The Church & the Jook Joint

Angel C. Dye

I finally saw Sinners on Tuesday night in IMAX. I've clearly been gathering myself since then. Whew. It's 

hard to even know where to begin, but all of your insights have certainly helped me to give language to what I felt and experienced in that theater. 

 For one, I'm a church kid. Grew up verrrrry Pentecostal (Church of God in Christ [COGIC] to be more specific), so I'm always thinking about the boundaries that certain brands of Christianity have erected between the so-called sacred and secular. And now that I am years into researching the very social institutions that Sinners centers around, jooks and their northern cousins, rent parties, I understand just how malleable those boundaries are. A preacher's kid being the one to survive death, darkness, and devastation and escape with the lifeblood of blackness—the Blues? Well if that isn't the epitome of holy and sacred, I don't know what is.

Related: 

• A Notebook on Sinners