As a complement to the posts below on Clarence Clemons, I want to mention that Timothy Egan has a column in the New York Times about the significance for rock fans of the interracial friendship of Clarence Clemons and Bruce Springsteen. He revises Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous observation about Sunday morning being the most segregated hour in the U.S.: “The most segregated place in America on a given night,” Egan writes, “can be a stadium rock concert — on stage, and in the audience.” The death of Clemons spells the end of a particularly inspiring hope for what the band Earl Greyhound calls the imperative to “Rock your faces [and] mix the races.”

Theologically, I consider the matter at stake here to be the question of whether and how popular musical experience and culture can be a witness to and training for a transcendent horizon — by going through the particularities of specific identities (religious, racial, ethnic, gendered, classed, dis/abled, sexual, and more) telling how they (we) have learned to live with and beyond themselves/ourselves. A white-privileged rock scene is, from this perspective, deficient in a way that a theological consciousness can help to unearth. Coming out of a Catholic background, as I do, the imperative is only multiplied, given how deeply the religion and theology I have learned has been covertly co-identified with whiteness.

Egan’s article shows a little of its own whiteness when he writes that “There weren’t a lot of blacks in my high school graduation class — two, to be exact — which meant that race was somewhat of an abstraction, happening elsewhere, mostly on a screen or from the grooves of a record.”

I know what he means, because I went to mostly-white schools, from kindergarten through seven years of graduate school, and have taught in mostly-white universities for ten years. A good number of these years

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In this unaired and uncensored footage from The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert and Jack White hilariously test each other’s Catholic knowledge. You may want to skip this if you are offended by bad language in close proximity to discussion of Marian dogma.