Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Tom BeaudoinJune 09, 2009

Understanding the general fact of many of us in rock cultures having found secular music to offer practices that resist the smallness of our surroundings -- a finding not yet sufficiently glimpsed in another discipline, theology, tasked with thinking salvific resistance -- can hardly give the richness that specific examples of this phenomenon offer. So it was that this morning I was edified by reading an account of the service to kids in New York City provided by the Boys' Club of New York in East Harlem. Their music program uses training in rock and cognate musics to help build a skillful passage to adulthood for these boys. Tonight, as A.G. Sulzberger reports, a group of "young music students from economically troubled neighborhoods" will play a show at Lincoln Center, at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater of the Juilliard School. Such stories remind us that a theological comprehension of secular musics need not confine itself to a narrow focus on analyzing song lyrics, but ought to study with critical appreciation the ways of life that rock can confect.

Check out the story in the New York Times here.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

(Cross posted to Rock and Theology.)

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.

The latest from america

Catholics across Texas and the world, including Pope Leo XIV, are offering their prayers and support after deadly flooding struck Texas on July 4.
Each year at this time, near the Fourth of July, we contemplate freedom. But maybe we are also being called to do an extended examination of our own fears.
George Drance, S.J.July 07, 2025
Is it possible to embrace the idea of a special, evenly divinely ordained mission for America without violating Christian ethical principles?
Thomas J. MassaroJuly 07, 2025
Pope Leo XIV arrived in the papal summer retreat of Castel Gandolfo on Sunday to start a six-week vacation, giving the hilltop town back its most illustrious resident after Pope Francis stayed away during his 12-year pontificate.