The Soul of Hip Hop: Rims, Timbs and a Cultural Theology

What is Hip Hop?

Hip hop speaks in a voice that is sometimes gruff, sometimes enraged, sometimes despairing, sometimes hopeful.

Hip hop is the voice of forgotten streets laying claim to the high life of rims and timbs and threads and bling.

Hip hop speaks in the muddled language of would-be prophets--mocking the architects of the status quo and stumbling in the dark toward a blurred vision of a world made right.

What is hip hop? It's a cultural movement with a traceable theological center. Daniel White Hodge follows the tracks of hip-hop theology and offers a path from its center to the cross, where Jesus speaks truth.

Daniel White Hodge (PhD, School of Intercultural Studies, Fuller Theological Seminary) is associate professor of intercultural communications at North Park University in Chicago, where he also chairs the department of communication arts and is research lead for the Catalyst 606__ program. He also serves as editor in chief of the Journal of Hip Hop Studies. He is the author of Heaven Has a Ghetto, The Soul of Hip Hop, and Hip Hop's Hostile Gospel: A Post Soul Theological Exploration.