Exploring the spiritual in popular music: Beatified beats

Increasingly in the twenty first century, the separate worlds of popular music and the sacred overlap and intersect. There are many similarities between religious/spiritual practice and the production/consumption of popular music. This can be seen in cases where an individual artist’s own religious or spiritual convictions inspire and influence the character of their music and the opportunities this presents for spiritual development or self-healing. Popular music is also assisting the development of new forms of spirituality, some of which are incorporated into existing forms of religious worship, while others present novel ways of accessing divine immanence. There are also instances where popular music is utilized to challenge and challenge religious rituals and conventions. This collection of essays seeks to illuminate the diverse ways in which popular music traverses the secular sphere in a era which has seen increasingly personalised strategies of religious and spiritual development; beginning with an introduction that solidifies and draws together common themes, showing how the diverse nature of religious and secular practices are experienced and manifest through the medium of popular music.