Tollbooth stuff with quiz

David Buckna, whose comprehensively annotated U2 "30 QUESTIONS FOR THOSE WHO HAVE EARS TO HEAR" quiz from last year is here, has a new "2005 Year-in-Review: The Gospel of Rock" quiz in the Phantom Tollbooth this month. (It nicely reuses the ending trick question from the U2 quiz.) The current Tollbooth also has a review of U2's Vertigo: Live From Chicago DVD up, judging it and U2's other performance videos "indispensable as documents of the gradually evolving magic that is U2 in concert."

update, added in late 2007: David emails to ask we re-link his U2 quiz which has moved to here.

Kneeling on Thanksgiving Day

Playing catch-up: Not sure I've ever seen a use of "Mysterious Ways" in homiletics, so I'll link this old Thanksgiving sermon-starter from Currents in Theology and Mission, which mentions pretty much the briefest possible citation from the song as a thematic suggestion for preaching on the holiday.

"Gold Lamé ....Stages on Life’s Way"

Thanks to philosophy professor Mike Austin of Eastern Kentucky University for sending me a link to his paper "We Get to Carry Each Other: U2 and Kierkegaard on Authentic Love." "A Man and a Woman," "Staring at the Sun," and (wait for it...) "Luminous Times" all find their way into this reflection on erotic love as described in Kierkegaard's three stages of life: the aesthetic (where one might expect rock musicians to be located, but...), the ethical, and the religious. Clever little first section, too.

Get That Out of Your Mouth #21

In case you haven't seen it elsewhere: an interesting Pitchfork column on indie rockers of faith. Excerpt: "...consider the work of people who are described as 'thinking Christians'-- a term that's about as patronizing as 'intelligent dance music,' but let's go with it for now. Take the quest for spirituality on Talk Talk's Laughing Stock, or the piety and humility of Sufjan Stevens' Seven Swans, or to widen the circle, the furious morality of the abolitionist preacher in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, or the scene in Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me in which the reverend asks Mark Ruffalo's drifter if he considers his life important. If we shun the religious content of these works, we're missing their emotional and intellectual power. You can disagree with the church of your choice, but to dismiss religion altogether-- and to write off the best ideas, the best people and of course, the best indie rockers-- that come out of it, seems pointless. Why shoot the messenger just because you're scared he has a message?"

MINISTRY AND MEDIA: U2 Bible studies and discussion starters

I had a nice email from someone last night describing how he'd incorporated the video for "Original of the Species" in to one of the Bible study sessions in the back of Get Up Off Your Knees and the way his class reacted to it. These are all more dated, but I'm pretty sure I have not yet linked any of them yet: Here's a youth group session on "Vertigo" from Group magazine. There are two more by the same author in earlier issues, working with U2's "One" ("synopsis: Christians are called to love others unconditionally") and "When I Look at the World." And yet another: a full youth group Bible study using "Grace" and St. John Chrysostom. I drew on Group regularly for my job from '94-97, and I have to say that while the U2 doesn't surprise me at all, the Chrysostom does. The times they are a-changin'.

following some trails from a "Journal of Religion and Popular Culture" Dylan article

Way back in 2002, Michael J. Gilmour had an article, They Refused Jesus Too: A Biblical Paradigm in the Writing of Bob Dylan, in Vol. 1 of the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, and I've just found it. While the piece is interesting in its own right, covering "a very specific way the Bible appears in some of Dylan's songs, namely the application of Christological imagery to himself and his vocation as an artist," I also want to point out the fruit of a brief pause over some U2 content in the methodology section. The author notes the problem that "the study of religious aspects of artistic work frequently turns to questions about the artist's faith, as if art is necessarily a window to the soul," and then gives us some fine reflections on the power of celebrity culture to skew the work of anyone seeking to study religious themes as expressed by a popular artist.

Following that is a persuasive list of reasons why all efforts to speak for what artists like U2 and Dylan personally believe "with song lyrics and poems as the primary data are doomed to failure." (On the U2 front, introductions to the band's faith have sometimes tried to avoid this problem by including personal quotes -- usually largely from Bono -- but to me this tactic merely exacerbates the skewing, idealizing effect of celebrity on the author's material.) Anyway, there's a lot of interesting stuff here along with some important warnings for anybody seeking to write about U2 (or any popular artists) from a theological point of view.

Gilmour has also published books in this field: one (perhaps an expansion of the JRPC article? don't know) called Tangled Up in the Bible: Bob Dylan & Scripture (there's a review here). I find it kind of amusing that Amazon suggested I pair this Dylan book with another (not out when Gilmour wrote the article) that represents the "art as spiritual biography" concept he does such a nice job of dismantling.

However, what's more relevant here is the brand new anthology he edited, Call Me the Seeker: Listening to Religion in Popular Music - you can see the contents in more detail. Call Me the Seeker has essays on artists like Nick Cave, Sinead O'Connor (with a clever analysis of fan-listserv reactions to her spiritual references), and the Stones (an article on "Sympathy for the Devil"), as well as two helpful and persuasive (IMHO) pieces on raves. And of course, U2 are represented in the book: first by Gilmour's own 2003 "The Prophet Jeremiah, Aung San Suu Kyi, and U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind: On Listening to Bono's Jeremiad," which long-term readers of this blog might possibly remember I found largely unpersuasive, and second by "Comic Endings: Spirit and Flesh in Bono's Apocalyptic Imagination, 1980-1983" by Brian Froese, newly of Canadian Mennonite University. This latter is a thorough tracking of patterns of language and metaphor in U2's early albums (happily, it's unable to resist citations from the later ones too, despite its narrowly defined scope), showing how U2 lyrics grow towards an increasingly sophisticated interweaving of "apocalyptically informed Christian spirituality, a prophetic concern for social justice, and an initially ambiguous masculine heterosexuality." The guy's been paying attention.

Anyway: isn't it great to see more and more work being done in this field that doesn't stop at "here's what I think this band thinks" or at introduction to the concept that popular artists deal with religious themes?

spring course

Fuller Seminary's School of Intercultural Studies will offer a spring quarter course in its Contemporary Culture/Postmodernism concentration called "All That You Can’t Leave Behind: The Spiritual Journeys of U2" (scroll down a bit). The description makes me think they've offered it once before, maybe in about 2002. The teacher listed is Barry Taylor, whom some of you may know from the book A Matrix of Meanings.

Christian Wrestling - Iconoculture

That's not metaphorical Jacob and the angel wrestling, but actual wrestling. Main point: we're mentioned once again on Iconoculture, who originally wrote about the Get Up Off Your Knees book here.

Pride excerpt

Missed it yesterday, but here Chris Scharen posts an excerpt from his (soon!) forthcoming book. If you've been curious, this gives a good sense of how he's approaching the topic and the kind of material he's using.

"We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check..."

This weekend is the Martin Luther King holiday in the USA, and would be a nice time to read, or re-read, some great preaching: the "I Have a Dream" speech, from US Constitution Online. I think it's often half-assumed that this speech was the source of the MLK video which U2 formerly inserted in the middle of live versions of "Pride," but that was actually the "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech 5 years later - also worth reading. (Incidentally, I looked briefly online for the text of the U2 statement regarding Arizona's Gov. Meacham's opposition to this holiday which was read at the first night of the Joshua Tree tour, just to continue the MLK weekend theme, but couldn't find it. Anybody?)

Faith goes pop - BBC pieces

Catch-up post: Al Rogers looks at religious messages in pop songs for the BBC. He's dealt with Good Charlotte, Coldplay, and more, and here's his brief "spiritual U2" broadcast, which focuses on the old story (which for some reason hit the news again in mid-2005) of U2's having turned down an offer of $23 million to use "Where the Streets Have No Name" in a TV ad.

"Us"

"This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a God, but for another - doubtless very different - St. Benedict." --After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre

Last night, it happens, I finished reading School(s) for Conversion. For anyone who read that, or the related CT article, or who has noticed with interest the diverse crop of places like this or this or this or this, you may find some weird and unexpected echoes going through your head as you read Angela Pancella's new @U2 piece on Soul at Work, a book by Margaret Benefiel which I blogged about when it came out. An appendix to the piece includes the whole section devoted to, not the band exactly, but what the author calls "the U2 community," in this book on "spiritual organizations."

Kudos to both Benefiel and Pancella (whom we should all thank anyway as she steps away from her @U2 role) for drawing our eyes to something undergirding U2's work that is rarely made explicit, not much asked about by reporters, and only highlighted by the band in occasional pieces like that "the hardest thing to do is to stick together" poem that came with the U2 iPods. (What a weirdly subversive thing to package with an iPod. But then, I guess you do things like that when "rather than being a once a week concept, it's sort of the way we try and live.")

Nice to be noticed

Thanks to Once Upon A Time In The North for naming Get Up Off Your Knees as one of the Top Fives of Twenty-Oh-Five (best books read, that is).

Thanks to the Portuguese CoeXisT blog for naming U2 Sermons "Melhor blog internacional" of 2005.

All too aware of the contradictions

In this 7-minute audio excerpt from a recent issue of St. Anne’s Public House, a quarterly audio ministry of Christ Church, Spokane WA, Joost Nixon draws on the Assayas book to reflect in "A Case of Vertigo" on why "my attempts to exclude the frontman for U2 from my brain have been consistently frustrated." Some of it is the kind of over-personal "but if... how can...? And yet..." stuff that gets old to those who follow U2 and spirituality conversations, but Nixon cites correctly (a relief these days), and St. Anne's Public House is enough of an off-the-beaten-path source that some of you might enjoy giving it a listen.

Top 5 in 2005

The Corner's asked some of us to participate in its Top 5 of the year list in which bloggers get to highlight some of their own favorite posts. Here are mine, which focus on some of the relatively rare instances when I write at length out of my own perspective on a blog which is still really a promotional device for the book Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog. This year there seem to be a lot of song readings. They're in no order.

1. "The root cause of a lot of the problems in politics is hardness of the heart." This is a reading of the song "Love and Peace or Else," done before the Vertigo Tour started. I think I've been proven off the mark on at least one point by the live sequencing, but I still like the piece.

2. @U2's Drawing their Fish in the Sand archive was updated this year, and I wrote about my involvement with it in U2 Biblical References....

3. This post, "No secret at all," is probably my major blog highlight of the year, split into 3 parts for length: 1, 2, 3. It's a theological reading of U2's song "The Fly," explaining its new live presentation on the Vertigo Tour in light of previous presentations. I think I am still the only person who has written on this topic.

4.teach me how to sing: U2 world-premiered their 1993 song "The First Time" in 2005; here are some comments on it.

5. Too cute and in-jokey? Maybe, but I made myself laugh with "Best to be upfront about these things."

Building on hope - Trade still a problem

One more catch-up post today since this stuff is already dated: In a year round-up story, the LA Times opined that "The year 2005 will go down as a turning point in the global war on poverty." The article is worth noting because it takes the time to give a realistic history of how the Cold War-era misuse of aid led to the cynicism advocates are now having to battle: "For decades during the Cold War, the Western world for the most part regarded impoverished nations as chess pieces in the struggle against communism. If foreign aid was doled out, it was mostly to prop up friendly dictatorships that could be counted upon to crush leftist insurrections. Nobody much cared if the aid disappeared down a sinkhole of corruption; helping people out of poverty wasn't the point. The inevitable result was cynicism about the effectiveness and purpose of international development."

(While we're talking about setting the record straight on African aid, there's a substantive reply to the recent Theroux "Rock Star's Burden" article at 3quarksdaily.)

You can also hear a BBC interview with Bono on the "2005 roundup" topic here. In it he goes into detail about the non-results of the recent WTO talks in Hong Kong (about which ONE asked supporters to email their leaders). Also, great story about a market day in Accra. Along the way comes an explanation of how the CoeXisT portion of the Vertigo show relates to these issues and what its point is... not that the people invested in attacking it are likely to pay any attention.

However, the most telling thing about that interview, IMHO, is this. Along the way there's a light aside that will have become quite familiar to anyone who reads U2 news -- Bono comments that despite the other three members of U2 having been "spiritually and indeed financially" supportive of his development advocacy work, at times he thought he was going to get kicked out of the band for being too boring or something. Well, at the highest point I saw, this piece analyzing successes and failures of the global 2005 anti-extreme-poverty focus had generated 163 stories on Google News, 162 with headlines like "Tension in U2 over Bono's Campaigning" (a story so exciting, apparently, that my local TV station covered it two nights running on the 11:00 news) and "Bono's U2 Breakup Fears." Only one out of 163 covered the real topic.

Sure, 6500 people died today for lack of drugs Westerners can buy around the corner, and the rice industry in Ghana has collapsed because of unjust trade regulations, but what's really important and worth broadcasting worldwide? A few celebrities may have at some point had a little tiff.

Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog: Incarnation, Fowler, U2...

Well, that was fun, but 12 days is a long time to hold posts in reserve, so we'll be playing "post 12 days of Christmas" catch-up here: let's start with six theological thoughts about the incarnation and U2 from Alan J. at Prodigal Kiwi(s). The same blog has a more recent reflection on using U2's history to teach faith development theory a la James Fowler.

12 days of Christmas #12

what am i to do
just tell me


rejoice


we will
rejoice

12 Days of Christmas #11

i've seen enough
i'm not giving up

12 Days of Christmas #10

in the curve of the moon
in the shadow cast across my room

12 days of Christmas #9

o great ocean
o great sea

12 Days of Christmas #8

though torn in two
we can be one