What happens when Black artists refuse the boundary between the sacred and the profane? These four papers show how such a refusal is not transgression but a mode of religious practice worked out through sound, embodiment, and desire. From Teddy Pendergrass's ecstatic concert rituals to Prince's devotional eroticism, from Tonex's queer disruption of gospel's heteronormative order to the cosmic spiritual experiments of Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane, these four case studies recover a tradition of Black musical and religious creativity that exceeds the bounds of church. Drawing on recordings, liner notes, concert footage, and archival ephemera, contributors open new theoretical and historiographical ground for understanding how Black religious experience has been made, unmade, and reimagined through sound.
This paper argues that Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane trouble dominant narratives of Black religion, music, sexuality, and Afro‑futurism by centering a Black, womanist‑inflected spiritual imagination that exceeds church and nation. Positioned at the intersection of Afro‑futurism and spiritual jazz, it shows how their sonic and "fashion‑forward" experiments recast Black sacred sound as a laboratory for Black futures in the mid‑ to late‑twentieth century. Drawing on historical and interdisciplinary archival methods—including recordings, liner notes, film, interviews, Arkestra ephemera, and materials from Coltrane’s ashram—alongside Black religious thought, womanist theology, and Afrofuturism studies, the paper traces how experimental music, Black religious curiosity, and transnational spiritual currents reshape U.S. Black religious formations from the 1950s to the 1980s. Interpreting Sun Ra’s cosmology and Alice Coltrane’s devotional jazz and sanctified harmonies, it proposes a multimedia presentation that demonstrates sound, image, and performance as a theological method and highlights Black women’s spiritual labor and queer‑adjacent aesthetics.
This paper explores the religious biography and musical career of acclaimed R&B singer and sex symbol Teddy Pendergrass as a means for articulating how the entanglement of black musical and religious performances gives shape to a mutual pursuit of feeling, affect, intimacy, and ecstasy. By way of his 1978 “For Women Only” concert series, I argue that Pendergrass enacts a contemporary reiteration of the black religious choreography indexed by W.E.B. Du Bois’ paradigmatic framing of the preacher, the music, and the frenzy. Through the synthesis of the spiritual and performative pedagogies of black Pentecostal experience and the sonic orchestration shaped by Philadelphia International Records, Pendergrass generates a material and ritual encounter that is at once sexual and spiritual. In this way, his performative repertoire can be interpreted as a vital repository and archive for the intersecting genealogies of black religious and musical invention.
When Prince converted to the Jehovah's Witnesses in 2001 and released The Rainbow Children, he did not retreat from the radical erotic vision that defined his earlier career — he deepened it. I argue that The Rainbow Children is a sustained act of spiritual self-authorship in which religious devotion and sexual possibility are not in tension but are mutually constitutive. Drawing on J. Kameron Carter's theorization of the archē of colonial modernity, Ashon T. Crawley's concepts of the choreosonic and enfleshment, and Jayna Brown's framework of Black speculative vision, I center the track "Mellow" to demonstrate how Prince's erotic lyricism and sonic practice perform what I call a "religioerotics of the crossroads": a mode of Black sacred life that refuses the separation of the carnal from the holy, centers Black feminine pleasure as spiritual ground, and reaches toward an Afro-futurist elsewhere beyond the terms of the present world. Prince's conversion was not the end of his radicalism. It was its most profound expression.
"Please Don't Stop The Music" analyzes the rise and eventual ostracism of Anthony Charles Williams II, also known as Tonex, who disrupted heteronormative gender and sexual politics through his musical artistry, clothing, and embodiment as a black male gospel artist in the early 21st century. In response to the Afro-American Religious History Unit's 2026 theme of "Black Religion, Music, Sexuality, and Afro-Futurism," this paper raises gospel music as a site of both religious constraint and quare liberatory potential. Covering the years between 2000 and 2011, this work offers a historical account of a career that constitutes a watershed moment for contemporary Afro-Protestantism, one discussed largely in popular cultural terms amongst Black Pentecostals and that lends itself to the academic study of Black Religion.