Podcast Transcript

Josef Sorett

Intro music

Josef Sorett is Professor of Religion and African American and African Diaspora Studies and Chair of the Religion Department at Columbia University. An emerging distinguished scholar in the field of African American religion, Josef is also the founder and director of the Center for African American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice. Josef is author of Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, The Holy Holy Black: The Ironies of an African American Secular, and, most recently, an edited volume of essays, titled The Sexual Politics of Black Churches, recently released by Columbia University Press.  

I invited Josef to The Dean’s Table to reflect on how his upbringing in Boston influenced his decision to attend college at an evangelical Christian school in the Great Plains, to discuss his decision to pursue a course of graduate studies at a theological seminary, and to talk about his decision to pursue doctoral studies in African American Studies at Harvard. He also discusses his innovative research and teaching in African American culture and religion. Josef, welcome to The Dean’s Table.

Josef Sorett: Thank you for having me, Dean Harris. Pleasure to be here.

Fredrick Harris: So, let’s get started. You once noted, Josef, in an interview you did some time ago, that you grew up on “a diet of hip hop and praise and worship music” when you were growing up in Boston. So, how did this experience come about?

Josef Sorett: I love the question, Fred, um, to sort of lay the stakes and context behind so much of the academic work. Um, and I guess my struggle in responding is to figure out where to respond, right? Because think about sort of the background in which my parents raised me or the sort of context in which they were raised, right? And so, perhaps the best way to begin is sort of, I often describe myself alongside having these two musical diets as a, as a grandson of the Black church, right?  Which is to my mother was raised in an AME church in a Black neighborhood of Boston, Roxbury. But as soon as she graduated, she fled, right, the traditional religious upbringing of her youth and was a kind of spiritual seeker.

Fredrick Harris: Yeah, now Josef, for our listeners, the AME Church is the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Josef Sorett: Thank you. Yes. Thank you for slowing me down. The oldest, right, Black denomination with roots, uh, in the age of independence, Philadelphia, where, Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded just shortly after, right, the founding documents of the nation were signed. And so my mother had grown up in a, now, over 200-year-old congregation, in Roxbury, that had migrated with the Black community from Beacon Hill to Roxbury in the middle of the 20th century, but had its own roots in the abolitionist movement. But my mother left this church, I think with so many young people of the sixties, right? And on her way to Middlebury College, left her AME roots behind and was, you know, part of a generation of spiritual seekers that, you know, identified not necessarily as religious, but as spiritual. Now, there’s a whole lot of steps along the way, but by the time I am, nine or ten, my mother, along that spiritual journey, ends up, returning to Christianity, but in an entirely different context, right. She ended up joining a Word of Faith church, part of that evangelical context that eventually sent me off to college in Oklahoma. And, so on one hand I grew up in a particular kind—I spent most of my adolescence, from the age of nine or ten, up through college—in a Pentecostal Charismatic church, just outside of Boston. I was also, right, one who grew up squarely as part of the hip hop generation. And so, the, the sounds of hip hop, on one hand, were essential to my own coming of age, but so was the music of this congregation in which I spent so much time, so back and forth between praise and worship tapes–tapes, not CDs yet, right? And the earliest hip hop albums, those were, right, the soundtrack of my adolescence.

Fredrick Harris: Right, right. So it’s interesting. We have similarities because my mother also grew up in the AME Church. My father was a part of a traditional Baptist church. He was a junior deacon, as they were called then. That didn’t last long, so that’s a whole other story. But, um, she also was seeking something else beyond the traditional worship style of the AME church and joined the Church of God in Christ.

Josef Sorett: Absolutely.

Fredrick Harris: Which is also a Charismatic denomination—historically Black—that emerged around the turn of the 20th century. But for our listeners who may not know what praise and worship music is, is this a type of music that is like traditional gospel music?

Josef Sorett:  Well, now they’re fused in so many interesting ways, but no. I mean there’s different histories we can tell about praise and worship and I think there is a story of the more spontaneous devotional music, within congregations like the Church of God in Christ, that often is sung before the formal service starts within many traditional Black churches, where hymnody and the hymnal become the guiding orientation. That’s, I think, one history, but I think today the sort of more common or perhaps more popular history is of, uh, a kind of music that traces its origins to the 1960s, the Jesus people movement, kind of, the folk festivals of the sixties meets liberal Protestantism, if you will. And so: think youth pastor with acoustical guitar, with lyrics projected on an overhead in front of the congregation. So it’s very scripted, it’s very minimalist, none-complicated lyrics, and the soundtrack is less the traditional Black church organ and more the folk performer acoustical guitar.

Fredrick Harris: So, Josef, you are, we know that you’re Bostonian by birth, now, but you attended a college far from Boston at Oral Roberts University, a Christian evangelical school located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a place very different from Boston, I suspect.

Josef Sorett: Absolutely. Nope, you’re right. [laughter].

Fredrick Harris: What led you to attend college specifically at Oral Roberts?

Josef Sorett: Yeah. This is a great question. I will say first, with my scholarly hat on: one cannot really study American religion without traveling through Tulsa, what’s often referred to as “the buckle of the Bible belt,” and seeing this particular campus, the campus of Oral Roberts University, founded in the 1960s by, right, one of the more prominent televangelists, healing evangelists of the 20th century. To see the architecture and the way in which it’s imagined as a kind of kingdom of God on earth. But to your point, the church that my mother joined, in my pre-adolescence, was, as I mentioned, a non-denominational Word of Faith Pentecostal Charismatic church. So there was a way in which the world of Oral Roberts was very familiar to her, right? And to that church. And, I think, for a large number of the African American students at Oral Roberts University, many of us ended up there because our parents watched Oral Roberts on television.

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Josef Sorett: Now my father also claims, right, he has an entirely different religious and racial biography that takes him back to a Jewish home in Newark, New Jersey. He also claimed to be watching Oral Roberts when he was a kid, but they were mocking him, right, within his home. But I ended up there, y’know, even though my mother later told me she had been praying I would end up at Oral Roberts, I ended up there because they told me I’d have a chance to play basketball.

Fredrick Harris: [laughter]

Josef Sorett: So really it was my hoop dreams weren’t unfolding as the way I had hoped. Uh, my senior year, I was thinking about prep school for a year. Uh, and then my father sent some tapes to the coach at Oral Roberts and he said, “Come on out.” He said, you know, he told me I’d have a shot. I went out, visited in July, liked it, and I was there as a full-time student in August. Eventually, although not immediately, ended up playing for a couple years, by which I mean sat on the bench of the basketball team at Oral Roberts.

Fredrick Harris: [laughter] Right.

Josef Sorett: So really basketball got me there, but it was, as foreign as it was culturally to be in Tulsa – I’d never been out of Massachusetts for more than two weeks before landing there in the August of 1991—theologically, it was very familiar, right? And that church that I was a part of, I was one of the first, but they would end up sending a whole number of young people off to Oral Roberts in subsequent years.

Fredrick Harris: Yeah. Oral Roberts, um, as an evangelical minister’s is, is, is very popular. Um, in fact, um, most recently I was going through, um, my mom’s house–she’s since deceased–um, and, um, discovered, um, my grandfather’s Bible, her, her father who was, um, a Baptist minister and it had, um, my grandfather’s name on the cover and, uh, Oral Roberts, uh- [laughter]

Josef Sorett: Yep. Yep.

Fredrick Harris: -right under it, ‘cause that’s where evangelicals would order their, um, some, their Bibles and other, uh, stuff.

Josef Sorett: My mother had one of those Oral Roberts Bibles in our home as well. So yeah, there was, I mean, and you know, you mentioned earlier the, the Church of God in Christ, this largest, historic Black Pentecostal denomination, so many of my classmates, that was their church home, right? With so many of the leading COGIC preachers and bishops, the leadership of the denomination, all of their sons and daughters were there, right? Because Oral Roberts was, I think, often seen, because he integrated the revival tent, right? He was seen as a more racially progressive alternative to Billy Graham, who was, right, the figure at the center of, of evangelicalism in terms of American culture and politics in a more prominent way.

Fredrick Harris: So, you returned to Boston [laughter] after being in Tulsa and you enrolled as a Master’s student at Boston University School of Theology. Now BU School of Theology is where Dr. Martin Luther King received his doctoral degree in theology, and where the famed theologian Howard Thurman, who wrote one of my favorite books of theology, Jesus and the Disinherited, served as the Dean of the Chapel at BU.

Josef Sorett: Right.

Fredrick Harris: What led you to BU? Cause it, seemed to be totally different than the theology that you would’ve studied or what was familiar with at Oral Roberts.

Josef Sorett: And it was, it doesn’t seem, it, it was incredibly different, right? Liberal Protestantism, at least within the church context I grew up with was by, by those congregation standards, not really Christianity, right? Like that, “We were the real Christians!” within our congregation and those liberal Protestants were

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Josef Sorett: You know, really, actually secular folks, but in churches, right? And there was a whole genre of fiction at the time that, right, like presented those kinds of liberal congregations as actually the seat of spiritual warfare. Basically, what happened: by the time I, uh, I was entering my fifth year, yeah, uh, at Oral Roberts University, the kind of Christianity that I took for granted as the norm was no longer, just matter of fact, made sense to me, right? I began to have some questions, which is like, right, what college is for. And those questions came to the fore. At, at a place like, Oral Roberts, there was not often space for those questions, whether it was about religion or race, and when I tried to ask those questions there was often shut down. And so it was clear to me that I needed a different kind of space, right? And I was also like at a place like, Oral Roberts we’re all taught that, uh, we’re ministers of the gospel, now whether we’re ordained or not, and so I was thinking through a range of theological questions that it was clear that, uh, the context of Oral Roberts was not going to be providing me with, with answers. And, at the same time, I had already, surpassed most of the leadership of the church I had grown up in were Bible college graduates. Most of them had not gone to college and so they were, in fact, not very helpful resources for thinking about where I might further my education and raise these theological questions. So I was sort of figuring it out on my own. I ended up applying to BU, uh, ended up applying to Duke, two Methodist schools, as well as Emory—Candler School of Theology—in your hometown.

Fredrick Harris: Yeah, that’s a very-

Josef Sorett: I had no idea what Methodism even was, really, although Oral Roberts himself was a Methodist. Then I also applied to ITC, right, historically Black seminary.

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Josef Sorett: But at the end of the day, I ended up deferring for a year, heading back home, and actually just sort of working on these questions, on my own, if you will, right, before entering. It was too much of a leap, in fact, to make a jump seamlessly from Oral Roberts and that theological world to BU or Duke, and so I deferred a year, visited both schools, and at that point had some connections and some roots reestablished in Boston, in fact, at the same AME church that my mother had left.

Fredrick Harris: Huh.

Josef Sorett: She told me later that was much to her chagrin, but,

Fredrick Harris: [laughter]

Josef Sorett: at the time it was, it was really a lifesaver, right? It was a space that, uh, both valued faith and education.

Fredrick Harris: Mm-hmm.

Josef Sorett: and became really a community for me. My grandmother was still a member there and so she was proud to have me home and in the congregation. And they gave me a space to work through the theological questions that, at Oral Roberts University, if I’d asked, I was more or less told I was in the wrong, right? I was-

Fredrick Harris: Right, yeah.

Josef Sorett: but this was a space where I could ask those questions. So that’s, uh, that church, in Boston became a safe haven and it also helped me make the decision choosing BU over Duke at that point in time.

Fredrick Harris: Right, right. You mentioned ITC. ITC stands for the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, that’s a part of the Atlanta University Center of Historical Black Colleges. So there’s a theological center there.

Josef Sorett: Absolutely. And it has representation from the big Black denominations, the Black Pentecostals, the Baptists, the Methodists, the AME as well as the AME Zion, the full range of Black denominations.

Fredrick Harris: Right. So, were you thinking about going into the ministry? Is this the reason why you went to seminary?

Josef Sorett: Yes. The short answer is yes. I will also say, at a place like Oral Roberts University,

Fredrick Harris: Mm-hmm?

Josef Sorett: It’s hard not to, right? So, there’s all the range of majors and I was pre-med while I was at Oral Roberts, pre-med health and exercise science. I figured I, I wasn’t going to make the NBA, but I could be a sports doctor of some sort right. But there were these theological questions that were just so central and that I did have a sense of being called. What I decided, in fact, when I was writing my personal statement to seminary, I still said I was going on to med school, but that I had to sort through these theological questions first. And I ended up working full time at a church, which also helped to clarify why I was going go the route of graduate school and the PhD. You know, churches have remained a centerpiece and a big part of the work I do, but not in the form of pastoral ministry.

Fredrick Harris: Right. So you didn’t go into pastoral ministry. You then went on to pursue a doctorate in African American Studies at Harvard and you were part of the first cohort of students, there were six of you, I think.

Josef Sorett: That’s right. Yep.

Fredrick Harris: Who were brought into the program. The chairman then was Henry Louis Gates.

Josef Sorett: That’s right.

Fredrick Harris: Who was building his, uh, “Dream Team” of scholars.

Josef Sorett: That’s right.

Fredrick Harris: What was that experience like?

Josef Sorett: Yeah, I mean, it was, for, you know, someone, uh, who had never had an Ivy experience before, from Oral Roberts University to Boston University, where, at BU they often would talk about, “that school across the river,” it was a huge adjustment and it was really exciting to be in the department, right. In an odd way, that is not your typical graduate school experience, right? My first graduate seminar, the Boston Globe was in the room, right? And around the table, um, Henry Louis Gates and Cornell West were teaching the class, but around the table where Homi Bhabha, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Anthony Appiah, William Julius Wilson.

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Josef Sorett: Salifo- koufou nf-uh, uh, now I’m going to mess his name up, uh, Suzanne Blier. They were so excited to be in the room with each other, that the six of us, as grad students, we just sat there and listened for a good chunk of the time. So I think it was incredibly exciting and overwhelming all at once.

Fredrick Harris: Yeah. These were major figures in, um, philosophy with, uh, Appiah, the study of religion, African American religion, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, everybody knows Cornell West, [laughter] and Henry Louis Gates, and there were many others, and so that must have been an exceptional experience. I understand you also spent time as an instructor at Medgar Evers college in Brooklyn.

Josef Sorett: Yeah.

Fredrick Harris: After completing classes at Harvard, but before finishing your dissertation. Can you speak on your experience working at a community college, and what, if anything did you learn from that experience?

Josef Sorett: Yeah, Medgar Evers, I taught there for two years, as well, as in fact, before I started teaching there, I was leading a research project that was evaluating a Master’s degree program run by New York Theological Seminary in Sing Sing Prison for now over 30 years um, which is its own interesting story in its own right. I ended up in New York cause my spouse had gotten a job and so I followed, reluctantly, to New York City while I was writing my proposal, in fact, commuting for the first year, still TF-ing up at Harvard. It was a faculty member at another university who had been supportive throughout the way, Tony Pinn, at Rice University,

Fredrick Harris: Oh right! Right, right.

Josef Sorett: who you know, who, right, does a really interesting, has led a range of interesting work on Black humanism, edited one of the first books on hip hop and religion in a scholarly lens. He had been a resource to me throughout and he connected me with someone at the College because he knew I was trying to find work and stop commuting back and forth to Cambridge. and so I ended up, within a week, meeting with the president, who pitched this research project to me and then offered me a teaching job that wouldn’t totally take me away from writing my dissertation. And at first it was really a dream come true, right? Because it was a space, as one who entered graduate school because I really, in addition to doing the scholarly work, wanted my work to be in service to community off campus, right, saw the opportunity as a space to leverage the resources of, uh, the university in service, uh, to community, it, it represented all of that under one house. Folks often joke about Medgar Evers being the biggest Black church in Brooklyn, in the sense that, right, it’s a public university, part of the City University of New York, but it’s also a historically Black university, founded in the 1960s-70s, because of demands and protests to put part of the City University system in the, this historically Black neighborhood, right.

Fredrick Harris: That’s interesting. I didn’t know that.

Josef Sorett: And so it was all under one roof. At the same time, it also was a space where I really learned how to teach, right? Where, at Harvard, as a TA, you could make a set of assumptions around, how much time students could give to a text, you show up in the room with a sort of basic plan, “We’re going to talk about, uh, whatever was on the syllabus of what I was teaching.” and there was not much space or time given to pedagogy. I was sort of forced to rethink that and relearn to write syllabi in a different kind of way and have a sense of “By the end of this semester, I want my students to know these three, four, five things.” And that kind of deliberateness was not something that was part of my PhD training.

Fredrick Harris: Right. I want to shift gears now and talk about your scholarship. Your first book, Spirit in the Dark, came out of your doctoral dissertation, which focused on religion and the Black literary tradition. As one reviewer describes this book, “Josef Sorett takes us into those Black literary spaces that have heretofore been described as secular and reveals how those who reside therein imagine the beautiful in light of the religious.” And he continues: “From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement, Sorett pushes the boundaries of our understanding of the workings of the spirit and in doing so, unsettles our understanding of Black religion and literature.” Now the title of this book, “Spirit in the Dark,” is from a gospel song famously performed by Aretha Franklin. I know this ‘cause I’ve been to many church services over the years and I love Aretha Franklin. Tell us, Josef, what is your book, Spirit in the Dark, about?

Josef Sorett: I mean the book basically tries to offer a literary history of African American religion, right? And so at one hand is looking at how ideas about the Black church and a variety of ideas about spirit and a range of other religious traditions have animated the Black literary tradition, right? And, and this is in the face of often a claim about Black literature across the 20th century as being modern, secular sort of a move away from traditional religious mores within the context of Black church, right, falling across this sort of sacred/secular divide. You have religion over here and then you have literature as occupying the secular; yet, to make that kind of claim, and this is not just of Black American literature, one really has to ignore the primary sources. And so what the book tries to do is map out the range of ways in which a variety of religious ideas, practices, institutions, under a variety of rubrics from the religious to sacred, to spiritual, what have you, have been front and center across the period from the 1920s to the 1970s in a range of Black literary sources.

Fredrick Harris: Great. So now you have a forthcoming book, a follow up to Spirit in the Dark, um, that expands and builds on the arguments of your first book. It’s called The Holy Holy Black: The Ironies of an African American Secular. What is that book about?

Josef Sorett: I’m still wrestling with the, the title here,

Fredrick Harris: [laughter] Okay.

Josef Sorett: It’s the- it’s in with the editor, it’s done, it’ll be out before the end of this year, I’m told, the supply chain willing. One of the things I suggest in the book in, in Spirit in the Dark, that I don’t feel I fully followed through on is this idea of the persistent centrality of Afro-Protestantism, right, which is to say the centrality of the Black church. And so what this second book, The Holy Holy Black, which may become Black as a Church, really does is grapple with the ways in which Christianity remains central, and to do this, begin with an account of the slave narratives. So there’s a continuation of this literary lens, but across the four chapters, moves to think about Black social movements at the turn of the 20th century and Black scholarship. So from literature, to activism, to scholarship: look at the ways in which religious orthodoxy and really Christian orthodoxy and racial authenticity, the sort of pairing of orthodoxy and authenticity, have remained entangled in different sort of ways that help to illustrate how Christianity remains central to the sort of discursive logic of Blackness.

Fredrick Harris: Mmm. So, does it matter which Protestants that you’re, Black Protestants you’re speaking of, is it AME is this the same as being Baptist or …?

Josef Sorett: Absolutely. This is a great question and so I want to say yes and no, right?

Fredrick Harris: [laughter] Okay.

Josef Sorett: Certainly, there is a— I mean the focus of this project, while Spirit in the Dark gives a good deal of attention to Catholicism and a tradition of Black Catholicism that is also present in the literary tradition, this book is about Christianity more broadly, but also in particular, a Protestant iteration of Christianity that in cases takes on particular denominational iterations, but is also part of a larger sort of Protestant formation, right? So, uh, the, the story in the slave narratives, uh, like hones in, on a particular kind of Protestantism that’s being worked out to manage and maintain the, a set of, uh, religious differences, both within Christianity, but also, uh, with an eye towards indigenous religions and, uh, Afri- both in the Americas and in the African continent. Um, and then in the, the, the question around denominationalism perhaps comes to the fore most, uh, sharply in the second chapter that focuses on the set of social movements at the turn of the 20th century, right? On one hand, you have the World Parliament of Religions, where you have Black Unitarians and Black AME folk, uh, who are, uh, speaking at the World Parliament of Religions, which is largely a liberal Protestant project that brings together east and west and figures Black Christians in a particular way as somehow inside, but outside at the same time. This period is also the advent of American Pentecostalism, right? And, and we would see the subsequent rise of the Black, uh, the, the Church of Christ Holiness and the Church of God in Christ, which you mentioned at the earlier in our conversation. And so, you see different Black denominational responses, to the problem of social difference, whether it’s religious difference in the Parliament of social, uh, Parliament of World Religions or racial difference, right, it’s- this is the moment in which the problem of the color line is diagnosed by Dubois. And right, this is the moment in which Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” becomes the law of the land. So, part of what that chapter’s trying to illustrate is the different ways in which Black liberal Protestants, as we might think of them or Black mainline Protestants, Black Baptists and Methodists, but also Black Pentecostal folk, who are often not seen as part of the literary ferment of that, uh, moment, the Black literary ferment of the turn of the 20th century, are responding, uh, to the problem of religious and racial difference in different ways. Yeah, so I try to attend to this denomination, the, the sort of varieties of difference within Christianity and Black enactments of a particular kind of Christian faith, but also capturing the ways in which a particular kind of Afro-Protestantism emerges over time and space as normative.

Fredrick Harris: Right. So you’re also the author of a new volume of edited essays that explore the politics of sexuality within Black churches and the communities they serve. Um, the book is, is titled The Sexual Politics of Black Churches, and it brings together an interdisciplinary roster of scholars and practitioners to analyze the politics of sexuality in Black communities. I know you’ve convened conferences over the years on topics related to the edited volume. Is the edited volume a result of those exchanges you’ve organized over the years?

Josef Sorett: Absolutely. The longer history of this project was a study that I was invited to lead while doing research in the non-prof world in graduate school, in the wake of Proposition Eight, the first iteration of Prop Eight in California, which was passed on the same day that, right, Obama was elected president, which, in opposition to same sex marriage.

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Josef Sorett: And there was a particular concern with Black churches and how they figured as perhaps the source of that opposition; of course, much research has been done to complicate that narrative. But following that study, the foundation that supported that project was asked to convene a group of folks to help think through, right, how- what are the better ways or more generative, productive ways to think about how Black churches are a part of a set of lash- national deliberations around a shifting, uh, what we might think of as a shifting sexual order as, right, debates around same sex marriage were turning towards a lens to, uh, the movement for marriage equality, so, right, where Black churches fit in in national deliberations, but also the sort of internal cultural politics of Black churches, right. So, what was the relationship between, say, electoral politics and the cultural politics of Black churches, in particular around questions of gender and sexual difference. And so, in the summer of 2010, brought together a group of about 15 to 20 scholars and religious leaders for a gathering here in New York City; first, uh, a public panel up at Union Theological Seminary, and then a, a more of a closed door conversation at which, very early versions of almost every chapter, uh, in the book were presented. And the folks were very kind, over years, to turn them in, impatient with me, as it took time to shepherd it through the editing process, and at least one person dropped out, one person added. And so this collected volume that is now out as of last week, officially.

Fredrick Harris: Congratulations!

Josef Sorett: -it’s sold out on Amazon! Thank you.

Fredrick Harris: Oh really! Wow.

Josef Sorett: New copies have to come in. And the book itself tries to, um, bring together developments within a set of disciplines, but also developments in the sort of public discourse.

Fredrick Harris: I would like to pivot and talk about your teaching experience at Columbia. You have a reputation for teaching several popular courses on campus. So let’s start with the introduction to African American and African Diaspora studies. I’ve seen nearly a hundred students or more taking that class. How is that experience for you?

Josef Sorett: Yeah, that—I don’t want to sound too biased—I think it’s fair to say it’s probably my favorite, although the hip hop class that I’ve been teaching for the last couple years is also in that space. You know, my PhD was in African American studies, it was really an exciting opportunity when what was then the Institute for Research in African American Studies, invited me to teach the course, it may have been while you were director.

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Josef Sorett: So it was an opportunity to sort of think about where the course was, what purpose it served in the department as a kind of gateway, and also what purpose it served in the broader life of the College and the University and the range of students that end up in the class, as over time, it went from being elective, that was sort of self-selected, right? Sort of preaching to the choir. And then it became part of the Global Core, still a lecture, but really foregrounding, uh, primary sources, and it also gave me an opportunity, right, at the time, right, because there isn’t a PhD program in, in African American studies, to work with a range of graduate students alongside the ones that I have had the chance to work with in Religion, on questions in the field of African American studies. I think it’s been an exciting space of exchange, to think about questions around the Core, to think about questions in the contemporary discourse around race and the Black experience, and to think about the field of African American studies, both with undergrads and the graduate students who’ve served as TAs over the year and have helped me update and reimagine the syllabus multiple times.

Fredrick Harris: So you also teach two popular courses on religion and music, one, “Gospel Music in Modern America” and the other, “Religion and the History of Hip Hop,” which I think you just referenced a few minutes ago. Each course comes with a playlist, I understand.

Josef Sorett: [laughter]

Fredrick Harris: Can you tell our listeners what motivated you to teach classes on religion and music and why it is important to develop a playlist to complement the course syllabi?

Josef Sorett: This is a great question, Fred, in some ways it comes full circle to where we began, right? Thinking about praise and worship and hip hop as part of my own biography. I taught this class for the first time, I think, in 2017. And, at which point, there had just been a recent album to come out, by a Chicago-based rapper, which happens to also be the birthplace of modern gospel music, right? Who brought together the genres of praise and worship, gospel music, and hip hop, in ways that blurred the boundaries. And this, of course, I’m talking about Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book album, and finally, that sort of pushed me over and I said, I’m, you know, “I’m going to teach this class.” And it’s also part of a project that I had been thinking about, and a book that is in the process of being written. The playlists themselves were always a part of the music, right. This course took on a different form last summer, when I taught both these courses back-to-back as part of the Summer Experience. Originally, the playlist was much more organically tied to what students brought to class, right? Every week, we had a listening party, so there was a part of the class that was my lecture that kind of situated the class, not only the music, but the sort of history, politics, and religious context of the decade, the course would move chronologically from the early seventies to the present. So I would lecture and then there’d be a listening party where students would make selections based on hip hop during a particular decade, right? So they kind of mapped out a playlist. And then last summer, I curated a series of public events to go with the two courses I was teaching in the summer, “The History of Gospel Music” one, and then “The Religious History of Hip Hop” one. And there, I had the, again, privilege of working with an incredible undergrad, Malik Johnson, right, senior here in the College, who helped to curate these playlists, which drew upon the songs that had been selected by students in classes in previous iterations. And then we made that available to go alongside the series of public conversations that I was able to host a group of colleagues at other institutions to join me for an hour-long conversation, about five songs they selected, right, that also became part of the playlist that would help those who joined us think about religion in hip hop during the seventies, eighties, I think we did seventies and eighties, then nineties, and 2000s and then the 2010 forward. And we had a separate playlist to also think historically about the evolution of gospel music.

Fredrick Harris: So, Professor, this is my last question. Professor Sorett is not only known for popular courses on campus, he’s also known for wearing very dapper bow ties.

Josef Sorett: Oh! No! No! [laughter]

Fredrick Harris: I’ve seen Professor Sorett wearing bow ties for just about every occasion, and I have to say, when we greeted each other at the Journalism building about an hour ago, I didn’t almost recognize you because you’re not wearing a bow tie.

Josef Sorett: That’s funny. You know what? It’s, uh, [laughter] I have worked, uh, regular neck ties back into my repertoire.

Fredrick Harris: Could you tell us: where does this deep devotion to wearing bow ties come from?

Josef Sorett: I’m going to tell you an origin story for my own bow tie. Well, I’m going to tell you multiple origin stories. I don’t know why, in sixth grade with my three-piece suit, I wore, uh, a bow tie to my graduation, uh, from the little private school I attended for two years on Beacon Hill in Boston, Massachusetts.

Fredrick Harris: Okay.

Josef Sorett: But I did, right? So that one would say it was part of the makeup even then. But while a junior at Oral—I don’t know if I’ve told you this story elsewhere—while, uh, I was a junior at Oral Robert University, Spike Lee’s biopic,

Fredrick Harris: Uh-huh.

Josef Sorett: Uh, of Malcolm X came out,

Fredrick Harris: Huh.

Josef Sorett: And a group of us, uh, Black male students at Oral Roberts University, where, again, roughly 20 to 25% of the student population in the early nineties at Oral Roberts was Black, uh, in the Black diaspora, but certainly significantly higher than any other non-HBCU in the country, right?

Fredrick Harris: Yeah, didn’t know that.

Josef Sorett: Um, we all, a group of us, significant group of us, decided we were going to wear bow ties, uh, in celebration of the release of this film. It was not well received on campus. Um, we’ll just say that.

Fredrick Harris: [laughter] Really. Okay.

Josef Sorett: But that sort of reintroduced the bow tie to me. And then, at Charles Street, the bow tie was a sort of mark of distinction. Now I will admit that when I entered graduate school at Harvard, wearing the bow tie meant something different.

Fredrick Harris: Right.

Josef Sorett: But I [laughter] I was not trying to conjure image of the stodgy old Ivy League professor.

Fredrick Harris: Uh-huh.

Josef Sorett: Um, but, uh, maybe I’ve grown into that, maybe that’s why I’m a little more reluctant to wear it now. I haven’t, I’ll have to think a little bit, uh, more about why I have moved away from the bow tie as of late, but I still have plenty that, uh, I still do bring out, depending on the occasion.

Fredrick Harris: Yeah. So, I actually have somewhat of a similar story.

Josef Sorett: Uh oh!

Fredrick Harris: When I was a graduate student living in Chicago, I worked part-time as a researcher at the Chicago Urban League, which, for our listeners is an old line, traditional civil rights organization. I would take the L train, or the elevated train for those who are not familiar with the subway system in Chicago. I would take it to 47th street, heart of the South side of Chicago. Now friends warned me about being careful walking in the neighborhood because it was deemed unsafe to do so for people who weren’t from the neighborhood. During those years I wore bow ties, because the preppy look was in style and I wanted to be in style, apparently. And so I would get off the L stop at 47th street, walk West down to Indiana Street to the offices of the Chicago Urban League. Along the way, I noticed that people were very deferential and nice to me.

Josef Sorett: [laughter]

Fredrick Harris: usually offering a smile and a “Good morning!” or a “Good afternoon!” depending what time of the day it was. And so, as someone who grew up in the deep South, in Georgia, this behavior seemed normal to me cause people always spoke to you on the street. But I did not realize what was up until one day,

Josef Sorett: [laughter] I know where you’re going.

Fredrick Harris: A stranger greeted me with “as-salāmu ʿalaykum.”

Josef Sorett: wa ʿalaykumu s-salām, Fred, wa ʿalaykumu s-salām.

Fredrick Harris: Which, for our listeners, who are not familiar with this phrase, this is Arabic, and it means “Peace be unto you.” And it’s associated with the Nation of Islam. And so I never had any problems, I worked at the Chicago Urban League, taking the subway for many years and people were nice to me. And so, I think there’s a lesson in this somewhere, Professor Josef: bow ties can give one superpowers. [laughter]

Josef Sorett: Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. Very contextually specific. I had the exact opposite experience when I brought that bow tie back to the multi-cultural evangelical church.

Fredrick Harris: Oh!

Josef Sorett: Where I was told that I was trying, you know, “Who you trying to be? Malcolm X?”

Fredrick Harris: Oh! That’s interesting!

Josef Sorett: Absolutely. They have superpowers that can cut in multiple directions.

Theme outro music

Fredrick Harris: [laughter] Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Professor Josef Sorett.

Josef Sorett: Thanks for having me, Dean Harris. I had a great time as well.The Dean’s Table is produced by Eric Meyer, with production assistance by Jack Reilly. Our technical engineers are A.J. Mangone, Airiayana Sullivan, and John Weppler. Our researchers are Emma Flaherty and Angeline Lee. Our logo design is by Jessica Lilien, episode portraits are by Cat Willett, and our theme music is by Imperial. I’m your host, Dean Harris.