HuffPo writer Paul O’Donnell has an interesting post about Wilco up, over at the Commonweal-sponsored blog called Verdicts.  According to O’Donnell, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy’s perspective on the whole religion thing pretty much functions as the voice of a whole disaffected generation:

Tweedy’s music is as Christ-haunted as the American landscape itself. Christianity comes up on nearly every Wilco album—in the voice of a skeptic, in words that sound like genuine praise, and in closely observed moments from the pews.

O’Donnell highlights the character-driven nature of Tweedy’s writing.  His songs “sound like more like quoted matter than Tweedy’s own theologizing.”  Still, even this second-hand faith rings true and heartfelt to O’Donnell’s appreciative ears.  “Tweedy’s thrashing out of religious themes sounds like a genuine discussion, one you’d have with your kids or close friends. His spiritual self waffles, pushes back, despairs,” O’Donnell writes, “Tweedy is not selling Christian religion or, it doesn’t seem likely, buying it. But he’s certainly dragged it and its issues out to the places where it all started.”

Unfortunately, Commonweal has a rather draconian website policy, often firewalling most of its good content, so I don’t know if you’ll be able to get to the post if you’re not a subscriber.  If you’d like to try, though, the full post is here.

If nothing else, try to get over there and leave some comments.  The one lone commenter this afternoon, who wrote, “My goodness. This is popular music? Are all young people sour, angry, resentful, confused, whiny?” seems to be missing the point.  It might be worth someone’s time to correct the misconception that genuine religious questioning is indicative of resentment and confusion.  I mean, think of Thomas, after all.  One can doubt even when standing next to the Lord himself.

Here is the song referenced by Andrew McAlister in a recent comment. This is a version performed by Wilco lead singer and guitarist Jeff Tweedy. See if this song does not create a world and draw you in, even a little.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

Off and on over the past several months, I’ve been listening to (and watching performances of) Wilco’s song “Theologians,” from their 2004 album A Ghost is Born. I come to the song more as someone presumably addressed by the title than as a Wilco devotee.

I cannot help but hear this song as a rebuke to the great mass of academic and churchy theologizing that fails not only to “reach” contemporary Christians and those curious about Christianities, but that fails to risk inhabiting the “lifeworlds” of such people, ostensibly a crucial source for theologians (insofar as faith is practiced by humans) and audience for theologians (insofar as theology is meant to be taken in by humans). “Theologians don’t know nothing about my soul.” And toward the end of the tune, we learn that maybe it’s Jesus who is singing this taunting song: “Where I’m going you cannot come”; “I lay it down”; “A ghost is born.” It’s rare that we get the image of Jesus singing to theologians, whether in “secular” or “sacred” music.

(more…)