Most of the major African American literary and cultural movements of the twentieth century have been understood and interpreted as secular. In reality, religion was an animating force in black literary visions from the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s to the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. Kristian Petersen talks with Josef Sorett, Associate Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Columbia University, about his new book Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics.