All These Things Into Position: What Theology Can Learn from Radiohead - Short Theological Engagements with Popular Music

Radiohead is simultaneously one of the most experimental and most successful rock bands on the planet. While their lyrics rarely reference religion, in this book Robert Saler argues that the discipline of Christian theology has a great deal to learn from the band when it comes to unflinching engagement with the world's brokenness and its longing for redemption. Market dynamics, the influence of capitalism on art, ecological theology, aesthetics, and Christology all come together as Saler asks what it might mean for Radiohead to ""soundtrack"" a theology of defiance against the forces that create death in our daily lives. ""Through Radiohead, Saler finds common ground for popular music studies and theology in the worldliness of the marketplace and the precarity of the Anthropocene. All These Things into Position is beautifully crafted and, by embracing contradiction, it enacts the very thing it argues for--incarnate, pain-filled hope."" --Jeffers Engelhardt, Associate Professor, Department of Music, Amherst College ""Rob Saler is out to change theology's soundtrack. In this tour-de-force interdisciplinary exchange, he demonstrates the eerie resonances and compelling creative possibilities if theology listens to Radiohead as it engages with the machinery of modern life. Saler convincingly shows the shared ground between theology and Radiohead: a ringing defiance in the face of exploitation and mortality, and an insistence upon beauty and hope in and for a suffering world."" --Edward Upton, Assistant Professor of Humanities, Christ College, Valparaiso University Robert Saler is Associate Dean at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, where he also serves as Research Professor of Lutheran Studies and Executive Director of the Center for Pastoral Excellence. He has written widely on theology and cultural criticism.