Religion & Future Humans: Featuring Sylvester A. Johnson

On this episode of Religion &, we invited three scholars to engage in a wide-ranging conversation with Dr. Sylvester A. Johnson, a leading thinker and theorist in the field of American religion. Dr. Johnson is not only known for his contributions as a historian and theorist, but he is highly regarded as an innovator and boundary breaker who disrupts disciplines and creates spaces for emerging themes and questions amongst scholars of religion.  As the director of the Luce-funded “Future Humans, Human Futures” project, Dr. Johnson explores the intersection of religion, technology, and ethics to tackle what it means to be human in this current moment.  Philip Goff, Andrea Jain, and Leonard McKinnis joined us to interrogate and theorize alongside Dr. Johnson the futures of the humanities, surveillance, and AI and how they are all deeply impacted by religion. Engage in a conversation with Dr. Sylvester A. Johnson that promises to push boundaries, imagine new possibilities, and unpack emerging theories as we think about the future of religion and the humans that are shaped by them.

Featured Panelist: Sylvester A. Johnson

Sylvester A. Johnson is Professor of Black Studies at Northwestern University. He was appointed to hold the 2024 Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress’s Kluge Center. As a scholar of race, religion, and technology, Johnson works at the intersection of technical and humanistic stakeholders to advance more democratic, inclusive outcomes for an innovation-driven society. His research has examined religion, race, and empire in the Atlantic world; religion and sexuality; national security practices; and the impact of intelligent machines and human enhancement on human identity and systems of racial domination.

Johnson is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Africana Religions. He has authored two books: African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015 and a winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award, and The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God, published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2004, which garnered the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book Award. He also co-edited, with Steven Weitzman, The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11, published by University of California Press in 2017.

Panelist: Philip Goff

Philip Goff is Professor of History at Indiana University Indianapolis and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. His research specialization is American religious history, with eight books and over 200 articles, reviews, and scholarly papers in that area. His recent books include: Civil Religion in America: Religion and the American Nation in the Twenty-First Century (with Rhys Williams and Raymond Haberski), The Bible in American Life (with Arthur Farnsley II and Peter Thuesen), and Religion and the Marketplace in the United States (with Jan Stievermann and Detlef Junker). In addition, he is the lead co-editor of Religion & American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation.

Panelist: Andrea Jain

Andrea R. Jain, Ph.D. is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Indianapolis and research affiliate at Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute, editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and author of Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (Oxford 2014) and Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality (Oxford, 2020). She received her doctorate degree in religious studies from Rice University in 2010. Her areas of research include religion and capitalism; global spirituality and modern yoga; gender, sexuality, and religion; and theories of religion.

Panelist: Leonard C. McKinnis, II

Leonard C. McKinnis, II is Assistant Professor of Religion and Black Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a scholar of 20th century Black religious movements that spawned in the wake of the Great Migration. His first book, The Black Coptic Church: Race and Imagination in a New Religion, was published in 2023 with NYU Press. At present, McKinnis is working on an ethnographic study of the Nation of Islam. The book, tentatively titled, Everyday Muslim: Material Spirituality and Lived Religion in the Nation of Islam, investigates spirituality as material and embodied practice among Nation of Islam followers. His work has been supported by the Crossroads Fellowship, Wabash, and the American Academy of Religion.

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