Tag Archives: U2
St. Patrick and the hermeneutic circle as living into the holiness of life during Lent
St. Patrick’s Day is more than green beer, The Pogues and 5K runs. It is a time to remember during this Lenten season the life of a former slave whose freedom meant freedom from darkness for not only Ireland but many people through the centuries.
We live in the real world. This may come as a shock to some, but it remains a truth that needs to be reflected on. … There’s more to read here.
U2 and Bonhoeffer’s cantus firmus: why we need music in our theology
In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, he develops an amazing reflection on the power of music to shape and transform theology. Given that I just finished a book on pop music and that I think most naturally in metaphors and similes (perhaps one of the reasons why parables of Jesus always made sense to me and the Epistles of Paul leave me generally dry and parched) Bonhoeffer’s … There’s more to read here.
R.E.M. R.I.P. – It’s the end of the world as we know it… and I feel fine.
Music fans across the blogosphere posted and reposted the news that longtime Athens, Georgia band R.E.M. had decided, in their words, to “call it a day” and disband for the foreseeable future. As Michael Stipe said on their website:
A wise man once said–’the skill in attending a party is knowing when it’s time to leave.’ We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we’re going to walk
3 Things U2 has that the Church needs: Life after Emergent and the “Iron Maypole” movements
“What can I give back to God for the blessings he poured out on me? What can I give back to God for the blessings he poured out on me? I lift high the Cup of Salvation as a toast to our Father To follow through on a promise I made to you from the heart…”
– Bono’s intro to “Where the Streets Have No Name”, U2 in Boston, Elevation
Vocation and the Call to Discipleship: U2, Dillard, O’Conner and Bonhoeffer
We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition; we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it is a transition we make a hundred times
Maundy Thursday – The empty cup, Annie Dillard, and stumbling into the Garden with U2
The world of Scripture is a world of “limited good.” That is, everything that exists is perceived to exist in limited amounts, in amounts that cannot be augmented without depriving others. As we come to this point in Holy Week, we come against the limits of our lives and the limits of what is around us. After weeks of fasting and doing without, coming into Holy Week is often a … There’s more to read here.
Lenten release: (just about) everything I learned about Lent I learned from U2
As I discuss in the opening chapter of my 2010 book Freedom of the Self, popular music since the late 1960’s has been replete with claims of what it means to have identity in the world. Whether our sense of identity is bound up in the longing for love, the loss of our past, or the social injustice that removes people from seeing their true beauty and worth, popular … There’s more to read here.
Lenten losses: Philippians 2, George Bailey, and finding the “Wonderful Life”
I have had a week of world-weariness and I suppose I am not alone in this. Our government can’t seem to balance the budget, wars continue to wage around the globe, poverty and sickness takes the body, soul and spirit of thousands upon thousands of people who are created in the Imago Dei.
It gets simply tiring, doesn’t it?
In Lent we find a season that acknowledges that to be weary … There’s more to read here.
top ten albums of the decade – a long ode to 9/11
Where were you on September 11th, 2001?
As for me, I was nine hours ahead of my family and friends in Seattle as I was finishing a day of work. Sitting in my office in the Divinity faculty at the University of Glasgow, I received a phone call from Diana saying that “something was happening in New York” and that I should log onto the computer. An hour later I … There’s more to read here.
