A friend sent me this provocative article from the Telegraph (United Kingdom), about an Anglican priest who is recommending that Christians consider what metal music has to offer spiritually. The Rev. Rachel Mann has some interesting things to say in this story. Unfortunately, in this kind of a venue, it’s going to be difficult for them to get a fair hearing. Why? Because the bent toward the expirational and the momentary on the web, and especially on news sites, and more especially when reporting on such an unusual convergence as the “secular” world of metal and the “sacred” world of the church, is nearly overdetermined to give itself for consideration with a less-than-sober patina.

Yet despite the discursive tilt toward reading this as something of a “lifestyle” piece, or simply as further evidence of the decline of the Church of England and its clergy, it sounds like Rev. Mann has got some deeper ideas at work.

She speaks of a “liberative theology of darkness” in metal, and the value of confronting nihilism, as well as “death, violence, and destruction.” This very thematic is part of what makes the metal scene, she says, so accepting of others. This is not cheap stuff being put forward. Paul Tillich, among other modern theologians, famously urged theology to take seriously the destructive and disturbing as rendered in art, testifying to the complex depths of human alienation and searching, which (as I read him, especially in the works on theology and culture) are propaedeutic for any meaningful theological talk of salvation or healing in modernity. Marcella Althaus-Reid argued that the desire to fence off “obscenities” from being given theological attention was the effect of a more truly obscene theology, one that wanted people to divide their lives up into acceptable and shameful behaviors before they could take their own spiritual inventories of their own “queerness.” Rev. Mann seems to be moving theologically in these waters.

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I finally am going to bring my stretched-out (16-month!) “series” on Winger and theology to a conclusion with this post. For those keeping score at home, part one is here, which hiccuped into part one and a half, and here is part two, followed by three, then comes four, only to give way to five, and here we are presently at six.

In case you lost track, this series has come to the point of thinking out loud about how bodies in the rock culture of Winger open up matters of theological interest, and how theology finds things interesting in these hard rock embodiments. To quote myself (with permission) from my last post on this topic: “One of the theologically significant ways of rock culture is training in bodily habitation. As religion scholar Talal Asad among many others have argued, the training of sense was intrinsic to the working of classic Catholic sacramental theology and is part of what Christianity and Islam share. With regard to how rock does it, I have called this the performance of a bodily wherewithal, wherein instruments like electric guitars or basses become something like natural appendages for the musician, in a way that speaks to fans (including other musicians) of bodily integration and excellence or deep congruence in inhabiting the world.”

In part five, I was discussing lead singer/bassist Kip Winger as “trainer of sense” and object of imitative desire on the part of fans. His ballet training and classical music interests were mentioned, and I took those to signal an uncommon interest on Kip Winger’s part in refined bodily presentation in musical performance.

Steve Almond’s recent book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (Random House, 2010), has some fun with this aspect of Winger’s persona. In fact, Almond’s book is the only work in print that I know of that dedicates a special section to a Winger roast of sorts. That (very brief) part is promisingly titled “Interlude: The Kip Winger Canon” (pp. 144-147).

Almond, in a section definitely not suitable for kids, talks with his wife Erin about Kip Winger’s unique power of bodily symbolizing the rock aesthetic, in the context of a real or imagined (and leading to further-imagined) encounter(s) that Erin may or may not have had with Kip Winger. While the actual narrative here may not be more than a forgettable snicker for the Winger in-crowd…

(NOTE: for what it’s worth (and I aim to write a review of the book eventually at R&T), I found the whole discussion too clever by half, and similar to Howard Hampton’s recent review, wanted more from Almond. A discussion of Winger that tried harder wouldn’t have to be boring, un-arch, or lacking cultural insight, if that is what Almond was worried about. (Of course, smart writing about pop music always risks uncoolness, and cleverness will never fully patch that constitutive leak.))

…it does help me transition to the point I want to make in this post: that whatever one might laud about what Kip Winger’s rock persona, it sometimes manifests within the old masculine/heterosexual codes that dance with patriarchalism — one of rock’s oldest and tiredest songs.

Where are female bodies in this real-symbolic metal world?

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On the publications front: I recently co-authored an article titled “Religion, Pop Culture, and Virtual Faith” with Sylvia Collins-Mayo, who teaches sociology at Kingston University (UK). That has now been published as a chapter in the new book Religion and Youth, edited by Sylvia Collins-Mayo and Pink Dandelion (Ashgate, 2010). The chapter briskly sets my argument about the “spirituality” of Generation X, from my 1998 book Virtual Faith, in the context of sociological research about generations in Western/secularizing cultures. I learned much from Sylvia Collins-Mayo (co-author of The Faith of Generation Y) about contemporary social-science framing of generational research and youth in the process of putting this chapter together. I am also grateful that Religion and Youth includes a chapter (”Generation X Religion: A Critical Evaluation”) from a critic of my work, Gordon Lynch (of the University of London, Birkbeck).

Religion and Youth is weighted toward the United Kingdom but also includes research on some other (Australian, United States, Brazilian) contexts, and takes as its major sections: generations, reports on belief and practice, cases of religious practice, religious identity of youth, handing on religion, and research/method questions in youth and religion. In this book there are many examples of rigorous sociology of religion that can challenge theologians in my own North American context to rework what we think counts as religious practices, or practices of interest to contemporary religions. I consider this intersection between social science and theology to be very important for Rock and Theology and for anyone thinking carefully about secular/popular practices and religion today.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

I am reading the new book Secret Faith in the Public Square: An Argument for the Concealment of Christian Identity by Jonathan Malesic (Brazos, 2009), as part of a small set of summer readings to help me think about what it means to try to take the measure of people’s faith, spirituality or religion. (The occasion is a small conference this week at Oxford, sponsored by the University of London, Birkbeck, on the study of religion in everyday life, at which I will be among several others giving papers.)

I will post a brief review later of Secret Faith, but wanted to take a short moment to flag a quotation from Kierkegaard that Malesic highlights. The context is Malesic’s discussion of Kierkegaard’s argument for faith as passionate and singular, in contrast to the kind of faith that pertains in Christian cultures wherein Christianity becomes part of the cultural furniture and is presupposed as a matter of good manners or patriotism. In such a situation, it is hard to take up one’s own radical gratitude for the gift of faith. It is hard, in other words, to really be a Christian. Malesic quotes Kierkegaard’s Works of Love: “[W]hen Christianity is presupposed, presupposed as known, as given, and is implied… now this Law of love is repeated by everyone as a matter of course,” instead of imagining “what his condition might be if Christianity had not come into the world.” As Malesic glosses things: “Christianity maintains its originality through each individual who becomes a Christian.” (p. 96)

Reading Kiekegaard’s theological thought experiment here, in which Christians are to wonder what life would be like if Christianity had not given them what is highest in their lives, in other words, in which Christians imagine how much has come to them unasked and unrecompensable, is in my view a fascinating and important one for Christians to undertake today. But perhaps not for the reasons Kierkegaard (and Malesic) give. Rather, the importance of appreciating “what [our] condition might be if Christianity had not come into the world” has to do with recalling the contingency of the Christian position and integrating that contingency into one’s personal theology or philosophy.

In the mid-1990s, when I was a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, I worked with other Catholic students to put together a forum on the identity of the Catholic theologian that was presented in spring 1995 and 1996. At one of these forums, one of the participants, a renowned theologian, remarked that in response to the question “Why am I Catholic?”, he had to observe first and fundamentally that it was simply an accident of birth, that he happened to be raised in a Catholic household, and had enough immersion in Catholic culture to have made a permanent difference for his life choices. No one followed up this comment at the time, and very seldom in theology do we refer our career moves or theological interests to the accidents of geography and culture, but the forthrightness of that observation has stayed with me. Things could just as well have been otherwise for any of us who have taken any particular religion to be so important to our identities. And indeed they are just as well otherwise for a great many others who are not Christian, indeed for the majority of the world who are not, should not be so, and never will be so. Many of us who spend time in secular music cultures such as rock culture get encouraged quickly into these kinds of thought experiments, because so many in rock culture do not identify as religious, or have music as their religion. It becomes increasingly easy, and often interpersonally important, to imagine “What would my life be like if I shared X’s biography and perspective on religion?”

That to me is one dimension of the radical ongoing significance of Kierkegaard’s thought experiment. When you keep one foot firmly planted in secular culture, especially an “art/commercial” culture like music, the question “what my condition might be if I had lived like this person” becomes not only unavoidable but ethically desirable.

It should help Christians hold lightly their claims to truth, which so easily become inflated when we lack such imagination.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

In his response to my recent post on “cars and spiritual transport,” Mike Iafrate has made a terrific suggestion about the potential theological importance, at least lyrically speaking, of Gary Numan’s song “Cars.” That’s a subtle highlighting of some spiritually suggestive phrases.

I will say that I find almost as compelling as those lyrics this video of Numan performing the song with Nine Inch Nails. Watch it in high-definition if you can.

The videality here almost entirely upends the lyrical content, giving a whole other experience for theological comprehension. As a matter of fact, I know there is someone who reads this blog who could give a wizardish theological reading of this video, right down to Trent Reznor’s delicate but authoritative handling of the “manbourine.” I hope that person, or someone else, will step forward with some thoughts.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

A few days ago, a Rock and Theology reader posted a playful commentary about the song “Red Barchetta” by Rush. This is a rock song celebrating what might otherwise sound like a mundane story: of the joy of being in a fast little sports car zipping around the open countryside, and of a mysterious uncle on a farm whose car it is, whose consoling company parenthesizes the story. Here are two videos of Rush playing “Red Barchetta” in the 1980s and recently. The first has a few words from drummer and lyricist Neil Peart talking about what cars can represent.

The comment from the recent post that caught my attention, however tongue-in-cheek the intention, was this subtle question: “What does the Red Barchetta make happen?” Around this question are framed various Christian interpretations, based on the “exitus-reditus” schema, the going-forth from God and the going-back to God, a going-out and going-back that can be said to “pass through” the world. This theological concept has given rise to centuries of interpretation about the “vehicles” God (and/as God’s Spirit) may take, and the travelers it may “pick up,” as God travels through the world. Hence the brief theological background for the question, “What does the Red Barchetta make happen?” (In other words, does it symbolize the divine passage through the world and signal that the very car-ness of this car says that it was built to travel from somewhere to somewhere, its mobility a symbol of divine dynamism?)

Much hinges on what we (cultural interpreters) ourselves make happen when we give such interpretations. Are we “preliminarily” playing with ideas in the Christian popcorn popper “before” they get served up for others? Are we giving the “real” (as “final”) interpretation of these cultural materials? My own position, in brief, is that in the game of making theological sense of cultural material, we are working with the materials we have from a psychological-cultural history, for this moment, in a process we neither own nor control.

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Apparently, this news is several months old, but Cesare Bonizzi has decided to leave rock. He is the 60-something Catholic friar who made global music news by fronting an Italian rock band, Fratello Metallo. His stated reason? To combat the devil. See his “final interview” here:

Several times, I have featured Bonizzi here at R&T –  for two reasons: [1] His Catholic theology of engagement with secular culture is refreshing, radical, and subtle. As he stated it in an interview: “I am religious and I am a priest. I believe in it and I put my whole life into it. But I don’t play to draw people closer to Christ, to the church or to religion. I do it to convert people to life, to understand life, to grab hold of life, to savor life, to experience life and enjoy it, full stop.” I wager that this is not only a theology occasioned by finding himself playing in a rock band for secular audiences, but the fruit of decades of prayer and service in religious life. [2] He models the experimental attitude that ought to characterize the Catholic engagement with secularity in contemporary Western life.

Now, that “devil” piece is quite interesting, and I would like to hear more about it. In the interview above, he presents a fully-formed nugget about how he thinks the devil was at work in his success, dividing him from his music and his religious companions. He parses “devil” as “divider”, and if that is his way of using traditional language but with a contemporary (”demythologized”) meaning, it’s a further example of his experimenting theologically in a secular age. In other words, theologically speaking, whatever singular force is pulling him apart from his band, his manager, and other monks, is not likely worthy of his own recognition/assent to a divine claim on his life. That’s how I would put what he said.

But even as he goes out swinging, he proclaims with gusto, and again with Catholic provocation: “Metal is the real brother!”

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

The Rock and Theology project gives many occasions to wonder about how theology gets started and for what it exists. Dealing with rock here invariably underscores the practice-intensive character of a theological sense-making of secular music. And as the masters of philosophy of practice remind us, even theory is a kind of practice. But theologizing from and for practice occupies an uneasy site in the Catholic contexts in which I do some of my work.

For example, when students in my practical theology classes read Friedrich Schleiermacher, a key figure in the modern founding of the discipline of practical theology, they are invariably drawn to a provocative question he raises: Can there be the same practical theology for Protestant as well as Catholic theologians? (Christian Caring, p. 117) This is often interpreted by my students, with good reason, to mean, can there really be a Catholic practical theology? Schleiermacher writes that “Much of our criticism of the Catholic hierarchy is due to the fact that it considers its methods to be nothing but means to an end.” (p.107) A “critical” practical theology, by contrast, should “serve as a standard by which to evaluate the methods that we employ in the church.” This means “any suspension of inquiry… is a suppression of the scientific spirit, and will prove harmful to the church as a whole.” (p. 108) He wonders what shape practical theology will then take for Catholics. What will guidance of souls in Catholic contexts demand of the practical theologian? I think the polemics of his day do not cancel the force of his critical point. His question remains: what might Protestant and Catholic practical theologians share, and what would distinguish their approaches?

Is there a critical enough mass of Catholics doing practical theology to be able to answer Schleiermacher’s question? Prominent Catholic theologians who helped define the course of Catholic theology in the latter half of the twentieth century have indeed defended the place of practical theology in the theological curriculum. Karl Rahner argued that practical theology was an essential discipline for Catholics because the church needs a scholarly partner to help it negotiate what happens in its continually new encounter with the world. The church can only realize itself in ever-new worldly situations. What then is practical theology’s subject matter, Rahner asked? His answer was, “everything.” The church-world frontier is an illimitable one, and there is need for translators to assist the church in being what it must be in each new cultural horizon. It is interesting that even though Rahner has been so monumentally influential, his views on practical theology are rarely associated with his larger theological project. So too Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza and David Tracy, so influential in helping set larger theological agendas in Catholicism, both argued for practical-theological orientations, and many practical theologians in particular are fond of Tracy’s correlational definition of practical theology, but these rarely are acknowledged when their projects are engaged in larger Catholic theology.

But new paths have been charted in recent years in foregrounding practical theology for Catholic publics.

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Several days ago, Dr. Chris McDonald, in reply to my “Ruminatio” post about Jacob Moon’s interplanetarily good cover of Rush’s “Subdivisions,” wrote: “I was intrigued by your comment that ‘he’s even doing the whole song himself, reducing a rock trio to a solo act with cool electronics, as if that too somehow speaks to the climate the tune gives for adulthood.’ Could you expand on that?”

What I think I meant there was that to understand the song “Subdivisions” has always been, for me and many others, to hear it as set to the famous music video that accompanied it.

While one might get a strong sense for the advocacy of an unrelenting individuality from that song alone, and certainly if one hears that song in the context of Rush’s larger catalogue, one also gets that sense from the video. There, the young-man-against-the-masses struggles to make his way through indifferent or hostile worlds of conformity. In the end is the famous scene of him playing the Tempest video game, alone with technology, greasy hair, and oversize glasses. And Rush not only understands, it celebrates this singularity.

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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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