Online Program Book

This Author Meets Critic session highlights Jon Ivan Gill’s Underground Rap as Religion: A Theopoetic Examination of a Process Aesthetic Religion, celebrating its fifth anniversary on 11/1/24. The book explores how underground rap, known for its subversive, grassroots, and revolutionary nature, intersects with religious traditions. Gill argues that underground rap artists absorb, critique, or reject religious ideas, creating evolving conceptions of God that reflect their social contexts. Drawing on scholars like Monica Miller and Alfred North Whitehead, Gill develops an aesthetic philosophy of religion grounded in secular religious methodology. He uses Whiteheadian process thought to argue that rap functions as a theopoetic force, acting not just as a response to divine creation but as a creator of its own quasi-religion. This groundbreaking work will appeal to scholars in Religious Studies, Hip-Hop Studies, Process Philosophy, and Theology for its innovative examination of the religious dimensions of underground rap.