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Meredith Holladay

It is through their music that the Indigo Girls build upon the theological idea of community-building and solidarity-forming, in order to tell the stories, to relate the authentic experience of human struggle and reconciliation, of human love and pain. Further, they work outward, convicted that their music and songwriting is an avenue to speak truth to power. All of this serves as theological reflection worked out in public and vocal forms of prophetic denunciation and proclamation. Their songs take on this prophetic tone of denunciation--speaking against oppression, inequality, and injustice. Moreover, their music does not remain complacent in the critique; through their songwriting they participate in prophetic proclamation--envisioning alternative ways of being, contributing to the collective imagination of contexts of equality, peace, and human freedom.

Cascade Books

Short Theological Engagements with Popular Music

This Is Not a Fighting Song: The Prophetic Witness of the Indigo Girls

Jack Holloway

"The world today is such a wicked place," Black Sabbath declared in 1969, when they recorded their debut album, set against a backdrop of war, assassinations, social unrest, and disillusionment. Cries for justice from the Civil Rights Movement, and for peace and love from the culture of "flower power," had been met with violent backlash from the ruling class. It was on this stage that Black Sabbath entered--the heaviest rock band the world had yet known. This band was shaped by a working class upbringing in Birmingham, England, where actual metal defined the small town existence of factories, bombed-out buildings, and little else. With their music, Sabbath captured the dread and the burgeoning pessimism that was haunting the minds of young people in the sixties and seventies.

Today, we are in a similar age of crisis: climate disaster, extreme inequality, police brutality, mass incarceration, and now, pandemic. Black Sabbath speaks to our time in ways few other bands can. They deploy apocalyptic imagery to capture the destruction of the planet by despotic superpowers, and they pronounce a prophetic indictment on agents of injustice. In this book, theologian and cultural critic Jack Holloway explores Black Sabbath's music and lyrics, and what they had to say to their historical context. From this analysis, Holloway outlines a Black Sabbath theology which carries significant import for modern life, reminding us of our deep responsibility to transform a broken world.

Hands of Doom: The Apocalyptic Imagination of Black Sabbath

Christian Scharen

Welcome to this exploration of the Roots of hip-hop. The roots of hip-hop, as in: the Roots--a story of one of the most enduring, multi-talented, and successful groups of the past thirty years in any genre--and the story of the roots of hip-hop, that is, the story of hip-hop, a musical culture born in New York's South Bronx during the 1970s. Alongside the two hip-hop stories I tell here, I also tell the story about what God has to do with the Roots of hip-hop--a theological story, if you will. I describe how, in the process of becoming one of the most creative faith-rooted voices in music today, the Roots' developed a calling as artists. And I do this, in part, to say that you, too, can discover and live your prophetic calling. You can't help but be inspired by the Roots. Yet the best result of that is that you become inspired to be your most playful, passionate, purposeful, prophetic self in the world around you.

Someone Has to Care: The Roots and Hip-Hop’s Prophetic Calling

Daniel White Hodge

Tupac Amaru Shakur was considered a Hip Hop prophet. His spiritual journey has not had much attention given to it until now. This book looks at Tupac's gospel message from a Hip Hop context. Tupac presents a theological message needed now even twenty-plus years after his death.

Baptized in Dirty Water: Reimagining the Gospel according to Tupac Amaru Shakur

Robert Cady Saler

Radiohead is simultaneously one of the most experimental and most successful rock bands on the planet. While their lyrics rarely reference religion, in this book Robert Saler argues that the discipline of Christian theology has a great deal to learn from the band when it comes to unflinching engagement with the world's brokenness and its longing for redemption. Market dynamics, the influence of capitalism on art, ecological theology, aesthetics, and Christology all come together as Saler asks what it might mean for Radiohead to "soundtrack" a theology of defiance against the forces that create death in our daily lives.

All These Things into Position: What Theology Can Learn From Radiohead

In this series, volumes offer a brief theological take on a pop music artist or group, specific album, or even single song. Each volume is deep theologically, smart about the artist or group, album or song, and passionately opinionated in its engagement. Yet the brief length and accessible style will encourage broad engagement. The range of artists and music is intentionally broad-the full stretch of 20th century popular music. The intended audience is equally broad, seeking by this series to curate a much deeper public conversation about God in pop culture. It will be of interest to people of faith, pop music fans, and those many curious seekers of signs of the holy in the midst of life.