Review: Music, Theology, and Justice

by Alexander Zarecki

Michael O’Connor, Hyun-Ah Kim, and Christina Labriola, eds., Music, Theology, and Justice. Lanham, PA: Lexington Books, 2017.

With a title as direct as it is provocative, Music, Theology, and Justice invites conversation, speculation, and connection across human stories. In this collection of essays, Michael O’Conner, Hyun-Ah Kim, and Christina Labriola — three scholars at the intersection of Christian theology and music — order writings into three parts for their readers: the prophetic, the pastoral, and the priestly. While the boundaries between these archetypal categories are at times held gently, this structure gives way to an intentional dimensionality of awareness regarding “latent relationships between diverse topics and themes.”¹ The ambition of this mapping first emerges not only in a thoroughly scriptural argumentation for understanding justice as a theological category, but more wholly by framing music as “an irreducibly social practice” with bodily accountability, transience, and repercussions.²

The connective undercurrent of the prophetic category highlights this well in stories “articulating protest against injustice, lamenting loss, and offering consolation.”³ Right at the start, historian and flautist Chelsea Hodge delivers an essay on American unionism in the first half of the twentieth century that balances a naming of injustices with nuance toward remaining faithful. In this way, Hodge sets a tone that remains true throughout the collection. This essay places focus on the story of Zilphia Horton, the musician and activist credited with bringing momentum to the labor movement by layering new words upon known religious music. By focusing on her narrative, readers are invited into a meta-sensibility that exemplifies speaking truth to power with love, perhaps best evidenced in her nuanced utilization of a song otherwise quite critical of religious leadership titled “The Preacher and the Slave.”

This motion of emergent, self-aware critique is carried on in theologian and songwriter Michael J. Iafrate’s attention to the latter half of the same century. With a thorough historicizing of punk music and ideology, framed as not merely derivative but a renewed iteration of liberation theology, Iafrate offers opportunity to connect personal agency with shaping community by way of musical expression. This is not limited to momentary acts of expression, but includes the thick culture that can surround both performance of and response to honest, incisive art forms. Theologian, musician, and composer Maeve Louise Heaney, in one of the more daring entries, puts forth an original work, complete with a hyperlink to an audio file on SoundCloud and mid-text excerpts from the score. Focus is shifted from the wider musical ethos of punk to a singular musical composition, but reflection through both leads to a reordering of the theological imagination, again especially as reordered in light of the poor and/or marginalized.

This reorientation, or more acutely this response to theological and societal blind spots, continues in the pastoral category as entries explore “creating and sustaining community, building peace, [and] fostering harmony with the whole of creation.”⁴ The music of Sting is held up for examination by theologian and guitarist Michael Taylor Ross. Found in the same gesture that brings Sting’s work into a more expansive understanding of religious responsibility (i.e., inclusive of our natural, nonhuman world), Ross identifies the very motion that he argues leads Christian scholarship to here miss out. He cites how recent scholarly attention to the theology of U2 remains largely uncritical of key churchly assumptions. Whereas scholarship on U2 tends to be more anchored by “certain faith in Jesus’ redemption of a troubled world,” a wandering capaciousness within the theology of Sting’s work “points to certain faith as the cause of much of this trouble.”⁵ Theologian and musician Awet Iassu Andemicael follows this call to intentional unease with a glimpse into the socio-religious landscape of modern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ethnic and religious norms are challenged by the Pontanima Choir of Sarajevo, who sings songs from across local Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic traditions with a constitution that exemplifies this diversity, all while, Andemicael argues, an individual distinctiveness of faith is “uncover[ed] fully.”⁶ Readers are further invited into this overarching ethic of challenging internalized biases with musician, philosopher, and theologian Jeremy E. Scarbrough’s thorough entry on extreme metal music. Following this thread can lead to a more intimate picture of lament and more generous framing of neighborly dialogue.

The final movement, the priestly category, with its emphases on “reconciliation and sanctification” and “offering prayers of praise and intercession to God,” proves perhaps the most ambitious and most nebulous of the three.⁷ It begins with theologian Jesse Smith’s thoughtful consideration of Daft Punk as priestly in the ritual of their live performance, turning attendees on to “discovering a shared humanity in the face of an alienating technological culture.”⁸ A sharp turn is then made roughly a millennium into the past with back-to-back entries focused, respectively, on Hildegard of Bingen and Mechthild of Hackeborn. In the former, theologian and musician Christina Labriola presents readers with a depiction of music as vehicle for inward reordering toward the divine. In the latter, theologian Ella Johnson names the surprising method of connecting a Neoplatonic imagination back to a modern sensibility of justice. In a gesture true to the often-subversive mode of art, Johnson invites readers to use Mechthild’s work to “critically examine the philosophical presuppositions and assumptions that underpin … thought on the relationship between music and justice.”⁹

It is in the final primary entry by theologian and musician Don E. Saliers that Music, Theology, and Justice proves just how far forward this collection stands in the discourse. Saliers runs back along the well-worn grooves of 1964’s civil rights era music and a psalmic U2, highlighting “the tension between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be.”¹⁰ A far-reaching lens on Christendom and a current socio-cultural denial of lament leads Saliers out of repeated dialogue and into a dire framing: “Music both inside and outside religious communities stretches toward justice — and singing out of these traditions may well be the most vulnerable and necessary political act in which we human beings engage.”¹¹ Each of the three categories contains a helpful summary entry — from scholars C. Michael Hawn, Bruce T. Morrill, and Ann Loades, respectively — but it is Saliers that delivers the recapitulation, a benedictive call to action.

For scholars of all disciplines and confessions, Music, Theology, and Justice bears historical precision and ideological nuance commensurate with any earnestly constructive endeavor, landing with an aspiration for continued attentiveness rather than paltry solution. For leaders amidst the church-at-large, this collection emboldens the convictions of a cultural (sub-)consciousness, demonstrating through example and argument that music, especially songs, are fundamental to both the understanding and expression of a responsible faithfulness. For musicians in and apart from the church, there is left a weighty encouragement that the whole ordered depth of one’s humanity is, by means of careful measure of craft, responsible to the divine work of justice in a shared world.

1. O’Conner et al., Music, Theology, and Justice, xiv.
2. Ibid., ix. (emphasis original)
3. Ibid., xiv.
4. Ibid., xiv.
5. Ibid., 88. (emphasis original)
6. Ibid., 108.
7. Ibid., xiv.
8. Ibid., 159.
9. Ibid., 190.
10. Ibid., 197. (emphasis original)
11. Ibid., 206–207.

Alex Zarecki holds a graduate degree in Theology & Culture from The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology and currently works there as an Assistant Instructor. With guitar and voice he has lead the worship band at Seattle’s historic Japanese Baptist Church for four years, and within this last year he has begun to bridge his personal songwriting into the music sung there for corporate worship.