Terrence L. Johnson

Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies

On Leave

Fall 2023, Spring 2024

Education

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

Profile

Terrence L. Johnson is Charles G. Adams 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), winner of the 2023 Outstanding Book award by the Association for Ethnic Studies; 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 Torn Asunder: Race and Religion in the Shadow of Law and Justice, which is under contract with Columbia University Press. He is also co-writing a book on ethics and law with M. Cathleen Kaveny tentatively entitled Christian Ethics and the Trump Court.

Johnson is a faculty associate of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics and a member of the Corporation at Haverford College.

Courses

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