I am writing to recommend an engaging little book, a kind of rockish spiritual manual really, written by David Nantais and titled Rock-a My Soul. This brisk and stimulating read will provide occasion for readers to think for themselves about how their music sits in their spiritual life.

Let me fully disclose my biases here: I have known and admired David Nantais as a friend for over a decade, and played in two bands with him in Boston, and the publisher of his book, Liturgical Press, also sponsors the Rock and Theology Project. Oh, and I also read the manuscript earlier and happily provided an endorsement for it. In short, I have every reason to want to support his book. Now that that’s clear, let me give some reasons why despite my biases, this book is well worth checking out.

Nantais, who is presently director of campus ministry at the University of Detroit, Mercy, is also an experienced rock drummer, aficionado of rock culture, and concert devotee (and, importantly for this book, a former Jesuit — seven years ago, we used to pick him up at his Jesuit residence for band practice).

This book is like a travelogue of how Nantais has been able to make spiritual sense of his deep pleasure in rock music and culture. The main thread throughout is the question of how to make of rock experience a spiritual exercise. Toward this end, he calls on many practices from Ignatian spirituality and describes the ways in which one can pay attention to experience in secular music as a way of referring our lives to God. The book is quite practical and those who are comfortable with, or even curious about, Catholic spirituality in contemporary terms will find Nantais an engagingly amiable and practical interlocutor.

Despite Nantais’ deep involvement in both rock and Catholic cultures, the book adopts a helpfully critical stance toward some features of rock culture,

and writing now from Detroit in the midst of his new pastoral work, Nantais discusses the knotty racial history that is brought to bear any time rock and roll is celebrated, much less made into an occasion for encounter with the sacred. I think he rightly names bodily experience as a primary point of tension between Christian theological traditions and the short history of rock and roll. And he introduces fresh topics for consideration, like the number of rock musicians who have undergone “conversions” and what that might mean.

Some of his claims will leave readers wanting more, such as “If a rock fan embraces environmental concerns because his faith impels him or because his favorite band promotes it, does it really matter?” (Depending on how this is qualified, for example, I could agree with it.) And Nantais takes up a humorous distance when necessary; while discussing heavy metal, he writes, its “common themes include demons, dungeons and dragons, immature sexual innuendos, and, well, that is about it!”

Sometimes spiritual handbooks can be just the right thing to help clarify how you stand in your spiritual practice and why you do so. I felt this way about a similar handbook published several years ago, by Teresa Blythe and Daniel Wolpert, Meeting God in Virtual Reality (Abingdon, 2004). Because he stays concrete in his own rock and Christian world, Nantais’ book can also serve as an evocative and provocative occasion to deepen reflection about the intersection of faith and culture in one’s own life.

If I have one criticism or disagreement with his approach, it is that his book tends to make Catholic spiritual tradition the backstop for interpretations of experience in popular culture. There are by now enough theological, psychological, and historical researches and critiques regarding, for example, Ignatian spirituality that it is well to be cautious in making the technique of spiritual exercise dependent on an ambiguous spiritual tradition without at least naming some of those ambiguities. I prefer to read Nantais, as I do many contemporary commentators on the Exercises, not as giving us access to Ignatian spirituality “as such,” but as a strategic theological use of elements of that tradition.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

PS: From the book, it is clear that one of Nantais’ favorite bands is King’s X, and here are two examples of their work from earlier in their career, and more recently. One the confident and Christianity-influenced “It’s Love,” about love being what “holds it all together,” the other the differently confident and now deconverted song “Pray,” in which the lyrics ask those who believe (what are characterized as) traditional religious claims to “pray for me.”

1 Comment »

1. 

   Looking forward to reading this work. Thanks for the heads-up! Troy

   Comment by Troy Allan — March 1, 2011 @ 11:17 am

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