“On the west coast of Africa, across the Middle Passage to the plantations of the U.S., the Caribbean, and Latin America, there were Africans trying to put together a cultural sensibility—a way of imagining themselves in the world, a way of critiquing their condition, and just a way of being a regular human and chronicling everyday reality, including humor, love, luck, and misfortune,” said Burnett, an assistant professor of systematic theology at Fordham. “They did a great deal of this through music.”

Burnett’s work explores how divinity emerges in Black life. He came to Fordham in 2018 after teaching in the University of Notre Dame’s Africana Studies department and Balfour-Hesburgh Scholars Program. He has shared his expertise at panels for the World Forum for Liberation Theology, the American Academy of Religion, and the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologies. This past summer, he served as a guest speaker on the podcast “We The Scenario,” where he spoke about the profound impact of his childhood church in Mississippi. 

“The Black church was very instrumental in dealing with racial oppression, but it wasn’t always so good with recognizing and celebrating the differences among human beings. It had a one-size-fits-all approach of what a human is,” Burnett said. “What I’m doing now is challenging some of the limitations in how the human is imagined in the world.”

In a Q&A with Fordham News, Burnett explains how his research and two different subjects—music and religion—harmonize together in his mind.  

You’re a systematic theologian. What does that mean? 

I try to understand and convey the relationship between God and the world from the perspective of marginalized peoples. When we look at the marginalized, we usually don’t ask them questions about what they think. Instead, as theorist Sylvia Wynter suggests, we look at the marginalized with respect to what they lack. My work critiques that. I explore how they think about the world. 

I’m particularly interested in groups marginalized by race, especially African Americans living in the U.S. I analyze the ways that they have negotiated life, despite the transatlantic slave trade, racism, segregation, and all types of contemporary injustice. One way is through music, or the sonic. As scholar of Black religion James Noel argues, Black religion emerges in the moans and shouts—the sounds—of a people trying to affirm their relation to an unspeakable experience of being turned into property and the unspeakable connection to a God (or gods), which suggest that a meaningful life way is possible.

How does music connect to religion in this context? 

Sound was important for Africans forced into slavery because it was quintessential to communication with the divine, especially in many West African traditional religions. Sound is how you communicate with the deity. It’s not just about entertainment or virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake. It has a function in communicating meaning, worship, and information. Sound also became a unifying way for enslaved Africans who could not talk to each other because they spoke different languages. They used music to communicate with each other. They developed spirituals, work songs, and slave seculars. The blues became a genre out of a transitionary cultural moment between what has been referred to as the “invisible institution” or “slave religion” and the formal institutionalization of Black American faith traditions. When the blues are read with respect to space, sound, knowledge, faith, and sensuality, we can see so much more than the musical genre that greatly influenced jazz, rock, gospel, rock and roll, pop, hip-hop, and other American musical genres. I look at this “more,” or the excess meanings in the blues, to consider how they play with, push on, and challenge theological ideas. My most recent book, Decolonizing Revelation: A Spatial Reading of the Blues (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), touches on this. 

Is there a specific music genre—perhaps gospel—where people tend to feel more closely connected to God? 

Yes. As historian Charles Long has argued, we can look to the worship practices of Black Americans as examples of how they gave meaning to their involuntary presence in the Americas, the meaning of God in light of that experience, and their ever-changing relationship with the continent of Africa. What they experienced was so tremendously terrible. It made them question the meaning of divinity. If something like this can happen, is there really any notion of the divine? Long and other scholars help us see that the answer to this question is an emphatic yes.

I read gospel music as a way of evoking and worshipping a notion of divinity that is indeed commensurate with “the agony of oppression and the freedom of all persons.” This notion of divinity is articulated through the Black American reception of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Gospels. It’s an affirmation that divinity is real—that God cares about us and that we can feel comfortable celebrating this, despite our conditions. Why? Because if you think about the gospel narrative, in the Bible, Jesus speaks to those who found themselves on the outside of love, care, and justice. 

What research are you working on right now? 

I’m exploring how the blues relate to suffering. I teach this in a course called Spirituals, the Blues, and African-American Christianity. What the blues is trying to do—and I’m thinking with scholars like Frank Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers—is to consider, in a more nuanced way, how the blues provides an alternative to the conditions that flow from anti-Black violence. While the blues are always more or less than what we might want them to be, it is clear to me that “blues people” are trying  to imagine another possible world. We see glimpses of that world in the momentary embrace of bodies swaying together on the dance floors of juke joints, in the moans and shouts of blues vocalists, in the spiritual imagination of hoodoo, and in confrontation and circumvention of the oppressive labor conditions of the Jim Crow South. As novelist James Baldwin once wrote, in the blues we find a “toughness” that makes the deep experience of pain in the U.S. articulate. However the blues, as Baldwin also wrote, does not stop with the reality of pain and anguish. It is also a representation of a deep sense of joy.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

“There’s a certain philosophical understanding of the human that doesn’t make enough room for Black and queer life. Black studies scholars and queer theorists want to dismantle this understanding in order to talk about Black and queer existence in terms that are non-negative or abject,” said Daniels. 

Daniels’ project, “Thurman’s Theory: The Mystical Life of Black Study,” examines the archives of Howard Thurman—one of the largest sets of archives of any African American scholar. Thurman was a Black spiritual activist who grew up in the Jim Crow South and later became a key mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. 

“My project attempts to show that some questions these scholars are attempting to demythologize have already been done in the mysticism of Howard Thurman—or [that]some of his mysticism allows us to approach new understandings of what it means to be human,” Daniels said.  

From ‘Tide-Shifting Cultural Moments’ to Today 

Over the next three years of fellowship funding, Daniels plans on analyzing Thurman’s recorded sermons, letters, meditations, and short essays and linking Thurman’s work to key themes in spiritual life today. Most of the works Daniels will be analyzing were written in the last decade of Thurman’s life from 1968 to 1971, after the assassination of King and during the emergence of Black studies, feminism, and gender studies in the U.S.

“I’m reading Thurman’s work at the end of his life at a particular time when many of the questions and theoretical methods that are popular now [in theology]were in their nascent stages. I’m asking, what was Thurman thinking about while these tide-shifting cultural moments were taking place and being born? And how might what he was thinking about then still be relevant to what scholars are thinking about now in its more developed stages?” Daniels said. 

Under the Ford Foundation fellowship funding, Daniels is also developing two peer-reviewed journal articles: an article that analyzes the relationship between eroticism and religion and an article that examines how Black queer Christians worldwide understand Black queer theology. 

“I am deeply interested in how my own project intersects with Black religion in general around the world. I want to think about what Black queer theology might look like because we are more connected now than ever [thanks to technology],” said Daniels, who serves as an Episcopal priest at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan. 

A Spiritual Vision That Allows People ‘To Be Their True Selves, as God Made Us’ 

On a deeper level, Daniels said his research investigates what it means to be human in relationship to God. 

“There is an attempt to nail down characteristics of what constitutes a properly human person. There are normative ideas of sexuality, gender, or what a body should look like. But they don’t allow people to be seen as dynamic—to be their true selves, as God made us,” Daniels said. “I want to develop a spiritual vision that can contend with normativity and promote dynamism.” 

His research also offers an important perspective on Black life, especially amid the Black Lives Matter movement, said Daniels’ mentor Rufus Burnett, Jr., Ph.D., assistant professor of systematic theology, who studies how divinity emerges in Black life. 

“Paul is saying there’s a different way for us to think about Black lives mattering. He’s offering the younger generation a way into the mystical through a Christian heritage that offers an alternative,” said Burnett. “He’s offering a very unique entryway to those who feel that Christianity has forgotten them.” 

The Main Takeaway

Daniels credits Fordham’s diverse theology department—a group of ethicists, theologians, and historians from the Protestant, Greek Orthodox, and Roman Catholic faiths—with helping him develop a deeper interreligious perspective. 

“Fordham’s diverse theology department allows me to cultivate the skill of listening across different disciplines and religious theological commitments and traditions,” said Daniels. 

Daniels said that the main takeaway from his fellowship research is that there’s something special—and unbreakable—within each of us. 

“There is light, imagination, vitality, and power within all of us that exceeds the limits of any political and social determination,” said Daniels, who plans on graduating from Fordham with his Ph.D. in theology in 2025. “With an abiding spiritual vision, practice, and faith, we can access that light and transform this world. Although it may not be perfect and we may not see precisely all of the things we hope to see, we need to keep the faith in our work because it comes out of a place that cannot be utterly violated by the world, that will live and move beyond us in ways that we can’t imagine.”

Suffice to say, this iconic short story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” penned by the writer Flannery O’Connor, does not end well.

On Saturday, Sept. 28, the story will be performed live at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

“Everything That Rises Must Converge: Race & Grace in Flannery O’Connor,” will pair an afternoon symposium with an evening performance of the 1964 story. The event is being hosted by Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, which in May 2018 was awarded a $450,000 grant from the Mary Flannery O’Connor Trust to support programming related to the author.

The day will begin with a panel discussion from 2 to 4 p.m. in Tognino Hall. The panel will be moderated by Curran Center associate director Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Ph.D., and will feature Rufus Burnett, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology at Fordham; Mark Chapman, Ph.D., associate professor of African American Studies at Fordham; and Karin Coonrod, a lecturer in directing at Yale University.

The symposium will be followed by a performance of the story by international theater troupe Compagnia de’ Colombari directed by Karin Coonrod, to take place in Fordham Prep’s Leonard Theatre at 7 p.m. It will be followed by a conversation with the actors.

O’Connor and Race

O’Donnell, whose forthcoming book Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor will be published next spring by Fordham University Press, said one of the reasons why this short story is so interesting is that O’Connor doesn’t paint race relations in black and white.  Instead, she creates characters who have internal complexity and who act out of mixed motivations. Everyone behaves badly, the ending of the story is tragic, and no one escapes some measure of blame.

In the story, the white woman, who has insisted her son accompany her on the bus since it was integrated, says in her conversations with him that African Americans shouldn’t mix with whites. She nevertheless engages with the son of the black woman when they sit next to them, and when she offers the boy a penny, his mother reacts with deadly fury to the white woman’s condescension.

“I’ve been teaching the story for many years, and it’s gotten more and more challenging to  discuss as the years have gone by, as we have a better sense of the tensions and dynamics that govern the relationships between African Americans and whites, both past and present,” she said.

The Myth of ‘White Innocence’

What’s complicated the task, she said, is the fact that while O’Connor possessed an ability—thanks to time spent living in the Northeast and the Midwest—to critique the white supremacy baked into the society in which she was raised, and excelled at writing about the relationship between African Americans and whites, she ultimately ascribes a quality of innocence to the benighted white woman in the story. The woman’s racism is not represented as a virulent force, based in violence and perpetuated by violence, but as a mistaken perspective.

In contrast to this, O’Donnell noted that during the same era O’Connor was writing her story, James Baldwin wrote that racial equality will only be achieved when the myth of “white innocence” is put to rest.

“That’s a concept that we in our time are getting a better handle on, but it’s not a perspective that O’Connor found compelling,” she said.

In fact, O’Donnell argues in her book that despite her best intentions, there are times when O’Connor subconsciously upholds some of the unjust racial practices of the South.

“It’s pretty clear that her sense was that the civil rights movement was very problematic, in part because of the insistence on the part of African Americans that desegregation take place immediately. For O’Connor, as for many white Southerners, the changes were happening too fast and threatened to undermine society. In addition, like most Catholics, O’Connor had a long view of history,” she said.

“[She felt that] you don’t change human nature and you don’t change society overnight by creating new laws. She thought it should be something that happens organically and slowly, and not all at once.”

The story is relevant in 2019, O’Donnell said, because it gives us an opportunity to understand how complex it was to live in that culture and in that time, to understand how fraught it was and how difficult it is for any society to change—a principle that applies to our own current cultural moment.

‘A Powerful Communal Experience’

O’Donnell attended a previous staged production of the story, which takes its dialogue verbatim from O’Connor’s pages. She said the transformation of a story read privately on the page to a drama performed publicly on the stage makes for a powerful communal experience.

“It’s a very interesting experience to witness this play, because as we are watching these characters sitting on the makeshift bus, fighting among themselves, we feel like we are on that bus, too, as it becomes a microcosm of America” she said.

“We are still fighting many of the same battles that we were fighting in 1964; they’re just no longer happening on the bus. They’re happening in other places.”

The event is free and open to the public, though registration is required. To register, visit the Curran Center’s event page.