Thanks to Dave Nantais for the invitation to think about the way rock culture confects friendship in general and male friendship in particular. Friendship, that intimate concern of ancient philosophy and occasionally of Christian theology (especially the monastic tradition), is always a worthy topic for the overlap of theology and music.

I want to raise a few questions in response to Nantais’ post.

First, in the movie clip where the “I Love You, Man!” guys are going nuts at the Rush concert, where “the girlfriend” stands aghast at the sea of slightly geeky male abandon, I was watching that and remembering how much such scenes are a part of my own and so many people’s history, and how much the stories of live concerts are a part of the story many modern/Western/secular people tell about themselves, and about high points or memorable points in their lives. And I wondered, when we tell the stories of our lives in quick exchanges or more leisurely conversations, how have we learned to disaggregate these “secular” concert experiences from our “spiritual” lives, or from being potentially “theological” material? Have any studies been done on the operative discourses or practices that encourage either their aggregation or disaggregation? My rock-culture-trained gut tells me that something about the “secular” markings of the concert scene make it permissible to express and indulge the kinds of passions we see in that clip. But if this is the case, is this part of the instantiation of secularity that Talal Asad and other scholars have outlined, where real formation is happening through ideological cultural practices that are “spiritually” significant but that separate the practitioner from social-political influence — that is, we learn to restrict that “performance” we underwent, and its origins and its implications, to that space, and to call it “merely secular”? “It was just a rock show.”

And on the Plant video: that is one well-crafted salute to his friend and bandmate Jimmy Page, with many phrases to ponder afterward. When I teach the field of practical theology to my students, I often give them my pithy definition of religious practices, which are what finally fascinates practical theologians: religious practices, or — stated differently — practices of theological significance, are, in my estimation, well understood as “orchestrations of identity with respect to claiming power.” They have to do with how persons get put together individually and communally with reference to the grounding power(s) they claim and that claim them. From this vantage, listen to how Plant describes the power that claims Page and Page’s music, and presumably Plant as well: “…towards the one light of invention and excitement.” “You created music from beyond music.”

The “one light of invention and excitement,” the “from beyond music” — these are rich imaginaries for “claiming power.” For theologians, that “claiming power” will be tangled up with the notion of God at some point in the inquiry — whether as a starting point, as a reference point, or as the conclusion.

One implication of this theological vantage is that we take seriously the following questions: Can we

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For those readers who like reading theology and can read French, I have a new article published this week about how popular culture can be understood as a kind of “virtual catechesis,” a de facto school for faith that, given its formative power, can and should be taken into more explicitly defined sites of faith education and dealt with creatively and seriously as a faith-resource in people’s lives. The article, “Une catéchèse virtuelle. La culture populaire comme lieu d’apprentissage de la foi,” has been published in the Belgian journal Lumen Vitae: Revue Internationale de catéchèse et de Pastorale (Vol 66, no 3), pp. 311-321. I have been working on this line of argument since my 1998 book Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X, and have had many occasions to learn from the contributors here at Rock and Theology about the prospects for this kind of theology, and to refine my thinking about it through this blog. The article was developed from material first tested at R&T and presented at the Annual Convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America two years ago in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Tommy Beaudoin, New York City