Anthony B. Pinn

Anthony B. Pinn is an American scholar of religion whose career has centered on African American religious thought, black humanism, and the theological consequences of taking suffering seriously.

Born on 2 May 1964, Pinn earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1986 and a Ph.D. His dissertation examined the problem of evil in African American religious thought, a preoccupation that has driven his work ever since. He taught at Macalester College from 1995 to 2003 before moving to Rice University, where he holds the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professorship in the Humanities and a concurrent appointment in Religious Studies. He’s also the founding director of the Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning in Houston and serves as Director of Research for the Institute for Humanist Studies in Washington, D.C.

Pinn’s central argument, developed across more than thirty books, is that black religion can’t be reduced to the church, and that the church can’t be absolved of its complicity in making suffering bearable rather than ending it. In Why Lord? he wrote that religious answers to life’s meaninglessness “promote an embracing of suffering which reinforces life’s meaninglessness rather than ending it.” His Varieties of African American Religious Experience (1999) pushed further, arguing that human communities are complex enough to require a genuine plurality of religious traditions, including non-theistic ones. For Pinn, humanism isn’t the absence of religion. It’s a religion in the sense Gordon Kaufman meant: a framework that orients life and motivates action. There’s something clarifying about that move. Traditions that insist on theism as the price of admission end up policing the very communities they claim to serve, and Pinn won’t pay that toll.

His 2014 memoir Writing God’s Obituary: How a Good Methodist Became a Better Atheist brought this argument into the first person, tracing his journey from Methodist upbringing to self-described non-theist. Later work extended his range: Kendrick Lamar and the Making of Black Meaning reads hip-hop as a site of serious theological inquiry, and The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology, which he edited, remains a standard reference in the field. He can’t easily be placed, he’s too secular for many theologians and too theological for many secularists, which is probably where the most honest thinking happens.