Terrence L. Johnson

Biography

Terrence L. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Religion, joined Haverford in 2006. A graduate of Morehouse College, he received his M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School and his Ph.D. from Brown University. He is a recipient of the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Career Enhancement Minority Junior Faculty Grant, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship and the Doctoral Fellowship from The Fund for Theological Education. His research interests include ethics, moral philosophy, African American religion and the role of religion in public life.

Education

B.A., Morehouse College

Master of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School

Ph.D., Brown University

Research

I am currently completing a manuscript on W.E.B. Du Bois’s moral imagination within his political and poetic writings. In the book, tentatively titled Tragic Soul-Life: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis facing American Democracy (under contract with Oxford University Press), I retrieve Du Bois’s category of tragic soul-life to re-think contemporary debates on the role of religion in deliberations on justice. Recent debates on religion and politics grapple with concerns related but not limited to safeguarding the liberties of religious persons in public debates, examining the appropriate role (if any) of religious arguments in a constitutional democracy and investigating the degree to which religion serves as a conversation-stopper in public deliberations. Du Bois’s moral imagination, which I define and delineate based on the category of tragic soul-life, allows me to extend our debates on religion and politics. For instance, when we distinguish religious beliefs from our political commitments, I believe we create artificial disjunctions that prevent us from attending to the messy relationship between religion and politics in the formation of race and what I call the tragic-sense of life. For Du Bois, religion and politics often overlapped within our constitutional democracy to justify slavery and segregation. The collision between religion and politics created the fragments from which emerged a firm but shifting moral disdain for blackness within the nation’s collective imagination. Hence, our moral imaginations, which influence our political behavior and habits regardless of our religious or anti-religious positions, often justified anti-black racism based on our belief in the “sin” or “immorality” of blackness. Secondly, within a contemporary society where John Rawls’s tradition of liberalism reigns supreme, the Rawlsian framework for public deliberation prevents us from engaging the degree to which suffering and subjugation form and fashion our sense of human dignity in particular and justice in general. Tragic soul-life lifts the veil to those buried, albeit boiling, concerns. Behind the Du Boisian veil, Du Bois’s moral imagination defines categories such as suffering, death and hope as viable and necessary categories for consideration in deliberations on justice. My reading of Du Bois places him not only at the center of African American Religion but also as a necessary interlocutor in debates on religion and politics.

Courses: Fall 2009, Haverford

Courses: Spring 2010, Haverford