity through reliance on self-evident claims like “home,” “memory,” “experience,” and so on. We turn to author James Baldwin and rapper Kanye West to emphasize the manner in which such travel and movement is multiplicative, never an endeavor limited to either sacred or profane. In an effort to take stock of the “both/and” of diasporic travel, we offer the theoretical instrument of aporetic flow, understood as the creative transmutation of impossibility into opportunity, where nonpassages enable movement. We seek to demonstrate how the analytic might contribute to theory and method in the study of African American religion specifically, and add to nascent critical discussions across the study of religion more generally that are beginning to situate “religion” as identity.

Contemporary humanism maintains a healthy suspicion of god and the supernatural but also tends to uncritically rely upon naturalized, self-evident, and universal assumptions about humans’ potential for progressive moral and ethical stances. Such tensions transform social differences into social “problems” needing redress. This chapter begins with discussion of human difference and particularity to consider the cultivation of humanizing strategies that recast social difference as expressions of human variability rather than problems to be overcome. Using the 2016 US election as a case study, this chapter explores the capacity and potential for the employment of intersectional techniques across difference in an increasingly turbulent twenty-first-century US social context. What epistemological changes are necessitated in order for humanism to take up, and take on, the challenge of human difference?

In early March 2014, some of the members of Culture on the Edge—a scholarly research collaboration of seven scholars of religion, interested in more theoretically sophisticated studies of identity, and all of whom are at different career stages and at a variety of North American institutions—had a conversation online on the use of the terms “critique” and “critical,” terms widely used in the field today but employed in such a variety of ways that the members of the group thought it worthwhile to focus some attention on them. What follows is the transcript of their conversation.

Scholar of African American religion and culture, Monica R. Miller’s chapter, “The Absence of Presence: Relating to ‘Black’ (Non)Humanisms in Popular Culture,” turns to hip hop culture, the history of African American (humanist) religious expression, and the high culture of visual art galleries, to offer an allegory about why race (and other forms of social difference) are so difficult to see in spaces of humanism. And yet, the ability to see such differences (and difficulties) are vital to updating humanism to more equitably engage the world.

The landscape of youth religious participation is an underengaged area across both the humanities and social science. While the humanities lack empirical data on the changing religious life worlds of youths, existing empirical work in the social sciences suggests that institutional religion buffers criminality and delinquency—a brand of engagement the authors refer to as “buffering transgression.” This is a process that both conceives and privileges religion as an institutional and a moral force responsible for creating prosocial behavior. While empirical studies on youths and religion keep religion arrested to institutional and moral functions, scholars in the humanities work hard to legitimate youth cultural forms, such as hip hop, by conflating its rugged dimensions with a quest (and hope) for democratic sensibilities—a motif the authors suggest is rooted in ideologies of teleological progress. Using the tropes progress, peril, and change, this article explores the utility (and limitations) of empirical work and the often misguided efforts to moralize religion. Here the authors raise queries regarding youth cultural change and religion and quantitatively model youth religious change over 16 years. The implications of these theoretical and empirical interventions point toward future work at the social scientific intersections of religion in culture.

Over the past several decades, there has been increased attention to the religious exploration of popular culture, including rap music. However, as is often the case, such attention has resulted in a narrowing of rap music's religious and theological meaning – a forcing of rap music into preconceived cartographies of life. In this article, I suggest that the slippery, messy and complex nature of the sacred dimensions of rap music can only be addressed in a rigorous way through the use of theoretical and methodological tools that are flexible. This article proposes this type of flexible framework can be achieved through combining Anthony B. Pinn's notion of complex subjectivity and his nitty-gritty hermeneutic with Laurel C. Schneider's theory of multiplicity.

Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, boldly articulated the ongoing pain of her son’s absence to a packed audience at Lehigh University in fall of 2014 during a Rap Session panel entitled “America’s Most Wanted: Hip-hop, the Media & the Criminalization of Black and Brown Youth.” Among other things, Fulton notes the dizzying reality of reliving the death of her son through recursive virtualized depictions of misrecognition—she palpably noted that she had “seen more than 50 different pictures that were supposed to be Trayvon Martin that wasn’t actually him, um, I just heard so many different things that I really didn’t know who they were talking about at one time ‘cause I’m like … It’s just so degrading.” What’s more—such visual replays of posthumous identity theft not only left Fulton vulnerable to witnessing the continued dehumanization of a child that had died at the hands of the state, the technological chopping block chipping away at her dead son’s reputation, as well as hers. To this compounded reality, she noted, “it’s as if, I had done something wrong, as if … I was a victim of a crime … and now they blamed me. So, a lot of times people like to justify what happened, they like to justify by [sic] the murder by making the person seem like they were so bad, nothing my son did should have caused his death.” For many, Trayvon has become an icon for social change; many others, in the wake of intense efforts to justify what happened to him, villianized him and a technological character assassination took place after his actual murder. For Fulton, each of these efforts to situate Trayvon as somehow deserving of what happened to him causes the grieving mother to relive the news of his murder. Fulton continues to relive her son’s murder by way of daily and purposeful virtually mediated misrecognition that is, above all, racialized in nature.

Religion, when dethroned from sacrality and the illusion of morality and affirmativeness, is just as ordinary as cherry pie. That talk of religion makes its way into the culture that we call hip-hop is of no surprise—after all, religion becomes just another (linguistic) way in which the social world is often discussed. In the same way, what some see as culture might be considered to hold “religious” weight and value for others and what holds “religious” weight and value for others might simply be referred to as culture. That is to say, there’s nothing intrinsic or of inherent value within these words that marks and delineates them as irreducibly different and distinct. What marks race or religion, for example, as “separate” domains is simply the constructed significance placed upon these terms across groups and communities. In other words, a term, or phrase like “religion in hip-hop” is in and of itself, empty of meaning and value. What they come to mean in time and space speaks to the contestation over ideas and values in the larger publics.