For your short paper this week, please pick from one of the following music videos and talk about how the video is engaging with the American and more generally the modern religious condition. You won’t be able to say everything that could be said. So be selective in what you choose to talk about as you make your specific argument.

In your response, be sure to bring in Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, for we’re using it as a way to understand religion as a cultural phenomenon, a way of understanding how societies arrangement themselves at the symbolic and lived levels.  But also, again with Douglass in mind, don’t lose sight of the issue of religious ambivalence — religion as social ordering or structuring and as possibly disruptive of social arrangements at the symbolic and lived levels. Lastly, in your response to this prompt, please remember that you can draw as you see fit on any combination of the features of the videos — sound, lyrics, visuality/images; any and all of these features of the videos are a rich resource or archive to draw from  — to make your argument.

Choose from one of these essays to anchor your essay/response/your argument:

1. Always on Time (Ja Rule and Ashanti)

2. Shesus Kyrst (Remy Ma)

3. Jesus Walks (Kanye West)