What happens when theology is allowed to play?
Too Sick to Pray: A Theology of Outlaw Country develops an account of theological play through the music and lives of outlaw country artists. Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Billy Joe Shaver, Townes Van Zandt, Kris Kristofferson, and others inhabit a world saturated with Christian language, images, stories, and expectations—but they rarely leave those materials where they found them. They borrow them, bend them, rearrange them, joke with them, resist them, and occasionally discover something new in the process.
The book argues that this kind of play need not represent a strict parallel to serious theology. Play creates a peculiar freedom: familiar forms can be temporarily released from their ordinary functions and placed into unexpected relationships. Outlaw country provides an especially fertile space for this activity because its artists continually move between sacred and profane, belief and unbelief, sincerity and irreverence, church and honky-tonk.
Through close attention to songs, performances, biographies, and the culture surrounding the music, Too Sick to Pray explores what happens to theological ideas when they are permitted to move outside their accustomed settings. Sin, grace, incarnation, prayer, death, resurrection, and redemption appear differently when encountered in a song rather than a doctrinal formulation—and sometimes the difference exposes possibilities that theology has overlooked.
The result is not an attempt to discover a hidden systematic theology within outlaw country. It is an argument for a more playful theological imagination. Outlaw country becomes a partner in that experiment: a place where inherited theological materials can be handled freely enough to surprise us again.
Introduction The Ghost of Hank
1 Outlaw Country God's Dirty Joke
2 Jesus Was a Capricorn Kris Kristofferson
3 spirit Willie Nelson
4 Revelation Waylon Jennings
5 An Elegy of Empty Harps Townes Van Zandt
6 Salvation Billy Joe Shaver
7 New Forms of Outlaw Theology Roger Alan Wade and Cecil Allen Moore
Conclusion Theology on a Sunday Morning Coming Down