I’m lucky enough to have a job that requires me to think, read, write, teach and speak about the intersections of religion, entertainment and popular culture in American society. However, long before I began work as a college professor, I attended a church that placed as much emphasis on entertainment as instilling faith. There was a shared sense that the latter goal (i.e. instilling faith) depended upon an ability to perform the former task (i.e. entertaining).

I vividly recall the Sunday in 1985 my father took me to the church bookstore after service to purchase a copy of the first Christian rap CD, “Bible Break” by Stephen Wiley, an Oklahoma-based youth minister/rapper who became a recurring guest at my church’s annual youth retreats. By all accounts, my youth leaders sought to “keep it real” even as their real goal was to keep us “saved.”

To continue reading, go to: CNN Opinion

Share This

As of late liberation talk seems to have entered into the lofty ranks of a “top ten list” of public enemies in American politics and popular culture. This development began roughly two years ago, during the most recent presidential election. It was then that Sen. Barack Obama publicly severed ties with the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, as the former pastor of Chicago’s Trinity UCC Church was reduced to angry, out-of-context, sound bites on countless cable television news shows.

More recently, however, this phenomenon reemerged in a concerted effort by Fox News’ Glenn Beck to attack Dr. James Cone, the academic father of black liberation theology. Cone is a longtime member of the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he has trained scores of dedicated religious leaders over a period of several decades. Together Wright (a preacher) and Cone (a professor) are two of the most prominent proponents of liberation theology in their respective professions. Yet despite long track records of quality service, both men were all too quickly cast aside as the embodied relics of the radical ethos and racial excess of the 1960s, aka, the decade of “black power.”

Sadly, some readers probably clicked away from this reflection the moment they saw the words “liberation” in its opening sentence. Liberation has, unfortunately, become a code word for “communism,” or “social justice,” and countless other presumably undesirable ideologies. However, to relinquish the language of liberation from our religious lexicons would be to rob our spiritual lives of one of its most valuable resources…

To continue reading, go to: ABC News.com

Share This

2003 was a pivotal year in the religious history of rap music, if for no other reason than the release of Kanye West’s debut album, The College Dropout, which featured the song “Jesus Walks.” This single signaled a new development in rap music, a genre that in its earlier years was firmly aligned with the visions of racial opposition and religious nationalism articulated by black Muslims, especially NOI and Five Percenters. As much as the song indicated a spiritual shift in hip hop—making Jesus a centerpiece of the culture—it also inaugurated a new (and related) class sensibility. No longer was the voice of “the hood,” as a stand-in for the black underclass, dominant. The College Dropout effused the anxieties of a particular black bourgeois sensibility, and the album put the lie to the myth that hip hop and middle-class identity are mutually exclusive. In fact, on the track “All Falls Down,” Kanye performed an overdose of the proverbial “conspicuous consumption” as he rapped:

I wanna act ballerific like it’s all terrific I got a couple past due bills,
I won’t get specific
I got a problem with spending before I get it
We all self conscious, I’m just the first to admit it

Continue reading “Kanye West’s Critique of Prosperity Preaching” at Religion Dispatches

Share This

RZA’s The Tao of Wu: Hip Hop Religion, Spiritual Sampling, and Race in a “Post-racial” Age

You’d think that seven years after the release of Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” that there would be little need to explain the link between Hip Hop music and religion. Yet in a recent NPR interview, I was asked once again what the often profane posture of Hip Hop has to do with the sacred aspirations of spirituality. So perhaps it is still necessary to pause at the outset and offer a few examples as a reminder to readers of rap music’s long tradition of religious ruminations.

In fact, one can trace a trajectory that goes back as far MC Hammer’s 1987 debut album, Let’s Get it Started, which featured the gospel track, “Son of the King.” Such spiritual lyricism continued through the prophetic musings of Tupac Shakur, the biblical (re)imagination of Ja Rule (i.e. Rule 3:16), the Muslim message of Lupe Fiasco, and the messianic aspirations of Remy Ma, whose 2008 album was simply titled, Shesus Khryst.

to continue reading, go to Religion Dispatches

Share This

As we near the end of the first Black History Month in age of the first black president, I want to quickly share with everyone the arrival of an important and timely book:  Watch This: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism, by Jonathan L. Walton.

In case you didn’t already know, President Obama’s road to the White House revealed most clearly that African American religion continues to occupy a most pivotal place in the American cultural imagination.  Moreover, his dramatic falling out with Jeremiah Wright (I know, this conversation is already exhausted) confirmed that the common assertion of the United States as a Christian nation is a claim in need of further clarification.  While African Americans have long inserted themselves into the Christian story, the Obama-Wright show served to illustrate that not all forms of American Christianity (really, protestantisms) achieve equally footing in the public culture of the U.S.

Jonathan Walton’s “Watch This” provides a compelling a critical account of the varieties of black Christianity that now dominate airwaves both in the U.S. and around the globe.  I’ve had the privilege of dialoging with the author as the project moved from dissertation to book, and I know him to wield one the sharpest and most insightful interpretations of African American religion, in particular, and religion and culture in America, more broadly.  While I’ve just started to get into the book myself, I am confident that anyone who picks it up will learn something new about religion and race in America.

Kudos, Congratulations, and Thank you, Jonathan!

What follows is the beginning of his discussion of the book on the website ReligionDispatches:

 Ten Questions for Jonathan Walton on Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism

What inspired you to write Watch This?

My interest in African American religious broadcasting came from what I perceived to be the gaps in the fields of African American religion and Religion, Media and Culture. For the most part, scholars of African American religion in general and black theology in particular theorize about Afro-Protestantism in America according to a particular historiography that privileges liberal Protestantism in general, and civil rights motifs in particular. But the prevailing narrative of the freedom fighting “black church” is in many ways inconsistent with a number of African American Christians whose view of the faith is informed by Trinity Broadcasting, the Word Network, and Streaming Faith.com. Just the same, for sociologists and communication theorists who have examined the world of evangelical religious broadcasting, it is predominantly framed as the domain of the white, Religious Right.

This book, then, is my attempt to illumine, unpack and interrogate the theological and social orientations of prominent black religious broadcasters in order to understand them as a source of attraction and ethically evaluate their dominant messages…

To continue reading go to ReligionDispatches.org.

To purchase book, go to www.nyupress.com

Share This

In recent years, references to Creflo Dollar, arguably the most popular black prosperity preacher of the day, have become a visual and verbal fixture in Hip Hop music. Such instances include a cameo appearance in Ludacris and Jermaine Dupri’s “Welcome to Atlanta” video, an invocation in a song by Fifty Cent, a professed pastoral affiliation by Mase, and a shout-out from Lupe Fiasco in his underground re-mix of Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks.” This would seem to suggest, at least within the culture of the bling, that Christianity has become as much a signifier of wealth and power as it is evidence of any specific type of theological vision. Evidently Dollar – for whom wealth is a core spiritual value – seems to embody, for many Hip Hop artists, the essence of Hip Hop’s hustle doused in holy water. Interestingly, Pastor Dollar also has a rap video in the works, performed a by a group of rappers, the Ziklag Boyz, who belong to his church and record on his Arrow Records label. A surprise to no one, the song’s refrain is simply, “Money, money, coming down!” (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFyMEnXDG4g ). While the video draws much resemblance to Lil’ Wayne and Fat Joe’s tale of the strip club, “Make It Rain,” – with dollar bills floating across the screen – noticeably absent from the Ziklag Boyz’ video are the bodies of scantily clad black and brown women. For male rappers, it is the bodies of black females that often make their rap videos so profitably seductive, but Dollar insists that the power to get “bling” can just as easily be achieved dropping bible verses like they’re hot. The mutual resonance between much of rap music and Dollar’s prosperity ministry is but one instance where Christianity seems to function as an explicit form of social capital in popular culture . . .

For the entire article go to: http://faithinmotion.net/

Share This

Hello Everyone!

Thanks once again for the generosity of feedback in the week leading up to the launch - the love is much appreciated.

By now perhaps you a have a theory; if not, hopefully you’ve at least asked yourself: “Why did this brother choose to launch his site on 07.07.07?” Well, since you ask, indulge me for a moment…

Whether it’s the poetic appeal – never mind if you’re a biblical literalist or Darwinian by design – of the earth being spoken into existence in six days followed by one of divine rest…

Or you’ve been out on those corners praying for that lucky roll of the die,

Whether you were listening to Minister Farrakhan move the crowd at the Mall in 1995 when he started laying down those numbers…

Or you’re a gospel music loyalist waxing nostalgic of Fred Hammond - before he
signaled the move of black churches to praise and worship music - on his second to last
album with Commissioned (circa 1991),

Whether you witnessed pre-break up Erykah Badu and Andre 3000 name their first born…

Or you’ve had to fight the itch of that long seventh inning stretch in your marriage,

There’s just something about that Number – a near universal appeal that appears to be attributed to the number seven.

Now, I’m no numerologist, but it was still all too difficult for me resist the resounding resonance with which the number seven seems to be celebrated. And just in case none of the examples in my above litany sold you, let me share, more personally, just a few reasons why I chose to launch my site on this the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the new millennium.

First of all, I am nearing the start of my seventh and hopefully final year (pray with me!) of what has been an extremely rewarding time of doctoral studies at Harvard University. They say seven years is average at Harvard… so call me average!

Second, seven is a number that many religious traditions treat as significant – just check out wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_(number) – so this choice also reflects the fact that religion and spirituality, in all their diverse manifestations, take a primary place in both my personal biography and intellectual journey.

And third, it has also been seven months since the passing of my mother, Patricia Ann Wallace, and amongst other things this site has afforded me the opportunity to memorialize her life on the web and to acknowledge the tremendous wealth of her spirit, to which I am an heir. Check out the page dedicated to her (www.josefsorett.com/patricia-ann-wallace-tribute/) on this site to learn more about this remarkable woman. We miss her dearly!

At the church I grew up attending, seven was believed to be the number of completion – and thus of new beginnings as well. In a year that promises us all a host of new beginnings – as well as important endings – I am excited to start this on-line dialogue.

Staying steady with the number seven, I’ve decided to define my launch into the blogosphere by an initial series of seven blog entries. Don’t worry, not all at once.

Here’s a glimpse of what you can expect from posts in the days and weeks to come:

Today: Reflections on Human Frailty: Life, Death and My HBO Addiction

Coming Soon:
Towards the (Post) Hip Hop Intellectual
Race, Religion and Politics in the City University of New York
“I Ain’t Here to Argue About His Facial Features…”
Left, Left, Left, Right, Left: Culture Politics, Policy and the Poles of Public Morality
The Art of My Eclectic (Personal) Fashion Sensibility
Muhammad Walks an Underground Freeway to the Club

Before I get to the first post, I want to quickly acknowledge one of my closest friends, who also happens to be my personal technology consultant: Joselin Mane. If you like what you see on this site, check out www.litbel.com for the best techie I know (website design, hosting services, etc.). While academic trends of late have highlighted the history of intersecting afro-latina/o diasporas (See: Future of Black Studies), this site has been an exercise in building black & Latina/o partnerships. In the process of learning to work this website, Joselin claims that he has been teaching me to fish… bacalao, I guess? If you can’t swing the cod fish, then try some Platanos and Collard Greens.   Either way, Mucho Amor a mi hermano dominicano de otra madre!

Okay, enough with the self-less plug. It’s now official, www.josefsorett.com has been launched. And while it’s surely anti-climactic at this point, check out my first blog entry, Reflections on Human Frailty: Life, Death and My HBO Addiction, which will post at 7am.

Share This