Regular readers, feel free to skip...

I apologize to folks who have had to read this several times in the past few months, but for the good of the order... when this blog began 3+ years ago it was tracking the experience of publishing a multi-denominational book of examples of how homileticians in different countries were working with one specific slice of pop culture. It has continued both as a promotional effort for the book and as a way to highlight similar examples of the faith/culture dialogue in the academy and the church. Frankly, there is nothing especially unusual or new about that: theologians have always critiqued and/or highlighted the implicit and explicit theologies expressed in the cultural products of their age. If you're looking for some new celebrity-mad gimmick or other, move along; nothing to see here.

Lilly Fellows Conference: The World and Christian Imagination

Two papers at the 2006 Lilly Fellows Program National Research Conference will deal with U2 and theology: Louis T. Albarran, of the University of Dayton, will present on "Lyrics Captive to Christ: Bono’s Christian Imagination Conveyed in Non-linear Language," and Lisa DeBoer of Westmont College on "Worshipping with U2." The conference takes place November 9 - November 11 at Baylor University, Waco, Texas.

U2 & Green Day The Saints Are Coming full video

"The preacher's task is to enter the culture's stories and retell them as the Gospel."
-Tim Keller, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, NYC

For anyone in the Fresno CA USA area

Join Tim Neufeld, Mark Baker, Jessica Mast, Caitlyn Baird, Hector Hinojosa and others as they discuss "Living in a Place Called Vertigo: Theology, Culture and U2." This informal discussion is part of the Ars Litterata series - conversations and readings around a wide variety of authors and artists - held in the Hiebert Library at Fresno Pacific University, Thursday, October 26, 12:40-1:50.

Apocalyptic and the Beauty of God

Any of our readers with a tolerance for some fairly high-falutin' language and an interest in a theme underlying this blog, a theological analysis of the vocation of the arts (and perhaps particularly among artists with an eye to the eschatological horizon, as in the case of U2), might enjoy this sermon on "Apocalyptic and the Beauty of God" given two days ago by N.T. Wright. Excerpt:
[T]he point of art, I believe, is not least to be able to say something like that, to draw attention – not, indeed, to a shallow or trivial pietistic point, as though to lead the mind away from the world and its problems and into a merely cosy contemplation of God’s presence, but rather – to the multi-layered and many-dimensioned aspects of the present world, to the pains and the terror, yes, but also to the creative tension between the present filling of the world with YHWH’s glory and the promised future filling, as the waters cover the sea. When art tries to speak of the new world, the final world, in terms only of the present world, it collapses into sentimentality; when it speaks of the present world only in terms of its shame and horror, it collapses into brutalism. The vocation of the artist is to speak of the present as beautiful in itself but as pointing beyond itself, to enable us to see both the glory that already fills the earth and the glory that shall flood it to overflowing; to speak, within that, of the shame without ignoring the promise, and to speak of the promise without forgetting the shame. The artist is thus to be like the Israelite spies in the desert, bringing back fruit from the promised land to be tasted in advance; that story, indeed, is one of the moments when (surprisingly within the narrative) YHWH promises that not only the promised land but the whole world will be filled with his glory (Numbers 14.21; cf. 14.10).... Here is the challenge, I believe, for the Christian artist, in whatever sphere: to tell the story of the new world so that people can taste it, and want it, even while acknowledging the reality of the desert in which we presently live.

U2 and social justice

Here's a 2006 senior honors thesis from Boston College called "When I Look at the World: Bono’s Transformation of Social Justice" (PDF). Contains a few errors, a bit of an odd organizational scheme, and general wide-eyedness, but it's a topic on which I haven't seen data gathered with quite this scope. Spanning U2's career (although the band is collapsed into Bono, unfortunately; in 121 pages there is one reference to Larry Mullen, 2 to Adam Clayton, and none to The Edge), it's a sort of catalog of U2-related social justice commitments as evidenced both in and outside of their music. There's a timeline of Bono's work for Africa which might be helpful to some folks.

The Saints Are Coming « AgapeRevolution.com

Trask at AgapeRevolution.com makes some comments on the lyrics to "The Saints Are Coming" by U2 and Green Day, reading them together with "Wake Up Dead Man." The same blog has done some previous U2 readings as well.

one plus one plus one makes.....

Sunday's Stand Up Against Poverty, in which the ONE campaign and many many many other like-minded organizations participated, successfully set the official Guinness World Record for the largest single coordinated movement of people in history. How many people stood up last Sunday for the Millennium Development Goals and to let world leaders know we want extreme poverty ended in our generation?

23,542,615.

Some things to look at

The mission of this blog is not to document every time someone sings U2 in church, nor to disseminate information about band members' beliefs, nor to redo any of the excellent fan-labor other U2 sites are doing. The mission of this blog, along with the rather self-serving role of keeping the book that generated it in the public eye, is to highlight all kinds of theological work on U2's art. Because of that, this video from YouTube, which tries to bring the song "Vertigo" into conversation with one version of Judas' betrayal of Jesus, merits a link. I expect viewers may have varying assessments of how well the video succeeds; but whatever else this is, it's one of the first examples I've had the chance to point out of someone doing theological reflection on a U2 song primarily through a visual medium.

Along the way, I also happened on this film of Bono discussing U2's recording of Woody Guthrie's "Jesus Christ." It's something of a rarity and the audio is less out of sync here than on previous versions I've seen; plus you can't top this one for getting a quick refresher on U2's Painfully Earnest Era.

theotherblog: eschatology of U2

Drew continues his reflections on the eschatology of U2 with The Unforgettable Fire.

On the Move, from W publishing group

Just announced for February 2007, another book directly involving U2 and Christian faith, now available for preorder... but this one's definitely unique. Note that this is the same publisher who did The aWAKE Project (now in a second edition).

Change Me: The Power of Imagery to Create Change

Maybe some of you aren't the (RED) type (I'm not, really). In that case you might be the Change Me type: Change Me is a project through Getty Images in which people all over the world can pick and comment on an image that they believe will make an impact on viewers. Some of the work will be featured in a book and made part of a traveling exhibition. For every submission, $10 goes to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria (that's where a portion of RED products' profit goes). Friends of the Global Fund is also selling Global AIDS USA postage stamps promoting a URL where people can go to get more involved.

Random Friday comments

Already 457 results for the Google [ U2 "window in the sky" ].

Tim's got another class up, this one reflecting on the Good Samaritan.

And, the US launch of the (RED) line on Oprah today, and the Stand Up Against Poverty events Sunday, probably give me a good enough excuse to link the ONE blog.

November U2 course in NYC

For anyone in the New York metro area, Get Up Off Your Knees co-editor Raewynne Whiteley will be teaching a Saturday course at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian's Center for Christian Studies called "Stranded in Skin and Bones: Theology and Ethics in the U2 Catalog." (Keep scrolling: the description is almost at the bottom of the page, in the "Theology" section.) The course meets Saturday November 11th, 9 AM - 3 PM, and you can register from the CCS page using the "Term 2" link.

Random discovery

From the 2002 annual eReview of the Brisbane College of Theology, here's a paper on "Investigating Ways of Communicating the Gospel in Contemporary Culture" (PDF), which draws on U2 as its principal example. Some discussion of oral versus literate culture, and comments on three songs (one from the 80s, one from the 90s, one from the 00s.) Excerpt: The music of U2 in some ways gives over the responsibility of meaning making to the audience. While the band knows that at some level the music is certainly meaningful for them, they trust that their listeners will appropriate the meaning of the music in a way which is helpful to them. In the Christian tradition, parables function in much the same way. Werner Kelber is enlightening here: 'Parables, we repeat, are unfinished stories, and whether they are being heard or read, they are contingent on the work of co-creators.' A parable might seem vague or somewhat unexplained, but that is because it invites us to make the story our own.

Theology, Culture and U2: Session 1

It is a great mark of the era we're in, I think, that Tim from Fresno Pacific is putting so much of his fall semester U2 course up on the web, free, for dialogue and critique. Here is his thorough description of Session 1 (Introduction, and How to Exegete a Song: "City of Blinding Lights.") The class plan (PDF), which he also is giving us unmediated access to, gets a conversation started between a very rich selection of sources (Parker Palmer, Paul Ricoeur, the Vertigo 2005 DVD, John Franke, W. Randolph Tate, VH-1 All Access, a Bono print interview, Arcade Fire, the Gospel of Matthew....) I will be commenting more on it on Tim's blog, since he's offered such a gracious space for interested parties to do so. You can find his Power Point presentation there as well.

Eros, agape, Assayas, and the theology of the body

Hat tip to Angela for this article by Roman Catholic speaker and writer Christopher West from his regular column called Body Language: Commentary on the Intersection of Faith, Sex, & Culture. The title of this one (PDF) is "God, Sex, & Bono." I must confess to a tinge of annoyance that the writer edits the final story from Assayas' book in such a way that readers are led to take the precipitating event as attending a church (which I think he also kinda sorta hopes we'll assume is part of his own denomination) when the actual topic is the Bible. But you know, he's probably got a really tight word limit. Anyway, here's how the article starts: "Pope Benedict, like John Paul II before him, is intent on helping the world see the connection between divine love (agape) and sexual love (eros). To help us reflect on these themes, I’d like to turn to what may seem an unlikely source...."

(RED) Raises $10M in U.K.from Feb.- Sep. 06

This article from the Kaiser Network says that in 8 months (RED) has raised twice as much from the private sector in the UK alone for the Global Fund as the worldwide private sector had given in the previous 4 years combined.

how far down the rabbit hole goes

I've posted a few times previously about how difficult it is to identify specific Bible references in many U2 songs -- that so often there is not exactly a quote of one particular verse, but a generalized Biblical language or restatement of ideas that could draw on several sources. U2 by U2 provides an example of this difficulty from a whole different direction in its treatment of the lyrics to "Walk On." Bono cites a particular New Testament passage as being the root of one theme in the song (the distinction between things that can and can't be left behind in the opening couplet and the closing litany). So here's a case in which a listener now knows definitively from the lyricist that this particular section in "Walk On" has a Biblical source, though not a verbatim quote.

My challenge to you? Working backwards from the lyric, name the New Testament passage you'd expect to be connected to it.

Got one? OK. (It might be fun to post what we came up with in the comments.) And then, you can click and find out how close you came.

...See what I mean about how complicated this is?

Never Mind the Bibles

Friend of this blog Andrew Careaga invites readers to join him at his online book-in-progess site and blog Never Mind the Bibles: A Theology of Punk. People who reject book proposals don't necessarily know what's good, but the blogosphere does! Talk with Andrew about, as he says, "music, God, punk rock, Jesus, Johnny Rotten, Joe Strummer, your quest for spiritual significance. Hell, you can even talk to me about Green Day if you like. Whatever."

Update on Theology, Culture and U2 course: Spiritually Significant Songs

Tim continues updating us on his U2 course with a post including a downloadable paper on what to him personally have been U2's most spiritually significant songs. In an email, Tim mentioned getting about 200 hits a week from U2 Sermons and wishing more of you would interact with the course content. I'll second that!