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 thinkers, preachers, and scholars from around the country confront both the Black Church and the Hip Hop Generation to realize their shared responsibilities to one another and the greater society. Arranged into three sections, this volume addresses key issues in the debate between two of the most significant institutions of Black Culture. The first part, “From Civil Rights to Hip Hop,” explores the transition from one generation to another through the transmission—or lack thereof—of legacy and heritage. Part II, “Hip Hop Culture and the Black Church in Dialogue,” explores the numerous ways in which the conversation is already occurring—from sermons to theoretical examinations and spiritual ponderings. Part III, “Gospel Rap, Holy Hip Hop, and the Hip Hop Matrix,” clarifies the perspectives and insights of practitioners, scholars, and activists who explore various expressions of faith and the diversity of locations where these expressions take place. In The Black Church and Hip Hop Culture, pastors, ministers, theologians, educators, and laypersons wrestle with the duties of providing timely commentary, critical analysis, and in some cases practical strategies toward forgiveness, healing, restoration, and reconciliation. With inspiring reflections and empowering discourse, this collection demonstrates why and how the Black Church must re-engage in the lives of those who comprise the Hip Hop Generation.

""Young evangelicals." "Black millennials." "The hip hop generation." This book sets the record straight on young Black Christians with a first of its kind digital-hip hop ethnography. This book is a must have in understanding how race, religion, and technology is reshaping American life"--

A sociologist and pop-culture expert offers a balanced engagement of hip-hop and rap music, showing God's presence in the music and the message.

Christians and Christianity have been central to Hip Hop since its inception. This book explores the intersection of Christians and Hip Hop and the multiple outcomes of this intersection. It lays out the ways in which Christians and Hip Hop overlap and diverge. The intersection of Christians and Hip Hop brings together African diasporic cultures, lives, memories and worldviews. Moving beyond the focus on rappers and so-called "Christian Hip Hop," each chapter explores three major themes of the book: identifying Hip Hop, irreconcilable Christianity, and boundaries.There is a self-identified Christian Hip Hop (CHH) community that has received some scholarly attention. At the same time, scholars have analyzed Christianity and Hip Hop without focusing on the self-identified community. This book brings these various conversations together and show, through these three themes, the complexities of the intersection of Christians and Hip Hop. Hip Hop is more than rap music, it is an African diasporic phenomenon. These three themes elucidate the many characteristics of the intersection between Christians and Hip Hop and our reasoning for going beyond "Christian Hip Hop." This collection is a multi-faceted view of how religious belief plays a role in Hip Hoppas' lives and community. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of Religion and Hip Hop, Hip Hop, African Diasporas, Religion and the Arts, Religion and Race and Black Theology as well as Religious Studies more generally.

Underground rap is largely a subversive, grassroots, and revolutionary movement in underground hip-hop, tending to privilege creative freedom as well as progressive and liberating thoughts and actions. This book contends that many practitioners of underground rap have absorbed religious traditions and ideas, and implement, critique, or abandon them in their writings. This in turn creates processural mutations of God that coincide with and speak to the particular context from which they originate. Utilising the work of scholars like Monica Miller and Alfred North Whitehead, Gill uses a secular religious methodology to put forward an aesthetic philosophy of religion for the rap portion of underground hip-hop. Drawing from Whiteheadian process thought, a theopoetic argument is made. Namely, that it is not simply the case that is God the "poet of the world", but rather rap can, in fact, be the poet (creator) of its own form of quasi-religion. This is a unique look at the religious workings and implications of underground rap and hip hop. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Hip-Hop Studies and Process Philosophy and Theology.

Religion, Culture and Spirituality in Africa and the African Diaspora explores the ways in which religious ideas and beliefs continue to play a crucial role in the lives of people of African descent. The chapters in this volume use historical and contemporary examples to show how people of African descent develop and engage with spiritual rituals, organizations and practices to make sense of their lives, challenge injustices and creatively express their spiritual imaginings. This book poses and answers the following critical questions: To what extent are ideas of spirituality emanating from Africa and the diaspora still influenced by an African aesthetic? What impact has globalisation had on spiritual and cultural identities of peoples on African descendant peoples? And what is the utility of the practices and social organizations that house African spiritual expression in tackling social, political cultural and economic inequities? The essays in this volume reveal how spirituality weaves and intersects with issues of gender, class, sexuality and race across Africa and the diaspora. It will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students interested in the study of African religions, race and religion, sociology of religion and anthropology.

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 Hop: Mapping the Terrain provides an important step in advancing and mapping this new field of Religion and Hip Hop Studies. The volume features 14 original contributions representative of this new terrain within three sections representing major thematic issues over the past two decades. The Preface is written by one of the most prolific and founding scholars of this area of study, Michael Eric Dyson, and the inclusion of and collaboration with Bernard 'Bun B' Freeman fosters a perspective internal to Hip Hop and encourages conversation between artists and academics.

Hip Hop’s Amnesia is a study about aesthetics and politics, music and social movements, as well as the ways in which African Americans' unique history and culture has consistently led them to create musics that have served as the soundtracks for their socio-political aspirations and frustrations, their socio-political organizations and nationally-networked movements. The musics of the major African American social and political movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were based and ultimately built on earlier forms of "African American movement music." Therefore, in order to really and truly understand rap music and hip hop culture we must critically examine both classical African American musics and the classical African American movements that these musics served as soundtracks for.

This volume assesses contemporary church responses to multicultural diversity and resisted categories of social difference, with a central focus on whether or how racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and gender differences are validated by churches (and especially black churches) torn between competing inclusive and exclusive tendencies.

From the Founding Fathers through the present, Christianity has exercised powerful influence in the United States—from its role in shaping politics and social institutions to its hand in inspiring art and culture. The Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States outlines the myriad roles Christianity has played and continues to play. This masterful five-volume reference work includes biographies of major figures in the Christian church in the United States, influential religious documents and Supreme Court decisions, and information on theology and theologians, denominations, faith-based organizations, immigration, art—from decorative arts and film to music and literature—evangelism and crusades, the significant role of women, racial issues, civil religion, and more. The first volume opens with introductory essays that provide snapshots of Christianity in the U.S. from pre-colonial times to the present, as well as a statistical profile and a timeline of key dates and events. Entries are organized from A to Z. The final volume closes with essays exploring impressions of Christianity in the United States from other faiths and other parts of the world, as well as a select yet comprehensive bibliography. Appendices help readers locate entries by thematic section and author, and a comprehensive index further aids navigation.