Show Notes
Can a live concert or a secular pop song actually be a space to encounter the Holy Spirit?
Theologian and author Dr. Daniel Horan joins host Case Thorp on the Nuance podcast for part one of a two-part series on finding the divine in everyday pop culture. They discuss how the academic study of spirituality helps us recognize God outside the walls of the church, and why Christians do not need to fear the secular experiences that move them.
Whether you are a ministry leader navigating cultural conversations or a professional simply looking for deeper meaning in the music you love, this conversation provides a rich theological framework for seeing God in all things.
Episode Resources:
The Francis Effect Podcast: https://francisfxpod.com/
Dr. Daniel Horan: https://www.facebook.com/DanielPHoranPhD
Dr. Daniel Horan’s articles: http://ncronline.org/authors/daniel-p-horan
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
Daniel Horan writes: “Dave Matthews and the band took the stage at around 7.30 p.m. without an opening act and played for three hours straight. Fans of DMB will not be surprised to hear about the marathon performance or the no frills, brief interludes between the songs. There’s no choreography, pyrotechnics or costume changes, just musicians who switch out a guitar here and there between the songs, tune their instruments, and start the next song in the set. There were several times during the concert that I felt a recognizable experience of joy and even transcendence, which reminded me of something bordering on the religious. When nearly every person present joined together in a spontaneous, yet synchronous belting of a song’s refrain, or cheered when the opening notes of a favorite song began, I was reminded in a visceral way of the spiritual power of live music, for jazz music might be one of the best metaphors for thinking about the Holy Spirit, and it was this reality that I experienced again that evening; this kind of experience that isn’t limited to DMB.” It could happen at a concert by Taylor Swift or Beyonce or some lesser known but still talented musician or band. The experience of being part of an audience, whether numbered in the dozens or thousands, or listening to live music together, or being in the moment of not just witnessing, but also participating in something unfolding in real time, can be wonderfully overwhelming. Well friends, that writer and theologian is Daniel Horan and he is today’s guest. Dr. Horan, welcome to Nuance.
Daniel P. Horan
It’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.
Case Thorp
Well, I’m glad to have you and I will confess, I am a huge Dave Matthews band fan.
Daniel P. Horan
Then you’re in good company, or I should say I’m in good company. This is great.
Case Thorp
Well, it is the sound of my high school and particularly college and graduate years, and so it’s kind of fun. Friends, listeners, viewers, we come to today’s topic because a fan of the podcast said to me: “Why don’t you do something on Dave Matthews and the theology of their music?” And I thought that’s really cool. So let’s do that. So welcome to Nuance, this podcast where we explore what it means to be faithful in the public square as followers of Jesus. Now you might think, wait a minute, Case, you’re usually looking at faith and work integration. Well, yes, but for you to be able to live faithfully in the public square, to speak winsomely to Christ in your workplace, we got to know what’s going on in pop culture. And we need to understand, “how do we explain it?.” And look at it through the eyes of Christ, and that’s what we’re going to do. So if you would hit that share button, leave a comment, it helps us in many ways to get this word out. Also, we’re going to go to the Dave Matthews lyrics, and this concert, and particularly this writing about what’s going on there by Daniel, and see what the Lord might have to say. So Dr. Horan is a professor of philosophy, religious studies, and theology at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. He’s the author of numerous books, and a longtime columnist with the National Catholic Reporter and co-host of the Francis Effect podcast. Now, Daniel, hold on. Pope Francis is no longer with us. Did you change it to the Leo podcast?
Daniel P. Horan
No, we didn’t. You know, 10 years ago in 2016, when we founded the podcast, it was indeed Pope Francis, who was foremost on our mind. But we are also thinking of his namesake, Francis of Assisi of 800 years earlier. I should say, 2026 is an important, Franciscan celebratory year, the 800th anniversary of the saint’s death in 1226.
Case Thorp
Hmm. I did not know that.
Daniel P. Horan
Yeah, October 3rd will be a really important historical milestone. So no, we haven’t changed it. I think I can speak on behalf of my two co-hosts that we are fans of Pope Leo. We’re really excited to see his ministerial leadership and pastoral outreach and kind of moral backbone. We see that in so many ways in the world today, but the Francis effect is carrying that Saint from Assisi’s legacy as well as our late Pope’s legacy into the Leonine papacy moving forward.
Case Thorp
Leonine, that’s cool. Well, I’m a big fan of popes and not necessarily in agreement at all theology just so my reformed listeners don’t just faint. But Daniel, if we get, if you can get Leo to come visit Notre Dame, you gotta get me in. You gotta, I’d love to meet the guy in person.
Daniel P. Horan
I would love that too. I should say my dad is a Villanova alum and so he was very happy to say that he has a pope that shares an alma mater with him. It’s very exciting.
Case Thorp
Well, well, I have to admit, I can’t believe we have an American pope. So when I was a child, I told my mother that when I grew up, I wanted to be either the pope or a mud wrestler. I don’t know why those two and how they’re perhaps interchangeable. And she said, well, there’s a problem. You weren’t born Catholic and you’re an American. There will never be an American pope. So she said, and you hate to admit that your mother’s wrong on something, but…
Daniel P. Horan
Okay.
Case Thorp
It is, it was quite a shock. Well, friends, Daniel wrote a column for the July, 2024 issue of the National Catholic Reporter entitled, “What Live Concerts Can Teach Us About Spirituality?” So we’re going to do a two part episode, two part series here, and in this first episode, Dan’s going to help us get a sense of how to read pop culture.
Daniel P. Horan
It is.
Case Thorp
How to understand the songs of today, even if it’s not Christian music, especially when it’s not Christian music, and even those sort of songs given to us by DMB. Now next week, we’re gonna dig into specific DMB songs and look at those lyrics and just hear what the Spirit has to say to us. All right, so Daniel, before you got to this concert, and I have to admit, I’ve never been to a Dave Matthews concert. I’m envious. Before we get to that, I want our listeners to understand the shape of your work. So you teach spirituality as an academic discipline, and that may strike people as a contradiction in terms. So they think spirituality is something you feel, not something you study. Talk to us about that.
Daniel P. Horan
Yeah, I’m happy to, and I think what you’re describing is a very common reaction, maybe more so, you know, from the average, more than I should say, the average Christian or person in the pews. It’s actually the scholars in the areas of biblical studies and theology and theological ethics, who over the last few decades might be a little bit skeptical as well. So I’m used to hearing this kind of question. In fact, I’ll tell you a very short, kind of revealing story about why people may be skeptical about the study of spirituality. I had a friend who’s a historical theologian, studied the Middle Ages, and he had taken a new faculty position at a big university on the East Coast of the United States. I’ll leave the names out to protect the innocent, but he was at a new faculty gathering at the beginning of the year with his department and a rather famous systematic theologian, a dogmatic theologian came up to him and said, you know, welcome to the faculty. I see you joined us. What’s your area? And he was just hired in this position, the senior position in spirituality. He said, I’m the new professor of Christian spirituality, to which without missing a beat, this other colleague says, yes, spirituality. He says, you know, theology is to spirituality as cheese is to cheese wiz. Pretty insulting. He was pretty upset. But there is this idea, right? And I think wrongly so, that spirituality is the sort of touchy-feely, what young people today would call woo-woo, or they say age, or hard to wrap our heads around, and that last point is true. It is difficult to wrap our heads around something that is an experience of the transcendent, of the divine, of God the creator, of the spirit, and what the academic study of spirituality does is a few things.
Case Thorp
Wow.
Daniel P. Horan
One is to continue to develop methodology for how to think about, reflect on, talk about, and study that first order experience of God. Which is not, I like to compare it oftentimes as a discipline, as an academic discipline, to the field of psychology. I think sometimes folks forget that what is today considered a very rigorous scientific area of study, psychology and psychiatry, these are fields that emerged at the turn of the 20th century with Freud, Jung, and others, and it was seen as like crackpot science at the time. It wasn’t real. What are we doing with dream analysis? What are we doing with this kind of family of origin questions and these sorts of things? So spirituality today, going from the 20th into the 21st century in higher education and in pastoral experiences tends to be playing that similar sort of catch up in gaining a foothold, so…
Case Thorp
Yeah.
Daniel P. Horan
One of the things that I find myself doing, especially at the undergraduate level, in addition to graduate level teaching in the area of Christian spirituality, is helping this current generation, Gen Z as it were, to think about their experience of being in the world as something more than what meets the eye, something that’s more than some of their parts, and this is where I come up maybe in a little bit of a different position than a lot of ministers in the church and a lot of kind of church-going faithful, which is I have never really been that concerned about the so-called spiritual but not religious folks, and this might be a good segue to some of our pop culture talk. Yeah, and so…
Case Thorp
Makes me crazy, and if you’re one of those folks, we love you, but there’s a lot said in that phrase. Go ahead.
Daniel P. Horan
There is, and actually there’s been a lot of work done by sociologists and theologians, in I would say the last 15 years, around that phrase, and more importantly, the people who would find themselves identifying in that category, and the reason why I, while the phrase can be kind of frustrating, and as you rightly point out, is loaded, right, it can mean a lot of things and carries a lot of weight. One of the things that I find affirming about that is that it speaks on some level to the fact that as human beings, each person is always already open to the divine, and so the issue… Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So I–so that’s the starting point, right? As human beings, we are created with this capacity for God. I’ll mention a 20th century German theologian who’s a bit of a hero of mine, so much so that I named my dog after him, and that’s the German Jesuit Karl Rahner. Very important. Yeah.
Case Thorp
True, I would agree, but your dog, like, is that a compliment? What would Rahner think?
Daniel P. Horan
Well, I think so. It’s a very good question. That’s my second favorite Karl of the 20th century. I’m a big fan of Barth. Barth, although Rahner and Barth disagree and agree about different things. I mean, can talk, if we want to talk about theology and go with, you know, the Confessing Church of Barth and the Catholic Church of Rahner in the 20th century, we could talk about the motive or the ratio for the incarnation. There they actually come closer together.
Case Thorp
I thought you were gonna say Karl Barth, but go ahead. Okay, okay, yeah.
Daniel P. Horan
Oh, we’re nerding out here a little bit too much. We’ll be losing some of this. My dog’s named Rahner, and one of the things that Karl Rahner said, the theologian, not the canine, is that each of us is created with, Latin, the capacity, this capacity for God, and that we are, and I love this expression of his, we are made hearers of the word, and if, if this is actually a great reference to Barth, Barth says we know nothing of God without Christ, right? Christ is the one, the word incarnate makes intelligible.
Case Thorp
Okay, so your dog can. Yeah. Even knowable.
Daniel P. Horan
Yeah, God’s very being. He’s very against the possibility of a natural theology in that sense. And what Rahner says is, on that point, right, he believes in a natural theology tradition, but he’ll say, we are the questions for which God is the answer. We are the hearers of the word that God proclaims, God’s gift of self-disclosure, the gift of God’s self as grace, and so that is our starting point precedes any kind of confessional tradition, any set of creeds, beliefs, denominational differences, and so for me, when I hear the phrase spiritual but not religious, for instance, I say, okay, well, here’s something that we can both agree on, whoever I’m talking with, that our very starting point is one of a graced possibility of encounter with God. Now, how we describe that, how we make sense of that, how it fits into our horizon of meaning, that’s what spirituality is at the next level.
So Christian spirituality more broadly, or we might say, you know, Roman Catholic Christian spirituality, or we might say Presbyterian, like Wesleyan Christian spirituality, like whatever the traditions are that help give us language and frameworks for understanding and structure, that builds on this more fundamental openness to the transcendent, and this is where I think dimensions of pop culture and art and music come in, because those are things that don’t necessarily, sometimes they do, and that’s fine, come with sort of creedal or belief categories, but more often than not, speak to something much deeper, much more profound.
Case Thorp
Well, and for that very reason, we at The Collaborative work spiritual formation into everything we do. In fact, I will say that sometimes it should be 51% of a study, a program, a curriculum. We have three fellowships that we’ve started. The Gotham Fellowship for Christian and Professionals, Orlando Fellows for Young Adults, and an Arts Fellowship, and spiritual formation are a huge part of those experiences because I love the intellectual and the academic, but I know that. See all these holes in my head? Like, stuff that I pour in here will leak out over time. But when you form that heart, it’s powerful. Okay, so thank you for making that connection to the pop culture bit because if not careful, I have found Christians can be malformed that living the spiritual life, meaning that the internal thoughts and processes as they encounter the world and encounter God, we can just absorb all these lyrics and phrases and music and cinema, et cetera, and not realizing how we’re being formed, but if we’re mindful, even if it’s not something Jesus might himself write. So this is good.
Let’s go to the heart of your column, another segment that you write. I think it’s important for our listeners to hear and to get a sense of this. You write, “when I teach students about the fundamentals of spirituality. I sometimes point to live concerts as one metaphor to think about the unity and diversity of experiencing the transcendent, meaning God. Given the demographic of my undergraduate students today, I usually suggest they imagine attending a Taylor Swift concert. I encourage them to think about all the different positions in the arena or stadium where one might have a ticket for the experience. The front row, backstage. somewhere in the middle of the floor, somewhere in the nosebleed section.” And Daniel, from what I understand, the cost of Taylor Swift tickets, that’s where I would be if I ever were to go.
Daniel P. Horan
I’m with you there. Probably in the parking lot for me is what I could afford for a Taylor Swift concert.
Case Thorp
Okay, I gotta stop that real quick and just say, one of our board members, Billy Wilson, wonderful man, his daughter saw Taylor Swift in the States and in Scotland, and they flew to Edinburgh and while there, he and his wife went and he said, it was so expensive that he was not about to spend a ticket on himself to go, and he said, so I just took her to the stadium and hung out outside and I could totally hear it outside.
Daniel P. Horan
Wow.
Case Thorp
And there was a pub and I went inside and it was all full of dads. These other dads that weren’t about to drop 800 bucks on Taylor. Okay, back to your article. You conclude this section by saying, “and then I asked the students to reflect on the range of ways the thousands of people are each individually experiencing the same performance.” Tell us more about what you’re trying to do with that exercise.
Daniel P. Horan
That’s great. Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. It’s a true to life example. It’s something I really do teach my students. In fact, I did this, we just finished up our spring semester here in South Bend, and this came up in the unit on spirituality. The key thing here is I think sometimes, especially with younger folks, but not so young folks also can experience this as well, which is we can become very disillusioned with Religion with a capital “R,” Belief with a capital “B,” Christianity with a capital “C,” when what we see first or approach first are the things that are either maybe culture war kind of hinted at or language that is exclusionary or concepts that are points of disagreement even among believers themselves, and so the entry point becomes really difficult. It becomes a challenging sort of context and it can become off-putting right from the–from the get-go. So as we were talking about earlier, one of the things I invite students to do is to think first, even before we get to the Taylor Swift example, because this is my pivot. It’s kind of a bait and switch. I get them thinking about the concert, which some of them have experienced, others have desired to experience, and the like, and the same thing could be true with a sporting event. You can think about SCC football, or here at Notre Dame, the Fighting Irish. It’s their world.
Case Thorp
Dude, SEC football, come on. You know, this is totally distraction, but Rudy is my favorite movie of all time. I just cry. I love Rudy. We need to do this again and we’re gonna do the theology.
Daniel P. Horan
Yeah. Is that right? Okay. We break it down. Okay. Well, that’s–that’s really great to hear. I know that they actually play Rudy on the stadium screen. They have a viewing, I think, I don’t know if it’s every year, every couple years, but you can go to Notre Dame Stadium and watch it, which is pretty cool.
Case Thorp
Okay, keep going. Wow. Okay. So when I come with you to meet Pope Leo, I want to make sure we coordinate that at the same time as Rudy in the stadium.
Daniel P. Horan
That’s right, but I have to put my cards on the table and my students cannot wrap their heads around this, that I’m not actually a football fan. I love basketball. I love hockey. Not a big football fan. So the only time I’ve been to Notre Dame Stadium for a live event was actually seeing Billy Joel in concert, which was not unlike the Matthews concert that we’re talking about. But back to the students and Taylor Swift, what with them understanding is a starting point is a foundation that–that our human personhood is constituted in part by this capacity for God, that God made us for God’s self, then we can talk about, how do we have all these differing perspectives of the experience of God in one’s life? You know, and that’s where I think about, like, if we have a shared experience, like a concert, a Taylor Swift concert, or Billy Joel or Dave Matthews or whatever, the singer, the focus, the sound, the music, it is literally the same or you know, 70,000 people are at the same event, and yet we can all recognize that the particularities of the experience will vary. What I walk away with, the tune that’s stuck in my head for the rest of the night, the stories that I’m gonna tell to my friends or to tell to that father in the pub in Edinburgh afterwards, you what was it like?
These things that color our experience of the same thing do not negate the fact that what we experience was the same, but we will always already experience it in our own particular context, and I think if we start with the contextual as divisive, as, well, I have it the right way, the way I experience the concert is the only way, or the way I experience God and the world is the only way, that’s how we slip into this sort of confrontation and debate and at times, you know, off-putting presentation of the faith. So what I say is, you know, regardless of what your perspective is, your personal experience, maybe your experience of the more than in the universe and in the world, what I would call as a Christian, the experience of God in the world, the experience of the Holy Spirit, the experience of grace, maybe that happens to you in great highs, like, you know, a celebratory event, like graduation, we’re in graduation season right now universities.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Well, and I hear it from guys all the time that I feel God more in the deer stand in the quiet stillness of the morning than necessarily Sunday at 11, and while it makes me sad, I get what they mean, and at the same time, I also teach in my teaching, it takes time to develop those muscles to understand and appreciate liturgy.
Daniel P. Horan
Absolutely.
Case Thorp
And the way in which God moves in and through religious structures. So it takes time to exercise that. You show up at a church the first time, you’re like, whoa.
Daniel P. Horan
Yeah, and I love that, that what you’re naming here, I think we would, in the kind of professional Christian guild, would call that spiritual formation, right? That forming of hearts and minds. And I think that’s exactly right. Just as, you know, the hour or hour plus on Sunday or Sunday and Wednesday or what have you, is for some people very formal or maybe new or different depending on the Christian context, it could be more or less liturgical. That may feel different than the other six days and 23 hours of the week and requires a sort of formation. Conversely, I would say there has been a longstanding tradition, particularly among high liturgical communities like my own tradition of the Catholic Church or the Anglican Communion among others, where people think if I don’t have the smells and bells, if I don’t have the pews, if I don’t have the organ music, I’m not in a context, I’m not in a space to experience the divine and have to learn that those other six days and 23 hours, we are also always open to God’s grace in our lives, and that’s where I go back to the kind of concert experience. Literally in a concert experience, I think music has a way of moving people and we can, I’m sure we’re going to talk more about that, but I think like the example of, of, you know, being in a hunting blind or being on the beach on vacation or just going for a walk, I mentioned my dog, Rahner. I go for a walk with Rahner early in the morning. I’m a morning person, and so we’re up pretty early, and it’s interesting to see the seasons of the year and how the sun rises and sets and the quiet of the morning walking along the St. Joseph River here in South Bend on the trail with my dog, and just being present to the world around me can be a spiritual experience. There was a great Jesuit, I don’t know why I’m quoting all these Jesuits today, is, I’m made to do so, I promise, but…
Case Thorp
I’m going to get to Calvin here in a minute, so you go ahead.
Daniel P. Horan
Good, good. We need a refresh, and so one of the things that Thayer Deschardins, a Jesuit scientist and Catholic priest in the early 20th century, one of the things he talked about was the mass of creation or the kind of liturgy of the universe. Like, how can we see God made present in the world around us? And that brings me back again to the concert analogy where I invite students to say, you know, on the one hand, the experience itself that’s overwhelming, that’s life-giving, that’s uplifting, is, I think, a divine experience, but then when we want to think about that in more spiritual terms, that’s the second order reflection. How do we make sense of what it is that we experienced? How is it that, to bring it back to the church example too, that this is admittedly a secular context, the Taylor Swift concert for example, right? It’s not a Christian worship service, it’s not a Christian rock band, and yet it’s something done communally. How is that experience different than just listening on your phone to Taylor’s latest album or Dave’s latest album or something? Absolutely.
Case Thorp
Okay now, I’m a good Calvinist, at least I think so. Actually, that’s a contradiction in words. We Calvinists are sinful or bad or depraved, and we have a high doctrine of sin for sure, maybe sometimes too high, but the Calvinist in me is low and, ugh, what about our broken selves that tend to, as Calvin said, long for idols? I mean, what if I’m…I can’t, one could hear in what you’re saying that all good experiences are God. All things that make you feel positive. Well, what if I’m strung up on drugs and lusting over Taylor Swift? Like, where is that line between knowing and directing one’s affections towards that which is right, true, and good?
Daniel P. Horan
Yeah, that’s a really great question and something for which I would agree that I’m a deep appreciator of Calvin and his institutes and a lot of what he has to say, but I do resist a little bit the depravity. There is a heavy-handed emphasis on sin, but he gets that from St. Augustine in the Roman tradition in the Latin West. We’re kind of burdened by that too. The thing that’s so resonant about both Calvin and Augustine’s insight is that we experience sin. I remember, and I wish I could attribute this correctly, but somebody once said that, you know, original sin is the only doctrine in Christianity that has empirical evidence. You don’t have to kind of just experience it every day on both sides.
Case Thorp
Have a two year old.
Daniel P. Horan
There you go. Exactly. Or a lovely dog who, you know, can non-human animals sin? A hundred percent. I’m sure of it.
So, you know, it’s a fair question, and what I would say is this goes back to the communal element of our faith tradition as well, right? As Christians, I like to say you can’t be an independent contractor Christian. You can’t be a sole proprietor Christian, a maverick Christian. We are, by virtue of baptism, brought in, as St. Paul says, knitted to one another in Christ by the Holy Spirit, and we do this in community. So when you were talking about spiritual formation earlier, that is something that I think is really important to keep in mind. In the Catholic tradition, in my tradition, we talk about the formation, the good formation of one’s conscience, right? So that we, you know, that we have the tools to adjudicate, you know, what are my motives? What is the right action? What do I owe my neighbor? What is it that Christ is calling me to do? And this is not something that I can just kind of make up on my own. I’m a big fan of the 13th century Franciscan theologian, Saint Bonaventure, and one of the things that he says, and he takes this somewhat from Augustine as well, is this idea that we are, and we become like that which we love, and if we could take on the story of God, incorporate the story of God in Scripture into our own lives, into our own stories, then we become more Christ-like. So I think that formative element is really important, but the other thing I would say is discernment in community, right? I just, I want to resist, or caution rather, a kind of individualistic spirituality, and I think that’s sort of what I hear you hinting at. Like, how do I know that just because it feels good that that’s, that is or isn’t from God? And–and I think both Calvin, you know, Luther before him as a good Augustinian and Augustine himself, you know, really are concerned about this question and invite us to that spiritual formation, that communal discernment, but what I would say is, all that is important. All that is something I affirm. I think it’s necessary because we can dilute ourselves. We can convince ourselves of all kinds of things and others, but one of the things I’m concerned about is the pendulum swinging among religious folks too far to this kind of ancient desert fathers and mothers idea of fuga mundi, which sounds like a swear word or like an Italian insult. Fuga mundi is Latin for fleeing the world, and it’s this understanding that in order to be an authentic Christian, I have to leave, in this case, the metaphorical world, right? The world, that St. Paul says in the first letters of Corinthians, like the wisdom of the world, the logic of the world.
Case Thorp
Yeah, flesh and pleasures.
Daniel P. Horan
Exactly. Yeah, and the problem with that is, then we have too strict a sort of divide between the profane and the sacred, and when we build a wall between those realities, first of all, it’s artificial. I don’t believe that that’s true, because God is present even to those in sin. If not, there would be an invitation to conversion, right?
Case Thorp
So Daniel, what I hear you saying is what we call common grace in the Reformed tradition, where it’s understood that God does pour out gifts of beauty and skill and joy on the whole world and on both those who confess Him and those who don’t, and so when 25,000 people feel something true at a concert, you don’t have to call it a counterfeit, and so what I hear you saying is, and I want listeners to take this away, this, it depends on your intention and your heart and in that communal discernment of what is this here before us.
Daniel P. Horan
Yeah, I think that’s well said actually, Case. That’s really good.
Case Thorp
And just as Taylor Swift could get skewed in our hearts, well, so too can our precious building or our cross that great-grandmother so-and-so donated to the church on the communion table, right? Anything can become an idol. It’s about the heart.
Daniel P. Horan
Absolutely. Yeah, I think that’s exactly right, and what that does is it opens up the world and a world of grace. Again, this is another phrase of Karl Rahner’s, but I don’t think it’s that far off from the reformed understanding of common grace, right? That, how do we find this? Yeah, there’s special grace, that’s maybe, you–we could talk more about that theologically, whether and how that is experienced in the world, right? Is it limited in some way?
Rahner was somebody who had this understanding that actually, no, God’s grace is gratuitous. Now, what it doesn’t do, and this is, I think this is really hard for a lot of Christians, and I struggle with this myself, to be honest with you, which is, we don’t like holding things that we perceive as oppositional together. It’s really hard for us to do. Fully divine and fully human. I know. It’s the Schrödinger’s cat thing in quantum mechanics. You know, we don’t like that the cat is in a superposition, both alive and dead in this hypothetical situation.
Case Thorp
Black and white is easier, Daniel, not tension.
Daniel P. Horan
But I think of that often where I’m like, you know, the centerpiece of our faith is that God becomes human, becomes as human as us, is fully divine and fully human, and if we mess with that articulation in any way, we slip into really problematic areas. We slip into errors, and yet we have to hold that together. We are sinful and yet we are graced, right? We are in a world that is created good and is a world that God decided to enter into, took on this, you know, as they say in Hebrew, this flesh, this dust of the earth, right? Therefore, as Irenaeus of Lyon in the second century says, creation can’t be bad. He was arguing against these, these Greek sort of thinkers, these Gnostic Christians who were saying, well, no, God couldn’t really become human because in order to take on our human materiality, fleshiness would be…
Case Thorp
it would compromise his divinity.
Daniel P. Horan
Absolutely, and the beauty of Christianity is God, and God’s self tells us, and we recount and pass along in the gospels this experience of God in human form. No, this is, again, I’m going nuts with the Rahner quotes today, but he has this great line, he says, “when God wants to be something other than God, God becomes human,” which is just a kind of catchy way to describe what we see in the letters of the Philippians, right? And we see in this notion of kenosis. So I think the world is good, and it is broken in a need of reform, in need of healing. We are good and graced and yet we are sinners, right?
Case Thorp
And so for the DMB listener, it’s okay to approach this music, even if it’s not a Christian band. It is okay to approach it as we, I hope, approach all things in life through the lens of the gospel, through the lens of Jesus. So I believe one of the reasons why Dave Matthews is so popular, and why I enjoy it, is because of that jazz element, mixture of the jazz and the riffing into the, I don’t know, traditional rock and roll type approach. Now, you’ve written before that you see jazz as a great instrument of the Holy Spirit. How do you see that unfold and how might that show up at a Dave Matthews concert?
Daniel P. Horan
Yeah, I love the question because I don’t get to talk about this enough. Listeners may love this or hate this. It’s meant to be analogous, right? So, a way of thinking about maybe metaphorically, how does the Holy Spirit work? Like, we as Christians, you know, I also wrote a column many years ago now about what I call Holy Spirit atheism, where people are kind of unbeknownst to themselves. You know, if you ask them, if you ask your congregation, do you believe in the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit? They’re gonna say, Amen, Amen, I’m with you, but do they live that way? And what I mean by that is Jesus is easy to conceptualize of, and, you know, as human God, creator God, the Father, okay, we get that we have all this depiction, but the spirit, you know, a dove, a thing of flame, what’s really going on here? So for me, there’s also this sense of the divine presence in the world. That’s doing a couple things.
One, it’s God constantly reaching out to creation and particularly to us, right? That notion that we are made for God, God has given us this capacity to be in relationship with God’s self. That’s a big deal, and, just to pause and reflect on that, opens up the possibility of seeing the Spirit, God as Spirit in the world around us all the time. The second thing is as Christians, we believe in baptism that the Holy Spirit unites us to one another as children of God, as adopted sons and daughters, as brothers and sisters in Christ. Well, what does that look like if we have different DNA, and different bloodlines, and different family relationships? Well, what it means is that the spirit is the web of sorts that connects us. There is a real spiritual bond between us, and so that’s still very abstract. You know, forget about birds and flames and this kind of thing. What does that look like? And for me, if anyone’s ever seen live jazz music or, you know, the jazz stylings of a kind of rock band, whether it’s Dave Matthews or the band Fish or the Grateful Dead, these musicians who ad lib, you know, they go off script. There’s a framework, there’s a kind of context in which they’re performing, but they can, without saying anything, without rehearsing, without being strict to the notes on the page, they’re able to kind of create something new, and I’m doing this for those who are watching a video with my hands, this is deliberate because one of the ways that theologians talk over the centuries about the way the Trinity works is called parachoresis, which is a Greek way of talking about a sort of divine dance of three in one, that the Holy Spirit is the love between Father and Son, and I feel like when you see that music and you go, how are they doing this? How are they on such a deep unspoken, what philosophers and theologians would call in a precognitive, pre-thematic way?
It’s communication before communication, and yet it produces this experience of art and overwhelming kind of emotional capacity in the music that it can move tens of thousands of people at the same moment. I see that what makes that possible is the presence of the Spirit in this dance of sorts, that’s happening that cannot necessarily be seen. It’s very hard to sort of identify, except we can experience it in the moment and it has an impact on us.
Case Thorp
Yeah, yeah. I served as an intern many years ago at First Presbyterian Houston and they had a jazz worship service on a Sunday morning, and it was so different and beautiful and unique. Really enjoyed that. Well, Daniel, thank you for this first conversation. Really appreciate your time.
Daniel P. Horan
Mmm. My pleasure. It’s been a joy to talk with you.
Case Thorp
Friends, stick around because next week we will move from this experience or this conversation about the theology, and we’re going to dive deep, more into the lyrics of what Dave Matthews and his band have to say. This guy, raised by missionaries, openly doubting, not openly a Christian, and yet we find meaning in truth, or as I would say, common grace, even in his lyrics. Well you can follow Daniel Horan’s work through his books, his column at the National Catholic Reporter, and his podcast, The Francis Effect. We will have links to all of those things in our show notes, including a link to his original July 2024 column that prompted this conversation. If this episode helped you think more deeply about beauty and worship, where transcendence comes from and how to talk about it with someone else who needs to hear it, please share this episode, send it to them. That would be great. The Collaborative creates content and unique experiences for Christ-centered professionals in the public square. Go to our website, wecolabor.com, wecolabor.com, leave us your email and we’ll send you a copy of Zeitgeist, our journal on faith, work, and culture. Many thanks to today’s episode sponsor, the Ross Johnston family. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
