Twenty-five years ago, in the middle of my teenage years, I went to a poundingly loud concert in Kansas City, Missouri, featuring lasers, smoke, explosions, and some of the best musicianship that contemporary rock had to offer. Last night, at Jones Beach on Long Island just outside New York City, I had that Kansas City concert in mind as, a quarter-century later, I was attending another concert by the same band, Rush, now as someone entering what is often called “mid-life.”

I have seen this band at least a dozen times, and having discovered their music around age 11, have been listening intently for 30 years now. They are an acquired taste, and often hated by critics, but last night I was feeling more than a little vindicated in sticking with them. Having won major industry awards for bass, guitar, and drums; having received multiple top awards in Canada (their home country) for performance and songwriting; having been the musical inspiration for a recent Hollywood movie and new video games; having been embraced by the Colbert Report, Rolling Stone magazine, and given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; having been the subject of an award-winning documentary; and having more consecutive gold and platinum albums than any band but the Rolling Stones and the Beatles…. This band has never stopped pushing forward. Few bands last this long, and do so with such vibrancy and continually deepened skill into the later stages of their career. Even though two band members are 56, and one is 57, they are currently preparing a new album for release next summer. They remind us that we are still inventing what the rock life can be.

Herein lies one interesting part of the show last night. Jones Beach, like many dates on their current tour, was sold out, and the fact that these rock legends are pushing 60 does not seem to matter to these fans. When seen against the backdrop of the expense of modern concerts and overall decline in the concertgoing business, the fact that Rush is still able to sell out 5,000-10,000 (and in Brazil, 50,000-60,000) seat venues consistently, after nearly forty years as a band, as well as make albums that continue to go gold and platinum, suggests to me that more than fan nostalgia is going on.

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One of the things I’ve learned over the last couple years of writing blog posts is how frequently I must pause to ask myself how I, as a parent, am going to present a certain issue. My hesitations are almost always around the ways I will present, in word and image, matters about women and sexuality in theological and musical cultures.

I have been on the Internet since September of 1988 (or what we called “bitnet” back then), and am aware that some of my posts from the late 80s and early 90s can still be found floating around on the Internet. In other words, I know well that once something is posted online, it rarely completely disappears. And I imagine that however long R&T as a blog and as a research project endures, that these posts will be somehow accessible years or decades from now, for anyone including my daughter, when she is old enough, who would like to read them and can figure how out to do so. (She is not yet five years old, so I have a little time before she’s hunting around for Dad’s past lives in cyberspace.)

Most parents can sympathize with the quandaries before me as I seek to write online and in print, as directly as possible, if even in necessarily indirect language, about what is at stake theologically regarding life in contemporary culture. In the first hours after my daughter was born, I had the immediate and conclusive sense, which has only solidified in the years since, that her vitality and future had already, in an “eschatological” way, eclipsed mine, and that almost every important decision my wife and I would make, even about our “personal” lives and work, would somehow shift, sometimes irreversibly, the ecology of our family’s life together and our daughter’s future in particular. This is more than profound because it involves upending an entire way of being in the world into something completely unanticipatable, but it is also banal because almost every capable parent, especially in our day, feels this way very quickly, thoroughly, viscerally. What are the theologically realistic and subtle ways that we parents of young children can think about how we will justify to our adult children how we spent these years when they were young?

My impression is that many radical religion scholars in sexuality and gender, whose work I respect, do not have children; or children’s concerns do not seem to enter notably into their writings and their calculations about what and how to write. What will this new era, when more theologians-as-parents than ever are able to write about the most delicate and important issues, portend for the content of theology and the processes by which theology is written?

And so I have to think about what I post online now in a different way, but this does not often give me any easy answers. As I mentioned, I am probably most concerned about how I care for the presentation of women and matters of sexuality in music and theology, even though there are lots of other values and practices that are important in parenting a girl in a white middle-class family like ours. Why femaleness/femininity and sexuality? My thinking is very simple: in the present, intentional and creative attention to gender and sexuality seem crucial in the healthy raising of children, and in the recent past, gender and sexuality have been deeply problematic parts of life, in religion and music, not to mention Western culture in general, for young people. (I am of course bracketing religion and spirituality, since for me a rich awareness of those dimensions of life are (I hope) givens for my parenting.) But race, social class, place, it goes without saying how crucial these too are — and there are so many overlays that are worth noticing about childhood and parenting, not to mention of course the imperative to have as much fun, and more deeply, as much joy, as our capacities and situations allow, to be as fair and just as possible, and most of all, I think, to discover one’s own courage and “legitimate strangeness.” I have a lot of this in the back of my mind when I cook up posts online now, and even when I write pieces for print publication. I have no “objective” norm for how I make these decisions. Perhaps the best way I can summarize my overriding sense of how to make decisions about what to write, is to hope that whatever my daughter learns of my work in the future, she will think that it adds up to something worthy of the better parts of the father she’s known me to be.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

I mentioned in an earlier post that I have recently begun work on a new album. This particular musical project — my second full length “solo” record, if I could arrogantly claim that term — is the most “theological” of the various musical projects of which I have been a part. It is also the first serious recording project that I have undertaken since I joined the Rock and Theology project. So I can’t help but be reflective in the process of making this record; perhaps more reflective than I have ever been about “what I’m doing” with these particular songs in this particular band. In this post I’d simply like to throw out some very tentative reflections and questions, to “think out loud.” (Can I get a little more of me in my monitor?)

Although my “solo” material has for a long time featured overtly “religious” language, especially Christian imagery and references, I have always emphatically rejected the notion that what I am doing is “Christian rock.” (I have never been interested in “Christian rock,” with the exception of a couple very fringey “Christian metal” bands long ago.) And though no one, to my knowledge, has ever “accused” me of making “Christian rock,” a few listeners have come pretty close. A friend of mine told me once after a show that when he saw my band play he felt like he was at church — “In a good way,” he added. I believe my response was “Thanks?”

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The vision of the Rock and Theology project includes a musical composition/performance dimension in addition to this blog and academic output. This dimension has been explored by a few members of the project so far, but it seems that we are still feeling out where this idea might take us. I’m not sure that the band Glass Wave, made up mostly of literature professors who translate literary classics into progressive rock music, provides us with a model that could be an exact fit. I have difficulty imagining what a rock translation of Thomas Aquinas, Karl Rahner, Stanley Hauerwas, or Gustavo Gutierrez would sound like. But it’s an interesting idea nonetheless and it could be placed in the file as another example of how academic and rock lives can interact: (more…)

Among the many astonishing images of dystopia contained in the 2006 film Children of Men is a scene that takes place in an abandoned elementary school. The school is abandoned because, in this story of a not-too-distant future, humankind has for unknown reasons lost the ability to reproduce. And because the futuristic Great Britain we are experiencing in the film is still in the midst of the “War on Terror” of today, like many of the locations in the film the school looks like the site of a bombing raid: broken windows, walls overrun by grass and weeds, animals scrounging around the rubble. Children of Men’s depiction of a world without children and overrun by violence is a startling symbolic narrative that suggests not only what is possible in the future but the present reality of the status of children in Western societies.

“Seen and not heard” is the classic line, right? Although the saying is trite, it is trite for a reason. Children, like all too many classes of persons, live in a world not of their making, not organized with them in mind, and therefore, “not for them.” And as strange as it may sound, this is true even in our churches. As much as Catholics, for example, say we are “pro-family” and “pro-child,” more and more observers are noting that children are largely absent from our churches and from our theologies.

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All of a sudden here at R&T, we are being hit by a veritable flood of theologians from Baylor University. Make that two. (Hey, in a group of nine, two is a lot.) A little while back we welcomed Paul Martens. Now I am pleased to welcome Myles Werntz.

He is a doctoral candidate in religion at Baylor University, and is currently writing a dissertation entitled Ontology, Ecclesiology, Nonviolence. He describes it as “exploring the interrelationship of ontological grounding of nonviolence through ecclesial bodies in the work of John Howard Yoder, Dorothy Day, and William Stringfellow.” That’s going to make a lot of our R&T readers salivate, and more than a few scratch their heads, but no doubt Myles will be teaching us about these things as time goes by.

Myles is the co-editor of Nonviolence: A Brief History (Baylor University Press, 2010), a set of lectures by the late John Howard Yoder, and writes on issues of ecclesiology, war, and poverty.

His rock path has been a lively one. He reports that his musical pilgrimage began in the throes of the Contemporary Christian Music world of Whitecross and Whiteheart, which was followed by a conversion to Pearl Jam in the early 1990s, a calling he continues to work out in the works of diverse conversation partners such as Bruce Springsteen, Frightened Rabbit, and Talib Kweli. Musically, he plays acoustic guitar badly, and drives fast when Alice in Chains comes on the radio. In his spare time, he blogs on film over at The Three Hands, when not teaching, writing, reading, running, or hanging out with his wife Sarah. Welcome, Myles!

This semester, I have been teaching a course at Fordham on research into theological practices. Each week the students and I discuss matters pertaining to models for theological research into lived religion or the practice of faith, and attendant issues of the stance of the researcher, the goals of research, and the relationships that practical theologians take up to systematic theologians and other theological frameworks, on the one hand, and social scientists on the other.

While teaching this course, I find myself pondering my own next theological research and writing project. I am planning to write a book on rock and theology, and have been keeping notes for such a book over the past year since the R&T blog got going. I find that my writing projects generally need a slow-burning groove in order to most fruitfully go forward.

Much of the work is unconscious, as I get insights from associations to something I read, or while exercising, or while talking to a friend, as much as from intentionally sitting down to write. (I’ve even gotten a usable phrase or two from a dream.) But being intentional works for me, too, and I keep a rough writing schedule to try to stay on track and imaginatively plotting where the work might go from month to month. As I’ve written before at R&T, a good deal of that intentional writing is still aided by unconscious forces, insofar as I often listen to music while writing. (And up to the recent past, listening quite loudly, about which I now have some pretty serious, though not yet total, regret, because it has contributed to my hearing loss.)

I find that my writing projects are like coin-machine games that let you drop in a coin onto a platform with a bar pushing back and forth, back and forth, ever so slightly moving the coins toward the ledge. The coins often don’t seem to move at all, or when they do, it is only a tiny bit – or sideways. But once in a great while, with aim and with luck, you can drop a coin in at the right moment in front of that moving bar and you can start a chain reaction of pushed pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters that will topple over the edge of the platform and out the bottom of the machine into your surprised and satisfied hands.

(Here is a fellow happy to illustrate how it works.)

Having now written three books, I have found that the process of book-writing opens all sorts of orthogonal ideas for me that become material for another book or articles or lectures, which themselves will later become material for a book. So in writing one book, I need to keep several other files open for the tangential but far from disorganized ideas that keep arising. Thus the bar moves back and forth, back and forth on several of my projects at once. Coins get dropped in on each game/project almost daily.

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And now for a few more words on Christian rock. We have addressed it on the blog before, such as in Mike Iafrate’s exploration here and my thoughts here and here.

The top two responses, in no particular order, that I hear regarding the very existence, or even just the title, of the Rock and Theology Project, are: [1] You mean like Christian rock? [2] You mean like playing pop music in church?

I often have a negative reaction to these responses, and want to say something like, “No, no, no, it’s much more exploratory, curious, open and experimental. It’s about finding why theology and rock matter for each other, about why we think of theology as sacred and rock as secular, about how theology influences rock, how rock influences theology, how people live in both sacred and secular worlds; it’s about examples of all this, methods for studying all this, communicating these paradigms to academic theology and to rock culture. And for me personally, it is about studying how rock culture can and does condition spiritual identity and experience, with the latter having been thought to be the traditional specialization of theology.” That’s what I try to say.

But I remain curious about my negative reaction to the top two typical responses. What makes me uncomfortable about Christian rock, or the use of pop music in worship or liturgy? As I have pondered my reaction especially over the last decade, I have come up with one (to me) good reason for that unease, and also one criticism of my own unease.

The good reason for the discomfort is the way in which Christian artists and liturgists end up trying to drain resistant gestures from rock, as if rock culture is finally compatible with the theology one wishes to teach by crafting something called Christian music or housing “secular” music in a “sacred” space. This is not to deny new resonances that can happen when secular music is re-framed in Christian terms, songwriting-wise or liturgically, or to suggest that “secular” rock culture, on its “own terms,” is something unframed or atheological.

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Dwelling in the interstices of rock and theology can train us in being alert in new ways to theologically significant material in “secular” culture, and to culturally significant material in “theological” culture. So we can pay attention to everyday forms of musical discourse for what they give to theology and what theology gives to them. This notion occurred to me again as I was reading the New York Times Book Review last weekend and music critic Jon Caramanica’s discussion of two recent collections of rock criticism. Caramanica reviews Robert Hilburn’s Corn Flakes with John Lennon: And Other Tales from a Rock ‘n’ Roll Life (Rodale) and a volume of Robert Palmer’s writings edited by Anthony DeCurtis titled Blues and Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer (Scribner).

Caramanica argues that the books display two different forms of rock criticism, contrasting Palmer’s restless and searching, intellectually-aware registration of the new and exotic, rendered with an unabashed “openheartedness,” with Hilburn’s more worshipful and ingratiating approach to rock culture, concerned with the gods of the stage and their specialness. I have not yet read these books, so I cannot say whether this review gets to essential differences in these books. However, rock writing is typically overloaded (often through being self-consciously underloaded) with religious marks, and Caramanica gives a nice sentence for our consideration as he maps his dual typology: “Palmer saw music as a continuum of borrowings and influences to be unraveled and traced back; Hilburn views it as one godhead supplanting the next.” It’s like his review suddenly becomes a theological hotplate: criticism versus veneration, history against kneeling. Theologians know these problematics well.

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Over at the Immanent Frame blog, four scholars (Courtney Bender, Wendy Cadge, Peggy Levitt, and David Smilde) have written a compelling manifesto describing and proposing a potential consensus for new directions in sociology of religion. This new constellation relativizes the United States as religious norm, problematizes Christianity’s dominance over the category “religion,” looks for religious life outside religious institutions as much as inside them, and reserves the right to criticize religion directly. The authors state that these developments “challenge notions of religion as primarily about belief structures and worldviews by emphasizing practice, discourse, the interaction of religious and ’secular’ structures, networks, [and] historical comparison…”

This formulation resonates with me because I have been inching in these directions in my own work. My last book and my recent work as summarized on this blog have been trying to: contribute to theology’s exploration of practice as distinct (and in many conceptual ways, separate) from belief, as a way of showing the conceptual limits and theological-political investments in the overfocus on belief in Christian theology, especially in (but far from limited to) Catholic academic theology; work out through a critical-historical and discursively-aware form of attention a theological “dispossession” of “normal” Christianity in favor of a “secular,” or maybe I should say, “abnormal” Christianity; show how rock cultures traffic in their own kind of religiousness that borrows from and refashions the religions, including but not limited to Christianity, that rock cultures inherit.

Here is another reason that working theologically at the intersection of theology and secular music provides not only the occasion for revisiting models for construing “faith” and “culture” debates, but forces innovating of new tools for doing so, tools that are fashioned well in robust conversation with our colleagues in sociology of religion (and continental philosophy of religion, as well, but that’s another thread). And this is another reason why I find practical theology such an interesting discourse, because it takes theories of action from interdisciplinary perspectives seriously. Or at least sometimes it does. Granted, practical theology is often not historically sophisticated enough, being so focused on the present faith praxis and often enough on the models from history that are said to “illuminate” or “problematize” that praxis. And for a discipline that specializes in practice, it can be numbingly indifferent to what is new or what is contingent, or perhaps I should say it often fails to mark praxes in both their newness and their contingency. Still, it is a provisional home, or one of several.

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