I began writing about popular culture and theology a dozen years ago, in a book called Virtual Faith. It surprises me that people still read and discuss that book, for two reasons: I am surprised because to me the cultural references seem so peculiar to a crucial adolescent and young-adult phase of a certain middle class North American cohort (otherwise known as “my generation”) that these references must seem odd to anyone outside that cohort, or even perhaps to my many peers in that cohort some dozen years later; but I am also surprised because a goodly amount of the method or mechanics of that book, including the theological framework and the cultural-studies assumptions, would need to be substantially revised now.

(One song that I referenced many times in that book has gone on to become a generational anthem of sorts: REM’s “Losing My Religion.” Here is the video where you can see the fans having made the song their own.)

One thing that connects my 2009 perspective on these matters, which has been displayed throughout this blog over the last ten months, with my 1996-97 (when I wrote Virtual Faith) perspective, can be found in the Appendix to Virtual Faith. There, I tried to describe what the book was trying to do, or at least how I would have it be read, methodologically. And it is there that I first wrote, briefly, about the rhetoric of theological writing on culture, as a theological force in its own right. I see this move on my part as analogous to my later focus on theology’s engagement with culture as consisting in practices of attention that serve as engines of deep change. In both cases, I see the theological engagement with culture as making it imperative for theology to think through what sorts of acts of the theologian have made that theologian who s/he is and will make their theology a personal and cultural power for spiritual and political change.

There’s much more to say about this, but I wanted to note in this regard that I recently heard from a Peruvian Jesuit, Victor-Hugo Miranda, who last year wrote this entry on his blog regarding Virtual Faith. (I’m already working on translation assistance.) In it, he also links to some of the videos I discussed in that book. Such an entry reminds me that it would be good to get more Peruvian and, more generally, South American theological and rockish material here at Rock and Theology.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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