Religious Studies

Using the example of the wartime writings of Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich (Transylvania, 1863–1944), the author examines how traditionally oriented thinkers approached the problems posed by the Nazi persecutions of the Jews during World War II. The author argues that the notion of paradigmatic thinking is helpful in describing
ultra-Orthodox responses to the Holocaust as it aptly captures the fundamental premise behind the interpretive perspective that enabled these thinkers to uphold the traditional understanding of theodicy and the covenantal relationship between God and Israel.

Richard L. Rubenstein who initiated the American debate about theological consequences of the Holocaust with the publication of After Auschwitz in 1966 is best known for his claim that God was dead. This proclamation of God’s demise is usually understood as a result of reasoning that includes the occurrence of the Holocaust among its premises. In the article, the author presents an alternative interpretation. Analyzing Rubenstein’s early essays, the author argues that his rejection of theodicy as traditionally construed and of the notion of God as the Lord of History should rather be read as a part of Rubenstein’s critique of “ghetto Judaism”—Judaism born in tragic and anomalous circumstances of exile, containing intrinsically problematic ideas of God, divine providence and divine election. Heavily influenced by Existentialism in general and by Paul Tillich’s rejection of traditional theism in particular, Rubenstein believed that traditional Judaism had outlived its purpose. In Rubenstein’s thought, Auschwitz—and those interpretations of the Holocaust that attempted to place it within the parameters of traditional vocabulary and covenantal framework—the author submits, serves primarily as the most glaring example of the bankruptcy of “ghetto Judaism” and its God. It is not, however, the reason of this God’s death and Rubenstein’s argument is logically independent of the fact of the Holocaust.

In this series with the Bulletin, we have asked 21 early career scholars to weigh in on Russell McCutcheon’s Theses on Professionalization, first published in 2007. In his 21 theses, McCutcheon offers advice to young scholars entering (or soon to enter) the job market, addressing the all-to-important (but often overlooked) question of professionalization. Each of the contributors in this series has been asked to comment on a single thesis, addressing its contemporary relevance, and how it relates to their own experience moving forward in the academic world.

"Playin’ Church will examine the presentations of Christian black secular musicians in televised tributes to gospel music. How do these musicians make a distinction between performance (secular) and demonstration (Christian sacred) in their presentation of sacred music? In what ways are gendered images incorporated into gospel to convey a performer’s competency?
In Rev. Shirley Caesar’s 80s gospel song “I remember momma in a happy way,”she recounted her childhood conversion experience, while “playin’ church” in the yard with her family members. “Playin’ church” is an expression that chastises the lack of authenticity within the black Christian lifestyle. She establishes her mother as an iconic endorsement figure to verify true conversion. Since the 1990s, Rev. Caesar has become a fixture in many award shows and celebrations of black Christian music. A trailblazer in
traditional gospel music, her presence as a soloist, or in ensembles, remains as an endorsement of authenticity for Christian musicians in gospel music and Christian
musicians in secular music who participate in gospel tributes. The mixture of these two groups, often opens up a conversation about “playin’ church” that occurs in both groups but is evaluated intensely in this mixed setting. Using Rev. Caesar’s “playin’ church” experience and other current Christian black musicians reflections, we examine Y’anna Crawley and Fantasia’s performance on BET, in which they utilize mother figures to
demonstrate competency as gospel solo artists."

Based on the Song of Solomon, Bishop T.D. Jakes released the Sacred Love Songs (1999) album, marketing the charismatic Christian mood music as “gospel” songs with the most “romantic and poetic texts ever written.”  Unlike R&B and soul baritone-bass “mood music” high priests Teddy Pendergrass and Barry White, Jakes is a preacher who narrates intermittently throughout the album in a manner resembling a Divine blessing on the marital bed. He embodies the iconic voice of God cuing the act of co-creation. By doing so, Jakes establishes bass timbres as the conventional sound for facilitation of sexual healing for Christian believers. Jakes collaborated with popular R&B and gospel soprano, alto, and tenor singers such as Tamar Braxton, Shirley Murdock, Jesse Powell, and Marvin Sapp. According to one iTunes reviewer, the music was “as healing as it is entertaining, Sacred Love Songs encourages men and women to love each other in God’s way with heartfelt musical messages.” Even though this album was promoted as pressing boundaries by addressing the intersection of love and spiritual issues, it re-asserts the permissible arrangements for specific Christian’s sexual and sensual exploration using gospel music: heterosexual and partnered within marriage. Sacred Love Songs is one of several recordings by gospel artists that seek to provide (non-) Christian couples with sexual healing through listening to music, while simultaneously excluding a large Christian population that is negotiating sexual desire outside of permissible arrangements for sex.  As I researched the genre’s reception, there is no exploration of a virgin, celibate, queer, or sensual listening to and feeling of gospel music to deepen love and spirituality. Furthermore, there is no consideration of the pleasure vocalists may derive while providing forms of musical sexual healing.
Within the twenty-first century historically Black Pentecostal settings where gospel music is performed, there is a longstanding tradition of presenting songs and delivering sermons that promote sexual abstinence among unmarried individuals, encouraging them to wait to have sex until they get married. Essential prescriptions for maintaining chastity in the “Worth the Wait” movement extend into this sphere, including teachings that Christian believers should guard their hearts, minds, and “gates” (i.e. ear and eyes) from sexually suggestive or erotic contemplation, pornographic entertainment, and self-pleasure through masturbation. And thus, single people are technically banned from consuming the Sacred Love Song album. Yet, undoubtedly, Pentecostals are using music to have sex outside of marriage. As such, the question is induced: are there ways in which believers explore sexual healing through gospel music in a non-heterosexual, single manner? Moreover, what might we learn about the pleasure derived from the combination of the sonic and somatic dimensions of gospel music making?
Following Black men’s narratives about singing gospel, I contend that sexual abstinence discourses obscure the alternative forms of sensual and sexual exploration occurring in gospel music participation. Noticing the religio-cultural fixation on sexual abstinence rhetorics, many religious scholars have focused on the ways in which such teachings foster anxieties about the meanings and implications generated from the use of the body for pleasure and arousal. However, in my research on Black men’s performance of sexuality in gospel music, I have found a music-centered contradiction to these sexual abstinence teachings. In the vocal pedagogical language and imagery that voice teachers and directors deploy to teach “good singing,” mentors make references to sensations perceived in the genitalia and other erogenous zones so that the vocalist can achieve “supported” breathing and ideal “placement” in the production of vibrant sound, also known as resonance. Black male performers are encouraged to draw from their sexual experience and/or imagination to simulate sensed and sung sexual climax while simultaneously using sonic iconicity and resonance to evoke transcendence in listeners during the facilitation of public worship. Further, outside of Black church music academies, these male musicians have encountered non-Black instructors’ use of similar sexually suggestive and vulgar pedagogical imagery that is problematically derived from essentialist perceptions of Black men, emphasizing their physical attributes and sexual prowess over physical sensations and spiritual vitality.
While examining ethnography in Washington, D.C., of Charles Anthony Bryant’s performance of “I Give You Praise” as a musical tribute to Richard Smallwood, and interviews with male gospel vocalists and preachers, I consider gospel music as an embodied sexual activity in which vocalists simultaneously experience and surrogate pleasure as an essential, unspoken feature of worship leadership. In this ethnomusicological research, I expand on ethnomusicology, vocal pedagogy, phonology, religious studies, and musicological research on gender and sexuality in other genres pioneered by scholars such as Susan McClary, Suzanne Cusick, and Philip Brett in order to analyze gospel music making and Christian worship participation as sex.
With attention to the ways in which men speak about music making while in the predominantly male gospel music networks, singing gospel is a multi-sensory, sexual activity engaging the listener with musical semiotics, memory, iconicity, and embodied resonance inscriptions. Inspired by the climactic phrase of the refrain in “I Give You Praise,” the following questions are examined in this presentation: In what ways do Black male gospel musicians perceive their vocal sound and embodiment as a dwelling place, a construction of habitation, and a safe space that facilitates spiritual, physical, or even sexual transcendence through worship in ways that resemble an orgasmic experience? To what extent do Black male musicians tap into modes of eroticism to inform their facilitation of worship? More to the point, how might virgin, celibate, queer, or sensual believers feel pleasure through gospel music participation?
To analyze the sonic-somatic pleasure derived from gospel music making, I consider vocalists’ musical production, hearing, and feeling the music as performers and audience. I begin by describing the premise of the musical event and its context honoring consummate gospel composer Richard Smallwood. I explain the composer’s significance among gospel musicians, focusing on the two male vocalists B.Slade  and Charles Anthony Bryant, who honored Smallwood and embody two performances of popular masculinity. For them and many other musicians, Smallwood is a muse who exemplifies the weaving of gospel and European art music traditions. B.Slade embodies the complexities surrounding the reception of self-identified gay musicians in gospel music by presenting the sonic and gestural domains that have been attributed to queerness. In contrast, Charles Anthony Bryant’s persona challenges gospel audiences’ assumptions about what queer potential or identity looks and sounds like with regard to vocal classification and comportment. Since Bryant’s performs against the gospel vocalist stereotype, I analyze the ways in which he intentionally uses his body to produce sound. As a result of this close analysis, I uncovered the ways in which musicians’ bodily experiences of pleasure are triggered strategically to produce consistent and balanced sound for many vocalists. With attention to the assumptions stemming from heteropatriarchal constructs of gender and sexuality expression in historically Black Protestant congregations and gospel music spheres, I summarize the constellation of symbolic meaning derived from the male musical functions, space, vocal range, bodily experience, and in setting the mood for the worship experience. I conclude by returning to the initial ethnographic sketch to demonstrate the dimensions of vocal production and how the activity moves the singer and participants, supporting the long held sense that there are both latent and intentional meanings and intimacies that are cultivated in vocal performance.
Informed by womanist and feminist modes of analysis, I conduct this research through the lens of what Black feminist bell hooks calls an oppositional gaze of Black male musicians (Black Looks 1992), as a formally trained, cisgender woman preacher, musician, and researcher who is sexually and non-sexually attracted to men. I must admit that whenever I present my research on Black men’s worship, I do so with critical affirmation of a tradition that I respect and critique.

In 1995, Grammy Award nominated gospel vocalist Pastor Daryl Coley consented to an interview with Gospel Today’s editor Teresa Hairston for an article entitled, “The California-born gospel singer overcoming homosexuality and diabetes.” It is the earliest music industry account of a gospel vocalist claiming to no longer be homosexual through spiritual “deliverance.” Within historically Black Pentecostal churches that showcase gospel musicians, “deliverance” traditionally refers to a release from physical ailments and perceived spiritual afflictions such as diabetes or homosexuality.  While deliverance characterizes various types of healing through spiritual work, many Black gospel music fans deploy the term in a gendered and sexualized manner, referring to a man’s struggle to resist homosexuality. Moreover, the notion of deliverance is promoted through men’s testimonies about becoming heterosexual with what they believe is God’s help. Male vocalists’ overrepresentation in these public accounts of spiritual “healing” from homosexuality reinscribe the stereotype within historically Black Pentecostal churches that to be involved in vocal music ministry is a queering act. Conversely, women’s deliverance narratives are unlikely to be distributed due in part to the socio-cultural fixation on protecting established constructions of Black masculinity.

Expanding upon my previous research about the perceptions of Black male vocal participation as queer (2016), this talk explores the sonic qualities of Black men’s public renouncement of their gay identity through deliverance testimonies. In a culture where homosexuals are often regulated to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” social agreement, the testimonies of men delivered from homosexuality conform to what feminist writer Adrienne Rich called compulsory heterosexuality (1960). While deploying ethnomusicological, phonological, linguistic, critical race, and gender studies analysis, I examine these delivered believers’ coded and textured performances of orality in Pentecostal worship: virtuosic singing, “speaking in other tongues,” preaching, and preaching-singing. Educing from musician’s narratives and recordings since Pastor Daryl Coley’s self-disclosure, their accounts prompt (non-)verbal communication about what constitutes legitimate and sustained deliverance.

Chapter under review for Gregory Melchor-Barz and William Cheng's edited volume on Music and Queerness.

Gospel musicians have recorded several food-related songs about southern and soul foods such as Tye Tribbett’s live performances of “There Will Be Chicken After Church” and Here II Praise’s “Chicken Song” (1998).  Through Tribbett, Here II Praise and others' performances about church and food consumption, we find illustrations of the ways in which traditional food metaphors in gospel repertoire symbolize the formation of Christian community. However, in the Truthettes’ gospel performance of “Peanut Butter and Jelly,” I explore the ways in which the humble, portable food metaphor is another aspect of African American Christian community building and sustenance. The Truthettes perform spiritual transformation by using the meanings generated by a food metaphor -- a symbol from which a Christian believer may fast or more specifically, for which they involuntarily lose their appetite, demonstrating belonging and entry into African American church families.

In this moment, we, the daughters of the African diaspora, Chamurro African American, Hawaiian African American, African American Samoan, African American Kiribati and African American move from being peoples characterized by loss and dispersion to people defined by convening our own reunions.

Through multi-media, harmful and imprecise depictions of women of African descent are rapidly crisscrossing the planet, shaping popular perceptions of their intellectual capacity in their absence. These stereotypes are simply imprecise. You see, for quite some time women of African descent have been frequently misrepresented in music and culture as being irrational, shallow, and unkind, especially when we are challenged by each other in heated debates. In fact, one of the most insidious circulated and internalized stereotypes is that women of African descent are given to same sex rivalry along the lines of hue, color, mixed race parentage, socio-economic status and education status, mental and personality disorders. Yet, here we are in the US territory of Guam to affirm that Black Lives Matter around the globe.

We submit our lives to explore the complexity of our myriad identities and connections as practitioner-scholars, whose lives have been inscribed and are read for the tensions surrounding post-colonialism. Therefore, it is a transgressive, political, and pedagogical act for women of the African diaspora to be visible as we invite each other to sharpen, to borrow from Anna Julia Cooper, “in the quiet, undisputed dignity of our womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage” in intellectual spaces and conference settings such as the joint Pacific History Association (PHA) conference and International Council of Traditional Music (ICTM) symposium.

In the ethnomusicology of Africana music and sound, the discourse has been conceptually organized around diaspora or the forced migration of people of African descent, with a focus on their routes across one body of water, commonly referred to in the African diaspora literature as the Black Atlantic.  This Black Atlantic emphasis further isolates our already scattered communities of African descent that have extended beyond the Atlantic into the Pacific through both voluntary and forced dispersions. This imagined isolation and distance works to disjoint the body politic of Africana people who are catching hell around the globe along gender, sexuality, and hued lines. And thus, these fragmented communities are less likely to implicate the hegemonic powers that be, which oppress women as well...