Kanye West’s New Album Is Intermittently Divine

Artists going back and forth with their own faith—between the temptations of worldly fame and the shelter, and strictures, of the church—is a persistent motif in American popular music and in black American music above all. In declaring himself born again and renouncing secular music, as he’s done in the lead-up to his new album Jesus Is King, Kanye West is reenacting the story of Little Richard, for example, who channeled the sacred ecstasies of the black pulpit into the salacious come-ons of early rock ’n’ roll, then enrolled in...