Anybody worth a damn within the Hip-Hop community will tell you that Bernard “Bun B” Freeman is on the shortlist to be the most dignified to speak for the culture.
This thought process has transcended into yet another learning experience as the UGK survivor will join Professor Anthony Pinn for a Religion and Hip-Hop Culture online course at Rice University this upcoming spring semester.
Pinn is currently the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and professor of religious studies at Rice University, but is also a Hip-Hop fan at heart. The promotional video for the new course shows himself and Bun B in reverse roles as they physically display how both rap music and theology both have been proven to be resource tools in human development.
“Our classroom course at Rice went so well that people off campus were contacting us and asking us about the course and how they could take it,” Pinn explains as the reasoning to go about creating the course. “Working with Bun in the classroom, it became clear that there were ways of learning and teaching that we hadn’t tapped. The MOOC [first massive open online course] gave us a way to be even more creative and innovative in terms of how we link the rest of world with the cultural richness and diversity of Houston to get information across.
The studious rapper agreed saying, “This course gave me the opportunity to let people see a side of hip-hop that isn’t always discussed. We’ve started a conversation that cannot end until people have a better understanding of who we are and what we do.”
The Religion and Hip-Hop Culture course (RELI157x) looks to tackle weighty questions such as “What is religion?,” “What is Hip-Hop?” “Are they the same thing?,” and “Do they overlap?”
Enrollment is now open on Rice University’s website and the course will begin on March 24.
The promotional video for the class can be found on the next page.
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Photo: edX
