For the New York Times, Ginia Bellafante has recently written this article relating the Catholic Worker to Occupy.

R&T readers who are interested in these matters should know that Occupy, in conjunction with dozens of other organizations dedicated to the equitable sharing of social resources, is calling for a General Strike in the United States on May 1.

For more information, see the latest from the Occupy Wall Street website here, or the MayDay NYC website here, or the InterOccupy site for various May Day General Strike cities here. Occupy Catholics are here.

Rock guitar wizard Tom Morello, of Rage Against the Machine and many other collaborations, will be leading a “Guitarmy” on May 1st in NYC as part of the General Strike. Information on the Guitarmy is here.

Here is Morello on #OWS:

As I have mentioned many times here at R&T, various artists and spiritual teachers have endorsed

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Two months ago, Jay-Z was featured at the New York Public Library in conversation with philosopher (of religion) Cornel West and with Paul Holdengraeber of the NYPL. The entire interview can now be viewed in eight parts on YouTube. Here is the first part:

For what it’s worth, I find the interviewers too ingratiating at many points, although Prof. West finds many gentle ways of raising some important questions about the religio-political dimensions of Jay-Z’s music. And it seems that West can’t quite get Jay-Z to subscribe to the black liberative theological tradition in the way West seems to want. Jay-Z seems too invested in honoring individuals’ complicated lives and backgrounds, as he often puts it, and avoiding too much religious particularism. West is operating (it seems to me) in a venerable theological (and ancient philosophical) idiom of “epideictic,” working from the presumption of the good intent of the interlocutor and continually circling back to the rhetoric of invitation and opportunity rather than condemnation or judgment. (This is the very rhetorical genre, as historian John O’Malley has argued, in which the Second Vatican Council in Roman Catholicism presented its teachings.)

I have followed rap and hip-hop only sidelong for many years; my ignorance about this genre is deep and wide. When we started the Rock and Theology Project, the intent was to focus primarily though not exclusively on rock musics and cultures — while leaving the very definitions of these open to negotiation. I had not thought very carefully about the racial dimension of the Project,

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