The Hip Hop and Religion Reader

"It is virtually impossible to imagine the study of popular culture today that does not give Hip Hop its due. With this Reader, Miller and Pinn offer scholars and students alike an indispensable collection of materials that will inform research and program classroom study. Historically grounded, critically informed, and socially engaged, the impressive range of essays demonstrates the high level of reflection and accomplishment that the field of hip hop studies has achieved, especially with regard to the study of religion. Showing hip hop’s global diffusion and diverse religious appeal, the essays in the volume demonstrate that the field has achieved an enviable position of scope, sophistication, and relevance."

David Morgan, Duke University, USA

"Hip hop has become one of the most important forms of popular art and culture across the world today. The Hip Hop and Religion Reader provides the most comprehensive analysis of religious dimensions of hip hop culture yet available. Rigorous, insightful and clearly organised, it will remain a definitive text in this field for students and researchers for many years to come."

Gordon Lynch, University of Kent, UK

"The Hip Hop and Religion Reader makes a sorely needed intervention into the field of hip-hop studies. Miller and Pinn have assembled an impressive body of interdisciplinary texts that spotlight hip-hop’s longstanding and deep relationship to religious narratives, traditions, institutions, and ideologies. These texts also demonstrate the ways that modern religion is informed by hip-hop’s cultural logic. This collection is crucial for understanding the foundations and future of this critically important area of inquiry."

Marc Lamont Hill, Morehouse College, USA

"This Reader is the essential resource to introduce students and researchers to what the editors describe as a 'more fully formed canon rightly called hip hop studies'...The structure, overviews, summaries, links and study questions all create a source book and conceptual roadmap, representing the foundational questions, concerns, theories and method that shape the discipline."

Abby Day, University of Kent, UK

"Exhaustive in its scope and expansive in its reach, this volume announces and solidifies the seriousness of religion to any consideration of hip hop. Pinn and Miller have put together a reader that curates an exciting new path of inquiry."

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Princeton University, USA

"The Hip Hop and Religion Reader certainly breaks new ground in our understanding of relations between religion and popular media cultures. It brings together superb and influential voices who understand the aesthetics, politics, and spiritualities involved when new forms of religious expression emerge outside the expected forms and the expected locations. Miller and Pinn have laid the groundwork for important and exciting new research into interactions between music cultures and religious cultures in a range of domains."

Stewart Hoover, University of Colorado Boulder, USA

"The Hip Hop and Religion Reader is a revelation—and almost in the truest theological sense. Miller and Pinn have produced what is clearly the most comprehensive and ambitious scholarly volume on the links between religiosity and hip-hop culture/music ever compiled. This Reader is as rigorous and holistic in its engagement with hip-hop as it is in its treatment of religion/spirituality. I can think of so many generative ways to teach this book, and to put its wide-ranging articles into productive conversation. I look forward to sharing this with my students."

John L. Jackson, Jr., University of Pennsylvania, USA