It's all we can do

From the guilt file of things I forgot to link, a reflection from Consequence of Sound on the intersection of the personal and political in "Streets." Excerpt:

It makes me wonder that if you have a truly grand, wonderful, life-giving song like “Streets”, you have to start with a humble beginning – a barren desert, a destitute village of back-breaking poverty – like a redwood growing from a tiny acorn. Consider that when listening to “Where the Streets Have No Name”, U2, and supposedly empty gestures from activist artists. Consider the background of the artist and the struggle they went through – what they’ve seen.

Nice to find out (a bit belatedly) that New Life Episcopal Church in Uniontown, Ohio, USA used the Bible study in Get Up Off Your Knees for their Lenten series (Facebook page for session 1 here). Nice logo.

"I was speeding on the subway through the stations of the cross"

I seriously doubt that this art exhibition, Stations of the King's Cross, which opens Saturday in London, is actually a reference to "Moment of Surrender," but the notion of turning London tube stops into a set of Stations certainly brought the song to mind for me. Here's a quick explanation of the project, and on this page you can find a way to donate to charities the project benefits.

Holding the hand of the devil

There is a little scrap of U2 content in the lead-off to this recent article about figurative language in scripture, and I think it's funny enough to link.

The current @U2 "Like A Song" issue is about "Vertigo," written by Tim Neufeld, and it's worth a read.

Holy Saturday

I just noticed this today. Probably sheer coincidence:

The present is all past. The future is nothing. The hand has disappeared from the clock’s face. No more struggle between love and hate, between life and death. Both have been equalized, and love’s emptying out has become the emptiness of hell. One has penetrated the other perfectly. The nadir has reached the zenith.
--Hans Urs von Balthazar on Holy Saturday

3:33 when the numbers fell off the clock face
Speed dialing with no signal at all
Go, shout it out, rise up
--Unknown Caller on.......

A Decade of H2OPE

The African Well Fund's annual "Build A Well for Bono's Birthday" fundraiser this year benefits Burkina Faso. This is the tenth year of this initiative (I think I've donated every year, and encourage readers to do so as well.) Donations from the nine previous Build a Well for Bono's Birthday fundraisers have totaled more than $213,000 and have been used to fund clean water and sanitation projects implemented by AWF partner Africare to benefit more than 56,000 people in Angola, Benin, Liberia, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Consider a gift to this great cause.

Stocki visits the USA

For anyone located in the American Midwest, Steve Stockman will be doing a number of music- and/or U2-related lectures at colleges over the last week in March. Read more about the schedule here.

"We walk by faith and not by sight"

Here's a post on "Walk On" as a soundtrack for the Lenten journey from the blog God's Word, Our Words and the World.

Back in 2008 I noted on this blog the title of an upcoming U2-related paper being presented at the Society of Biblical Literature. Recently discovered that this paper, The Bible under the Joshua Tree by Andrew Davies, is now available on the SBL website. Some well-worn comments, some new insights. Excerpt:

It is almost, then, as if [Bono] felt he wanted to write scripture in the process of rereading it to deliver a new psalter for his generation that combined the pathos of lament with prophetic fury to rage against (what he saw as) the injustice endemic in God’s own country. And if in this imagination Bono is the new epic biblical poet, then 1980s America is, for The Joshua Tree, biblical Israel: a chosen, special nation, led by a noble and respected leader who, tragically, only rarely managed to live up to expectations but was seduced by other priorities; a land set apart from the others by its inherent nature, afforded the opportunity to be bigger and better, but often failing in its fundamental remit; a people who were once enslaved and are now free, but still wandering through their own wilderness in the quest for their home whilst still carrying the wounds of their oppression. The Joshua Tree conceived America’s journey in forthrightly biblical language and imagery and observed that it was still a nation in the wilderness.

I had marked this post about a visit to Northern Ireland to link quite some time ago, but lost track of it. So here it is, better late than never.  The author reflects on learning about the Troubles as a tourist, how it led him to return to U2's War album, and the idea of participating in Scripture.

Book review

One of the longer reviews I've seen of Exploring U2 appears in The University Bookman. Not overly enthusiastic, but it does give summaries of a couple of the pieces.

The journal Dappled Things offers a very interesting essay about Flannery O'Connor's influence on Bruce Springsteen. While along the way it namechecks U2 as another artist touched by her writing, the main interest is the thorough analysis of the artistic result of naming sin as sin, using it as "the starting point of understanding the human drama" (as, of course, U2 certainly do.) Check out "Naming Sin: Flannery O’Connor’s Mark on Bruce Springsteen."

"wary of the poet's notion of erotic love"

A short piece by Michael Austin, professor of philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University, explores the dangers of absolutizing romance's role in marriage in an article called "Authentic Love, Kierkegaard, and U2." Drawn from a longer academic paper from 2007, it looks at the thought of Danish philosopher/theologian Soren Kierkegaard in dialogue with the U2 song "A Man and a Woman."

Excerpt: "Those who have truly integrated erotic love and divine love understand that committed married love is valuable for human existence in ways that the person who merely seeks personal pleasure cannot experience or understand. But this kind of love is deeply satisfying and fulfilling, and offers pleasure as well. So we shouldn't trade authentic love for an inferior counterfeit; we shouldn't risk losing love to find romance."

"energy to strike at self-ism’s creed"

A little late for the U.S. holiday, but here's a thoughtful reflection on Martin Luther King day and music from The Drake Effect. The post raises the question of what it means that much popular music "simply reinforces a desire for personal experiences of pleasure with self-indulgent narrowness, even much of the worship music in the churches I have frequented," and asks about music that raises issues of love of neighbor, commitment to solidarity, and so on, finding U2 a good example of the latter.

Bleed Into One redux

Some readers may already have seen this on the @U2 blog, but the producer of Bleed Into One, a film chronicling the history of the Christian rock genre (mentioned before on this blog in 2008), has published a reflection on how he chose the title from a U2 lyric. He also talks about the song "Drowning Man" and its special meaning for him. The film now has a Kickstarter campaign up, as well, so head on over if you'd like to support it.

(Incidentally, if you're wondering why on that 2008 post I refer to a helpful comment from a reader, but there are no comments visible, it's because this blog lost 5 years of previous comments when the comment system I was using stopped being supported. Good times.)

I just heard about a new article called "Soundtracks of Acrobatic Selves: Fan-Site Religion in the Reception and Use of the Music of U2," which appears in the October 2011 issue of The Journal of Contemporary Religion. Free viewing of the actual text isn't possible for 12 more months (even from within an academic gateway with a subscription, it seems), but the abstract says that the article analyses 40 pieces posted on a fansite in response to U2 songs, looking at how such online reflection "may contribute to the development of religious/spiritual exploration in contemporary Western societies." The authors are Clive Marsh and Vaughan S. Roberts.

Achtung! The U2 Studies Journal

Check out the news of an online, semi-annual journal in U2 studies launching May 2012. The call for submissions is here, and to keep informed you can subscribe to email, or follow on Twitter.

Advent 1

The Rock and Theology blog offers U2 as a case study in why rock does Advent better than Christmas.

New from Brian Walsh

Get Up Off Your Knees contributor Brian Walsh has a new arts-related book coming out, Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination. Read more about it here or learn about the Toronto launch party here.