Theology, Art, & Culture

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Some of my work begins in places where theology is not ordinarily expected to begin: a country song, a tattoo, a glass of whisky, a painting, a concert, or another object of everyday culture.

I am interested in these things not primarily because they contain hidden theological messages waiting to be decoded. I am interested in what happens when theology encounters them without already knowing what the encounter is supposed to produce.

The governing concept for much of this work is play.

Play temporarily alters the rules governing ordinary relationships. Objects can be used differently; words can acquire unexpected meanings; inherited forms can be rearranged without simply being discarded.

This creates a peculiar kind of theological freedom.

When theological ideas move beyond their conventional settings, they enter relationships that systematic argument might never have anticipated. The result need not be less rigorous theology. Play can become a method of discovery: a way of testing what theological concepts can do when they are handled differently.

Too Sick to Pray: A Theology of Outlaw Country develops this argument through outlaw country music.

The world inhabited by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Billy Joe Shaver, Townes Van Zandt, Kris Kristofferson, and others is saturated with Christian materials—God, Jesus, sin, prayer, death, resurrection, grace, and redemption—but those materials rarely remain safely within their inherited arrangements. They are borrowed, resisted, joked about, inverted, performed, and occasionally rediscovered.

Rather than constructing a systematic “theology of country music,” the project asks what this play makes possible for theology itself.

Other projects extend this experiment beyond music.

Angel’s Share: Whisky Mythologies examines the stories through which whisky becomes attached to landscape, memory, authenticity, ritual, tradition, and transcendence. The project is interested in mythology not simply as false history but as a form of meaning-making through which material objects become culturally enchanted.

My work on theology and tattoos begins with another material transformation: the decision to make an image part of one's body. Tattoos bring questions of nature and agency, identity and self-construction, memory and permanence, interiority and exterior form into unusually close proximity.

In each case, the cultural object does more than supply theology with an example. It introduces a problem.

This approach also shapes my work with visual art.

A work of art is not valuable to theology simply because it depicts a Christian subject. Indeed, some of the most productive encounters occur when art refuses theological explanation, disrupts familiar religious images, or creates experiences that theological language struggles to accommodate.

Theology becomes interesting at precisely this point: when it has to respond rather than merely interpret.