David Samuels wrote an interesting essay last May for Harper’s Magazine, titled “Underachievers Please Try Harder,” about his experience of indie rock during an “All Tomorrow’s Parties” festival in England in December 2010. I have been thinking about some passages from Samuels’ essay, because they register so well some larger currents in the rock/theology interplay.

Like many today, Samuels takes important cues for his everyday life from popular music. “My own experience of the world,” he writes, “has been shaped as much by pop music as it has by people, a fact that I recognize without understanding what it means or where it will lead me. The fact that pop songs don’t have plots the way movies and novels do is a source of drift and disquiet in my life, as I suspect it is in the lives of other people who love rock music at the expense of more traditional art forms. I pay close attention to the lives of the artists who have made it into their forties while singing about longing and doubt, and who have replaced the youthful promise of transcendence with the consolations of pop craft.”

Ok, wait. It is not clear to me why the latter is a “replacement.” Is transcendence edgier and craft more settled? Today I taught a class on Protestant theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher’s (1768-1834) understanding of practical theology. He argues that practical theology (in contrast to historical theology and philosophical theology) is the theological domain that develops “techniques” or “rules of art” for pastoral practice, drawing on the insights of philosophical and historical theologies with reference to contemporary concerns that emerge in church life. Schleiermacher is not alone in arguing that “craft,” or wise practice, or theological savoir-faire, is not an add-on to the “yes” to transcendence but can indeed facilitate that “yes.” When in the presence of one who really knows how to deliver a sermon, offer counsel, or teach, we really can be taken to a new, sometimes even permanently new, place, whether alone or together. I might add that craft can be its own transcendence — one “toward” or “within” history and materiality rather than itching to escape it.

Anyway.

In “Underachievers,” Samuels displays sensitivity to the way that (ambiguously) sexual imagery in

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