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In the midst of oppression, poverty, violence, and insufficiency where survival takes priority over salvation, what theology speaks to this condition? Black Theology and Holy Hip-hop are important to understand and promote, especially in their relationship to inner-city ministry and spiritual development, primarily in regards to black and brown youth. This work investigates the complex crises experienced among our black and brown youth, with special focus on the inner-city. Black Theology and Holy Hip-hop is less about people and more about institutions--the dichotomy between the institution of the church and the social institution of music that affects young people's mindset. This book will examine how a double-edged sword of Black Theology and Holy Hip-hop will cut a new faith in inner-city ministry that will initiate freedom against personal pain and systemic oppression, on the one hand, and free minds from self-hate and submissive control on the other.
Now a global and transnational phenomenon, hip hop culture continues to affect and be affected by the institutional, cultural, religious, social, economic and political landscape of American society and beyond. Over the past two decades, numerous disciplines have taken up hip hop culture for its intellectual weight and contributions to the cultural life and self-understanding of the United States. More recently, the academic study of religion has given hip hop culture closer and more critical attention, yet this conversation is often limited to discussions of hip hop and traditional understandings of religion and a methodological hyper-focus on lyrical and textual analyses. Religion in Hip H...
In Crossing Traditions: American Popular Music in Local and Global Contexts, a wide range of scholarly contributions on the local and global significance of American popular music examines the connections between selected American blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop music and their equivalents from Senegal, Nigeria, England, India, and Mexico. Contributors show how American popular music promotes local and global awareness of such key issues as economic inequality and social marginalization while inspiring cross-cultural and interethnic influences among regional and transnational communities. Specifically, Crossing Traditions highlights the impact of American popular music on the spread of sou...
Life happens at the intersection of faith and culture. Whether we are Christians or not, we all have some narrative about the way the world ought to be that shapes how we view the world and live our lives. In this book, Anthony Bradley explores those intersections in ways that analyze and direct our imaginations toward the best practices that lead to human flourishing. Economics, political philosophy, sociology, psychology, and theology are just a few of the disciplines used in an attempt to make sense of a world where things are not the way they are supposed to be. Something does seem strange about the world, but we are not left without tools and principles that we need to make life work at the intersections of faith and culture. The aim of Something Seems Strange is to provide a model of thinking about life at those intersections, so that people can lively freely according to their God-given design.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Black Church stood as the stronghold of the Black Community, fighting for equality and economic self-sufficiency and challenging its body to be self-determined and self-aware. Hip Hop Culture grew from disenfranchised urban youth who felt that they had no support system or resources. Impassioned with the same urgent desires for survival and hope that their parents and grandparents had carried, these youth forged their way from the bottom of America’s belly one rhyme at a time. For many young people, Hip Hop Culture is a supplement, or even an alternative, to the weekly dose of Sunday-morning faith. In this collection of provocative essays, leading thinke...
African Origins of Monotheism recasts an African knowledge of God in a new and original way. It aims to recapture concepts of God as originally reflected upon by pristine African religious thinkers. Muzorewa is seeking after the traditional African understandings of the Divine, which trace their origins back before the rise of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Monotheism, he maintains, is the ancient view of God, ubiquitous across the continent of Africa; indeed, monotheism comes "out of Africa." The book challenges the way that the idea of God has been manipulated by Eurocentric agendas, by colonizers, enslavers, and empire builders, all of whom were using God-talk to achieve their own personal ends. In African thinking, the God concept is guided by a sense of the presence of the all-pervasive and omnipresent God, which has instilled in the people a sense of respect for life at all costs. Thus, respect is not based on a commandment or on fear but on a propensity for affinity.
Rap music is often seen as a Black secular response to pressing issues of our time. Yet, like spirituals, the blues, and gospel music, rap has deep connections to African American religious traditions. Noise and Spirit explores the diverse religious dimensions of rap stemming from Islam (including the Nation of Islam and Five Percent Nation), Rastafarianism, and Humanism, as well as Christianity. The volume examines rap’s dialogue with religious traditions, from the ways in which Islamic rap music is used as a method of religious and political instruction to the uses of both the blues and Black women’s rap for considering the distinction between God and the Devil. The first section explores rap’s association with more easily recognizable religious traditions and communities such as Christianity and Islam. The next presents discussions of rap and important spiritual considerations, including on the topic of death. The final unit wrestles with ways to theologize about the relationship between the sacred and the profane in rap.