Terrence L. Johnson

Professor of African American Religious Studies

Education

BA, Morehouse College
MDiv, Harvard Divinity School
PhD, Brown University

Profile

Terrence L. Johnson is Professor of African American Religious Studies. His research interests include African American political thought, ethics, American religions, and the role of religion in public life. Johnson's interdisciplinary research agenda is historical, critical, and constructive. He weaves together African American religions, political theory, and American history to paint broad conceptual schemes for imagining religion, democracy, ethics, liberalism, justice, and freedom.

He is the author of Blacks and Jews in America: An Invitation to Dialogue (2022, with Jacques Berlinerblau); We Testify with Our Lives: How Religion Transformed Radical Thought from Black Power to Black Lives Matter (2021); and Tragic Soul-Life: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis Facing American Democracy (2012). He also serves as co-editor of the Duke University Press Series "Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People." He is currently completing a manuscript entitled “The Law of Race and Public Religions: Talking Book Traditions and the Limits of Originalism,” which is under contract with Columbia University Press. Johnson is an ordained Itinerant Elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.