“In this engaging and compelling biography, Craig makes a persuasive case for the significance of religion in Tina Turner’s life and animating her personal and professional aspirations. With empathy and depth, he offers a rich account of how Buddhism, Afro-Protestantism, and metaphysical religion shaped her unique hybrid religious sensibility, revealing her musical performance as spiritual practice. An unforgettable figure in American musical history, Craig’s work makes Turner unforgettable as a figure in American religious history.”

—Judith Weisenfeld, author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration

About


Ralph H. Craig III is a scholar of religion whose research focuses on pre-modern South Asian Buddhism and late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American religious history. He received his B.A. in Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University and his Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Stanford University. His dissertation is a study of early medieval representations of Buddhist preachers across South Asian Buddhist literature. His research interests include religious authority, religious experience, religion and race, popular culture, memoir, metaphysics, meditation/yoga studies, ritual and performance studies, intellectual history, and philosophy. He has a forthcoming religious biography of Tina Turner titled, Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner (Eerdmans Publishing, 2023), which explores the place of religion in the life and career of Tina Turner and examines her development as a Black Buddhist teacher. His future projects include a monograph on Buddhist preachers in Mahāyāna Buddhist sūtras, a Black Buddhism documentary reader, and a monograph on the SGI-USA Nichiren Buddhist organization.

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