Where does your morality come from when you’re disillusioned by the church? For one of the most incisive albums of his career — and the last released in his tragically cut-short lifetime — Kaseem Ryan examines that question with the perceptive clarity and quiet power that made him one of the great sociologists of early 21st Century hip-hop. The Thief Next to Jesus is subdued in its volume and intensity as music; Ka’s tendency to value reflective calm on the mic and airy melodic rumination in his beats has always served him well there. But this album’s interrogation of the relationship between Black suffering and Christianity’s muddled efforts to address it hits as hard as anything Schrader or Scorsese ever put to film when it comes to piercing through a spiritual existential crisis. The sequencing is one of the keys here: opening with a familiar yet potent diatribe against the superficial fixations of rap in “Bread, Wine, Body, Blood” (as in money-hustling, substance abuse, sexual materialism, and gang violence) and following it up with the gospel-refrain hopefulness of finding the essence of humanitarian life in “Beautiful” sets the listener up for an ethical study that only gets more complicated as the album goes on. The heart of the album are the tracks where Ka unravels his perspective, on his own history and the things he’s witnessed, in a way that stresses what age and experience have added to his emotional burden. And his hushed, attention-grabbing poise when he drops his deadpan wordplay adds a mordant, weathered cast to his invocations of old wounds (“Borrowed Time”; “Broken Rose Window”) and dangerous paths not taken (“God Undefeated”). So when he digs deep into his efforts to keep the faith — alternately echoed and rebutted by snippets of religious figures and philosophers wrestling with their own cultural conflicts — it cuts deep. When “Collection Plate” admonishes the idea of a religious institution more freely given to offering abstract hope than material support and tracks like “Lord Have Mercy” and “Such Devotion” nod at the idea of an underground economy that has a clearer sense of morality than the church does, the result is some of the most starkly provocative work of his whole career. His gospel-sample beats are integral to this feeling, too; they’re weathered and worn enough that it emphasizes how these questions feel generations old. And in the end, there’s a crucial line of thought that the three-track concluding run of “Fragile Faith,” “Hymn and I,” and “True Holy Water” makes clear: whether you’re a believer, an atheist, or an agnostic, the idea of faith is only as beneficial as its impact on the people who struggle with it — and it’s those people you have to believe in first.