Preface: Turning nothing into something is God work': holiness and hurt in the hood -- Introduction: Context and other considerations / Anthony B. Pinn and Monica R. Miller -- Part 1. Hip hop on religion as/for the embodied self. Searching for self: religion and the creative quest for self in the art of Erykah Badu / Margarita Simon Guillory -- Methods for the prophetic: Tupac Shakur, Lauryn Hill, and the case for ethnolifehistory / Daniel White-Hodge -- Existentialist transvaluation and hip hop's syncretic religiosity / Julius D. Bailey -- God complex, complex gods, or God's complex: Jay-Z, poor black youth, and making "The struggle" divine / Michael Eric Dyson -- Part 2. Hip hop on religion and the "other". A PARTICULAR PAC: ontological ruptures and the posthumous presence of Tupac Shakur / James Braxton Peterson -- #NOWTHATSRELIGIONANDHIPHOP: mapping the terrain of religion and hip hop in cyberspace / Elonda Clay -- Mapping space and place in the analysis of hip hop and religion: Houston as an example / Maco L. Faniel -- Imperial whiteness meets hip hop blackness: a spiritual phenomenology of the hegemonic body in twenty-first century USA / James W. Perkinson -- Bun B on religion and hip hop: an interview (by Biko Gray) with Bun B / Biko Gray -- Part 3. Approaches to religion in hip hop on the margins. Hip hop and humanism: thinking against new (and old) fundamentalisms / Greg Dimitriadis -- Conspiracy is the sincerest form of flattery: hip hop, aesthetics, and suspicious spiritualities / John L. Jackson, Jr. -- Constructing constellations: Frankfurt School, Lupe Fiasco, and the promise of weak redemption / Joseph Winters -- Zombies in the hood: rap music, Camusian absurdity, and the structuring of death / Anthony B. Pinn -- Real recognize real: aporetic flows and the presence of New Black Godz in hip hop / Monica R. Miller -- Concluding thoughts: The future of the study of religion in/and hip hop / Monica R. Miller and Anthony B. Pinn -- Afterword: An insider perspective / Bernard "Bun B" Freeman

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 understand