Street Scriptures

Between God and Hip-Hop

Street Scriptures
Alejandro Nava
RRP:
NZ$ 52.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 42.39
Paperback
h229 x 152mm - 256pg
16 May 2022 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780226819167
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This book explores an important aspect of hip-hop that is rarely considered: its deep entanglement with spiritual life. The world of hip-hop is saturated with religion, but rarely is that element given serious consideration. In Street Scriptures, Alejandro Nava focuses our attention on this aspect of the music and culture in a fresh way, combining his profound love of hip-hop, his passion for racial and social justice, and his deep theological knowledge. Street Scriptures offers a refreshingly earnest and beautifully written journey through hip-hop' s deep entanglement with the sacred. Nava analyzes the religious heartbeat in hip-hop, looking at crosscurrents of the sacred and profane in rap, reggaeton, and Latinx hip-hop today. Ranging from Nas, Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, Lauryn Hill, and Cardi B to St. Augustine and William James, Nava examines the ethical-political, mystical-prophetic, and theological qualities in hip-hop, probing the pure sonic and aesthetic signatures of music, while also diving deep into the voices that invoke the spirit of protest. The result is nothing short of a new liberation theology for our time, what Nava calls a "street theology. "
"With this majestic study, Nava reclaims ' the streets' as a living, breathing text, through which black and brown youth transmute everyday terror into spiritual beauty and hurl truth on the doorsteps of power. By placing academic theology and urban hip-hop culture side by side, Nava' s work has the potential to usher both into a more liberating future. " -- Onaje X. O. Woodbine, author of ' Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball' "Nava' s writing pulses with passion-electric, vivid, joyful, and oh so readable. By immersing the reader in the music, Nava offers the most compelling lens available on exactly how hip-hop created a moral aesthetic that moves people to change the world. Street Scriptures is social criticism of the highest order. " -- Jonathon Kahn, author of ' Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois' "In this compelling work, Nava reads the radically subversive ' street scriptures' of hip-hop as a distinctive form of urban liberation theology. This elegantly argued book by a scholar and activist is an important contribution to the study of urban religion and of ' religion' itself in one of its most powerful and challenging contemporary instantiations. " -- Robert Orsi, author of ' History and Presence'
Alejandro Nava is professor of religious studies at the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Mystical and Prophetic Thought of Simone Weil and Gustavo Gutierrez, Wonder and Exile in the New World, and In Search of Soul. He has discussed hip-hop and religion on NPR, Fox News, HuffPost Live, and MSNBC, among other outlets.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780226819167
Published: 16 May 2022
Published In: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Pages: 256

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