Religious Studies Program's 2025 Roetzel Lecture, "The Rhythm of Life: Thoughts on What Music Tells Us About Religion"

Highlighting personal narrative, this talk explores how music has informed and influenced my scholarship on the nature and meaning of religion over the past three decades. By extension, I argue that there are dimensions of religion (and its relationship to meaning making) and the study of religion that open up to us and become more vibrant when viewed in relationship to cultural production such as music. In a word, the study of religion shouldn’t isolate us from the workings of our social world, but rather it should help us better understand what we respond to and produce in/through the workings of that social world.

Anthony B. Pinn is currently the Agnes Cullen Arnold Distinguished Professor of Humanities and professor of religion at Rice University. Pinn is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Professor Extraordinarius at the University of South Africa. Pinn is the founding director of the Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning (CERCL) at Rice University. In addition, he is Director of Research for the Institute for Humanist Studies – a Washington, DC-based think tank. Pinn’s research interests include religion and culture; black religious thought; humanism; and Hip Hop culture. He is the author/editor of over 35 books, including The Black Practice of Disbelief (Beacon, 2024), Deathlife: Hip Hop and Thanatological Narrations of Blackness (Duke, 2024), and Interplay of Things: Religion, Art, and Presence Together (Duke, 2021). 

Presented by the Religious Studies Program, Co-sponsored by the Department of African American and African Studies, the School of Music, and the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature.