Hard Gospel: Blackness, Belief, Aesthetics

The Reverend Dr. Lisa Allen is Associate Dean and Professor of Worship, Music, and Spirituality at Methodist Theological School in Ohio (MTSO). She is an ordained elder and the Coordinator of Practical Ministries for the Sixth Episcopal District of the Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church. She graduated from Millsaps College and the University of Southern Mississippi with Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Ph.D. degrees in piano and music education. She also holds the Master of Divinity degree from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. 

Dr. Allen-McLaurin’s teaching interests include spirituality and theology in worship and music, and gender issues in the Church. She has authored several books, including her most recent book, Over My Head: The Power of Ancestral Music to Future the Black Church (Cascade Books, 2025), The OneWord Worship Model: A New Paradigm for Church Worship Planning (Cascade Books, 2023), and her 2021 monograph, A Womanist Theology of Worship: Liturgy, Justice, and Communal Righteousness (Orbis Books). Dr. Allen-McLaurin has been featured as an ethnomusicologist and practical theologian in video and online journal documentaries including the 2020 People’s Voice Webby Award-winning documentary, A King’s Place: Reclaiming the Black Church’s Civil Rights Past and the 2015 Emmy-award winning documentary, Reflect, Reclaim, Rejoice: Preserving the Gift of Black Sacred Music. She is a noted composer and arranger and, in 2019 debuted her Advent cantata, Christmas is Waiting to Be Born: An Advent Cantata Inspired by the Works of Howard Thurman at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia. While on sabbatical in 2023, Dr. Allen-McLaurin served a six-month term as music director and scholar-in-residence at the American Church in Paris, France.

In addition to her work at MTSO and the CME Church, Dr. Allen-McLaurin serves on the editorial board of The Methodist Review Journal and holds memberships in the American Academy of Religion and the Society for the Study of Black Religion. She has served as a mentor with the RISE Together National Mentorship Network and is a 2018 inductee into the Morehouse College Board of Preachers.  

Dr. Allen-McLaurin is married to Thomas McLaurin and their blended family includes five children and two grandchildren.

Jessica Swanston Baker is an ethnomusicologist and associate professor of music at the University of Chicago whose work explores Caribbean popular music, listening, and postcolonial time. Her writing has appeared in Ethnomusicology, Representations, and other journals and edited volumes. Her first book, the award-winning Island Time: Speed and the Archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis (University of Chicago Press, 2024), tells the story of wylers, an up-tempo popular music from St. Kitts and Nevis, and shows how sound and speed shape modern Caribbean life.

GRAMMY-Winning artist Cory Henry has made a significant mark in the music industry, recently clinching the award for Best Roots Gospel Album in 2025 for his deeply personal project, Church. This album features contributions from his family, including his grandmother, reflecting the rich musical heritage that has shaped his artistry and resonated with audiences worldwide. Along with his Grammy-winning album, PBS aired a documentary on his life and the making of Church, providing an intimate look at his journey and creative process.

Henry’s impressive accolades also include a GRAMMY win for his collaboration with the acclaimed Spanish artist Rosalía in 2023, as well as a GRAMMY for his contributions to Kanye West’s groundbreaking album, Donda. His versatility as a musician has led him to work with a diverse array of artists, including Bruce Springsteen, Imagine Dragons, Kanye West, Stevie Wonder & more.

Originally hailing from Brooklyn, New York, Cory was a key member of the Grammy-winning group Snarky Puppy before launching his solo career in 2018 with his debut album, Art of Love. His sophomore project, Something to Say, was Grammy-nominated for Best Progressive R&B Album in 2022, showcasing his growth as an artist. He followed up with Operation Funk in 2023, and his live album, Live at the Piano, received a nomination in 2024.

In 2024, while touring with the legendary Stevie Wonder, Henry took the opportunity to record a holiday album titled A Wonderful Holiday during his days off, collaborating with members of Wonder’s band. This project showcases his ability to blend his unique style, further highlighting his musical versatility. Additionally, Cory made a memorable appearance as a guest performer with Jon Batiste at Coachella in 2024.

Cory was also featured in the film Saturday Night in 2024 and appeared in the Little Richard documentary, “I Am Everything,” in 2023, further expanding his role in both music and film.

Henry currently leads his own band, The Funk Apostles, captivating audiences with electrifying performances around the world.

Cory Henry’s journey from the vibrant streets of Brooklyn to international stages is a testament to his extraordinary talent and unwavering dedication to his craft. As he continues to explore new musical territories and push boundaries, Henry remains an influential figure in contemporary music, and is quickly becoming an icon around the world – inspiring countless fans and fellow musicians alike.

Professor Adrián Emmanuel Hernández-Acosta is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching fosters dialogue between religions and the arts. He specializes in historically informed and theoretically conversant study of the literary, musical, visual, and cinematic arts of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Approaching the Caribbean as a threshold between disciplines, traditions, and languages, Professor Hernández-Acosta focuses primarily on Spanish and English, but sustains conversations with French and Portuguese as well as Italian, ancient Greek, and Latin. His two current book projects exhibit a range of interests—from literatures of the ancient Mediterranean as well as medieval and early modern debates on poetics to Spanish literary traditions and Africana religions—as these converge in Caribbean reception.

His first book project analyzes a duel waged in verse, prose, and body between two queer Cuban poets from the twentieth century—José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera. At the center of their duel is the reception of the Furies as Greco-Roman figures of interminable mourning. This book posits reception as a mode of receptivity that simultaneously activates various layers of the past in their very significance for a given present. In conversation with the subfields of classical reception, religion and literature, and postcritical literary studies, the book revisits notions of mimesis (Plato and Aristotle), counterpoint (Fernando Ortiz and Edward Said), and askesis (Michel Foucault, Lauren Berlant, and Lee Edelman) to freshly theorize receptivity itself in the work of mourning today. 

His second book project analyzes how figures of the slain and suicidal in the arts of the insular Hispanophone Caribbean transmit the critical force of mourning in scenes of Africana religions. This book follows that trope of tropes known as metalepsis, which is characterized by its transfer of a figure of speech from one context to another. It extends conversations with literary theorizations of metalepsis, such as poetic allusion (Harold Bloom), boundary transgression (Gérard Genette), and critical posture (Hortense Spillers), as well as with those who regard language more broadly as a determining factor in human experience (from Aristotle to Lacan and Derrida). The book highlights how the predicaments of mourning are always also predicated—that is, articulated in language. Moreover, it calls for an orientation to mourning that is not merely resistant or reparative, but waywardly receptive due to the divagations of language itself.

Taken together, these two book projects offer crisp accounts of power in aesthetics ethics, and politics at the supple intersection of the theory and practice of religions and the arts. Professor Hernández-Acosta cultivates both breadth and precision in his research and teaching from a commitment to tarry with the dead and dying in a world seemingly determined to let the lives of so many fall away.

Professor Hernández-Acosta’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, and the Journal of Africana Religions. His research has been supported by a Visiting Faculty Fellowship form the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. He has also been invited to share from his work beyond traditional academic settings, including the David Castillo Art Gallery in Miami, Political Theology Network, and ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America. 

Dr. Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice. His first book, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, undertakes a black ecocritical study of the “deep” as the diffuse subtext of African American literature. It argues that blackness dawns in Middle Passage as an ongoing inhabitation of the deep, which is most fully apprehended not as social death but ecological life.

Hailing from Chicago’s South Side, Joshua Lawrence Lazard is a scholar of practical theology and African American religion. He earned a BA in Accounting at Fisk University, and completed his Master of Divinity and Master of Arts in Church Music at the Interdenominational Theological Center presenting a thesis on the relationship between Black preaching and music. As an ordained Baptist minister, Joshua currently serves as the associate pastor of Church of the Covenant in downtown Boston. As a doctoral candidate at Boston University, School of Theology, his primary area of research is in Homiletics with focusing on the African American preaching tradition. His research and critical interests pay attention to the sounds of African American religion as they bear on fugitivity, theories of imagination, pragmatism, and Black critical theory. Upon defending his dissertation entitled, “The Sanctified Imagination: The Afterlife of Sermons in the African American Preaching Tradition,” he will begin teaching as the associate professor of Africana Studies and Religion at Washington and Lee University.

Maurice Wallace is professor and associate chair of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. The author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 (which earned him an MLA William Scarborough Prize) and King’s Vibrato: Blackness, Modernism and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr., both published by Duke Univ. Press, he is also co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Wallace teaches nineteenth- and twenty-century African American literature, nineteenth-century American literature, and Black cultural studies. At Rutgers, he co-directed the 2023-2024 Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA) Faculty Seminar, “Sound Studies and Voice” (with Andrew Parker in Comparative Literature) and, since 2020 co-convener (with Nathan Jérémie-Brink of New Brunswick Theological Seminary) of the CCA Gospel Materialities Working Group. Currently, he is at work on two monographs: a book tentatively titled Objects and Uplift: Frederick Douglass, New Materialism, and the Black Hermeneutics of Things and a meditation on race, ecology, and tree life in the US titled Black Trees.