The Gospel According to Bruce Springsteen: Rock and Redemption, from Asbury Park to Magic
Jeffrey B. Symynkywicz
Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, 197 pp., $16.95, www.wjkbooks.com
Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of a Nation
Rodney Clapp
Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, 159 pp., $19.95, www.wjkbooks.com
Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture
Daniel Radosh
Scribner, 2008, 310 pp., $25, www.simonandschuster.com
Pop culture gets the theological thrice-over in these new books.
Bruce Springsteen has sold more than 50 million albums since 1973. Now Jeffrey Symynkywicz, Minister at First Parish Universalist Church in Stoughton, Mass., examines The Boss’ “defiantly hopeful” message in the latest addition to the popular Gospel According to … series.
Symynkywicz knows his stuff and helps the reader see themes in classic albums like 1984’s Born in the USA and last year’s Magic. He also provides interesting biographical and historical information (and uninteresting quotes from everyone from Augustine to Kahlil Gibran).
If you want to know more about Johnny Cash, the music legend who died in 2003, skip this book and read Steve Turner’s wonderful The Man Called Cash; but if you want to read one of today’s most insightful Christian writers riffing on America’s confused, God-haunted culture, then dive in.
Tipping his hat to thinker Stanley Hauerwas, Clapp examines “America’s simultaneous embrace of holiness and hedonism, its pining love of tradition as it carries on a headlong romantic affair with progress.” Cash is never at the center of Clapp’s narrative, but his own legendary struggles serve as the thread that weaves the book together.
Meanwhile, Rapture Ready is an exploration of the evangelical subculture by a self-confessed “liberal New York Jew in my mid-30s.” Radosh avoids churches and focuses instead on forms of culture found at Christian stores, events and theme parks (like Orlando’s Holy Land Experience).
Radosh covers a lot of ground, and as a result he offers less depth and insight than a previous “outsider-looking-in” book, Andrew Beaujon’s excellent Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock. Reading these books about the evangelical industrial complex is as fun and unsettling as looking in a carnival’s fun house mirror.
