In 2010, religion scholar S. Brent Plate wrote a short popular article about “The Varieties of Religious Experience in Indie Rock” here. He suggests that in the indie rock of the last decade, “religion is a resource, not to generate sellable lyrics, but to generate tactics for living life, and then to sing about that.” I like Plate’s phrasing, because it touches on an element common to both ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ life — the discovery/creation of religion to make life inhabitable. (That is a best-case scenario. Of course, these discoveries/creations of religion can also make life uninhabitable.) His final line is theologically terrific, but I’ll not spoil it here.

Here is a song Plate mentions: Arcade Fire, “City With No Children”…

When Plate argues for a new immanence about religious experience in rock and roll, I think it is not new. Indeed, it is probably as old as rock and roll itself. And I think the functional theological immanence of rock has been one reason that so many artists and fans can make a meaningful spiritual life with reference to it. But that doesn’t mean such immanence doesn’t get reworked in different genres and for new audiences in creative ways, and I’m grateful to Plate for giving some potential examples.

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

Many of our graduate students here in the Graduate School of Religion at Fordham University are Haitian, and they face the daunting task of eventually returning to lead a theological life with the people in a devastated country. Let there be global support for Haiti, spiritual and material, in the aftermath of this terrible earthquake. The Red Cross is listing the pressing needs and accepting donations here.

Singer Régine Chassagne of the band Arcade Fire is Haitian. Here is the band performing their song “Haiti.”