Leonard Cornell McKinnis II

Leonard C. McKinnis is Associate Professor of African American Religions and Black Studies. His research and teaching sits at the intersection of Black religion, Black theologies of liberation, New Religious Movements, and ethnographic approaches to the study of religion.  Prof. McKinnis’s first book , The Black Coptic Church: Race and Imagination in a New Religion (NYU Press, 2023), contributes to an on-going effort to salvage the scholarly narratives of African American religion from their primary focus on mainline Protestant groups.  Moreover, this volume broadens the category of African American religion; one that speaks to the multiplicity of imaginations that are part and parcel of the religious world of African Americans as they have sought to make sense of their place in the world that denied their being.  In this text, Dr. McKinnis introduces a theme that grounds his theoretical intervention: performative imagination.  He introduces performative imagination as a question: ‘What might it mean to rescue imagination from the abstract and from a world of ideas such that imagination becomes a human and religious performance?’  In this book, the question can be stated as, ‘what might it mean to imagine and perform Blackness otherwise?’ The Black Coptic Church offers the occasion to think through this question and intervention.