Dearly Beloved: Prince, Spirituality & This Thing Called Life
By Pamela Ayo Yetunde
Broadleaf Books, 269 pages
Published April 22, 2025
Members of the Prince reign-dom – critics, artists, theologians, and curious saints alike – will find themselves drawn to Dearly Beloved. Pamela Ayo Yetunde cleverly combines her deep knowledge of clinical therapy with Christian theology to explore the power of Prince’s music. Her colorful and imaginative writing draws on the language of the crucible and the cross, interrogating the way Prince’s lyrics not only define this “thing called life” but also how he guides his listeners to get through those same lives.
Yetunde’s writing comes with a warning: “This book is for grown folks who are open-minded and open-hearted for a body of artistic work dedicated to helping Prince art consumers resolve, simply put, the tensions between good and bad, God and Satan, intrapsychically and socially, politically and spiritually.” And so she begins to address these tensions in Prince’s work, exploring how his theology is expressed through his music, as any artist expresses themselves through their medium. Yetunde beautifully curates this body of work as if moving chronologically and methodically through a hallway of Prince’s life, drawing on her love of his music and the work she cultivated from her time at United Theological Seminary, where she founded the Theology of Prince project.
Yetunde asks us to reflect on the ways this “preacher” guides us in accepting that we are truly God’s “dearly beloveds,” and how to become “the best manifestation of us being Dearly Beloved.” Particularly intriguing is the way the author explores her concept of Prince as the priest and preacher of the boudoir, challenging our views of sexuality vs. sanctity. In his sanctuary, Prince as preacher teaches his devotees to learn to love themselves and to consider all forms of love – physical, mental and spiritual – as we aim for the ultimate achievement of agape love, or God’s total and unconditional love for us.
It is in this final point that Yetunde’s multidisciplinary approach is particularly effective. She speaks first from her personal experience of Prince’s music as a college student, builds on her clinical knowledge as a therapist, and draws parallels between the healing that is an outcome of her work and Prince’s message. She relates Prince’s activism in the Black community to her personal experiences as a Black woman, making great use of the intersection between her life experiences and the theological critique of Prince’s body of work. And she tells us of Prince’s past, and how he rises above hurts and pains with his writing, music-making and performance of his art.
Yetunde’s belief that we, too, can find support for our healing in Prince’s music is supported by the spiritual practices that fill her work. She offers questions that turn over the soil of mental state, encouraging us to reflect on these questions and to find in Prince’s lyrics ways to reconcile ourselves with God. She invites us to be transported through our “controversies” and baptized in the “Purple Rain” as we travel across “Graffiti Bridge” – all to get through this “thing called life” and find ourselves “Dearly Beloved” in the presence of God. Reading Dearly Beloved – and listening to Prince’s soundtrack along the way – is a life-giving opportunity to reflect upon Prince’s lyrics and artistry as we work toward our own healing and belovedness.
Presbyterian Outlook supports local bookstores. Join us! Click on the link below to purchase Dearly Beloved from BookShop, an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores. As an affiliate, Outlook will also earn a commission from your purchase.
Sign up for Page Turners, our monthly email newsletter, to receive book-related content in your inbox once a month.
