Theology should pay careful attention to subjective reports of “spiritual experience” in popular music. By staying with an attitude of curiosity and critical appreciation for how music resides in the everyday life of fans, theology can better understand how people make a special kind of sense of their lives today. In my view, theologians can and should show critically and constructively how the impulse for life in relation to a claiming power, a felt “beyond,” however conscious, unconscious, or pre-conscious, is being lived in “real life.”

So it was that I was delighted to read this blog entry by Harvard Divinity School student (and friend and my former student) Maggi Van Dorn, in which she discusses the intertwining of her love for the music of Rod Stewart and her taste for a consoling “more” in her life.

The title of her post references a famous passage in the Christian scriptures, from 1 Peter 3:15, in which followers of Jesus are encouraged to be prepared to account for their hope. (Slight tangent: this scriptural fragment, a favorite of both evangelicals and liberals alike, is almost never placed rhetorically in relation to its preceding advocacy of wifely submission and its characterization of women as the “weaker sex.” After that news, the demand to give an account of hope would seem like either a dare or a necessity. At any rate, the challenge of giving an account of hope remains, two thousand years later, perhaps the most basic theological act.)

I wonder if R&T readers are, like Van Dorn, Rod Stewart fans. I sure am, although I have never been able to fully enjoy the turn his career took in the 1990s toward standards/torch songs/songbooky crooning. I prefer the rocking, irreverent, come-hither Rod. I saw him in concert in 1984 in Kansas City, and the rooster hair, the dayglo suit, the soccer balls aloft, and the swagger; he was a crooner even then, but was on the way to becoming more “decent.” The voyeuristic charm of the “Infatuation” video, which captivated so many of us boys’ imaginations in my neighborhood, was giving way to the more saccharine “Some Guys Have All the Luck.” He did find a middle-aged midway between his older love songs (like “Sailing“) and the newer chintzy music with a loving tune like his cover (and understated, sweet video) of “Forever Young.”

But seen from another (admittedly male) angle, what a palette of male desires his music displayed, from mere carnal attraction, to the need for adult love, to familial concern and protection, always with just enough idealization to make them ever so hyperreal. But he did this while trafficking a metrosexual

demeanor that was already well-known from glam and even early rock (Little Richard). I think that any time a compelling sexual persona becomes popular (up to Amy Winehouse, Rest in Peace, in the present), there is a schooling of affect that naturally opens onto much bigger questions about our desires, and thus are always theologically saturated. Maggi Van Dorn’s account tells such a tale, too, from her perspective in her narrative as a girl and young woman.

Here is Rod Stewart with Faces doing “Stay With Me” and “Maggie May.”

And here is Stewart live on the tour I saw, in 1984, doing “Infatuation,” and calling onto the stage perhaps one of Maggi Van Dorn’s relatives!

Tommy Beaudoin, Tarrytown, New York

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