Search

In this essay I consider the methodological and theological significance of David Hopps's creative intervention in The Extravagance of Music to 'rehabilitate lightness' in theological reflection on music in a way that includes taking seriously even the theological potential of musical 'kitsch' and 'banal' popular music lyrics. Yet though Hopps makes a persuasive case for widening the musical content that he deems worthy of theological engagement, I show that his own 'light' limits around the revelatory potential of music surface in a series of caveats and qualifications. I argue for a still more capacious approach to theological reflection that resists even these limits. I suggest that such reflection has the capacity to open our ears to the activity of God at work in and in spite of the quality of human musical creations and testifies to the extravagance of God more than to the extravagance of music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that an accent on resistance pervasive in current literature on consumer culture and religion drives a narrow application of Michel de Certeau's distinction between strategies and tactics. This paradigmatic appropriation of Certeau's work uses his notion of tactics to describe a mode of Christian resistance that can persist even without overthrowing the strategic grid of consumer culture. Situating quotidian tactics within the wider body of his work, I argue that they are not, for Certeau, primarily signs of resistance, but signs of absence: living realities that pulse within and against systems of strategies that can never quite contain them. I propose reading tactics through a hermeneutic of absence to open a space for a theological account of consumer culture that takes seriously the irreducibility of our experiences, even those in and through the distortions of the contemporary market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]