The Blue Note: Can Your Faith Face The Music?

Singing the Blues With Jesus

It was my turn to preach in chapel. I was given John 11:1-44 at the beginning of the semester, and since, in God’s providence, it was just two days after my father finally died after a long year of tremendous suffering, we held a memorial service in conjunction with chapel that day. I had long […]

Ain’t It Hard?

In a famous review of Richard Wright’s Black Boy in 1945, Ralph Ellison eloquently describes the blues as a form: The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of […]

Memento Morte: Remember Death

Judging by much of the art and literature, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was fairly morbid. Amid all the optimism of the Golden Age, an entire genre grew up called memento morte, which involved meditation on suffering and death. This is not surprising given the fact that about half of Europe’s population in some parts had succumbed […]

Tragedy vs. Nihilism

An Example of Suffering and Endurance

“Suffering is the badge of all our tribe” are the words of Shylock, the Jew, in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice. Although he spoke insincerely, what he said was not devoid of truth. But now that Jesus, the Messiah, has come all who believe in him are the people of God in a world […]

Bono, the Bible, and the Blues

In the spirit of our occasional “Free Space” interview section, the editors offer this piece by U2’s Bono on the Psalms, the blues, and the comfort of grace. We make no claims to Bono’s orthodoxy, but we find his own words strangely familiar to many of the other sentiments presented in this issue. This piece […]