There’s an important but underappreciated dimension in The Souls of Black Folk, one of the most well-known books by W.E.B. Du Bois. Anthony Pinn, MDiv ’89, calls it “the problem soul.”
Pinn, the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and Professor of religion at Rice University, will detail this topic while delivering the William James Lecture at HDS on Thursday, March 9, at 5:15 pm. His lecture is titled “The Problem Soul and Life without Appeal.”
Pinn is the author/editor of more than 35 books, including The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era; Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion, and Noise and Spirit: Rap Music’s Religious and Spiritual Sensibilities. He is also director of research for the Institute for Humanist Studies, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.
Prior to his talk on campus, Pinn discussed “the problem soul” and his interest in religion and culture.
HDS: What is “the problem soul”?
AP: The problem soul is a dimension of Du Bois’ understanding of the twentieth century cultural climate and historical moment. It gives us a sense of an African American posture toward the condition of life in the twentieth century as they related to deep anti-black racism.
HDS: How does an understanding of “the problem soul” help us interpret Du Bois’s work?
AP: It is an important but underappreciated dimension of what Du Bois wishes to communicate in his most well-known book, The Souls of Black Folk. Without understanding the problem soul, we truncate his sense of life in the twentieth century, and we fail to recognize the moralist-absurdist sensibilities that actually inform Du Bois’s thinking and “doing.”
HDS: What drew you to your work on religion and culture, specifically humanism?
AP: My interest in religion is longstanding. And, I’ve always felt culture and cultural production are significant ways in which the questions and concerns that frame religion as a quest for complex subjectivity are expressed and explored. Humanism, although often overlooked, is an important manner in which humans' wrestle with the fundamental questions of our existence. To understand both the religious and “non-religious” dynamics of human life and engagement, attention must be given to both theistic and non-theistic modes of thought and living.
—by Michael Naughton