My good friend Andy (whom I believe is also a Recovering Baptist even if he won’t admit it) sent me the following message:

Hey Keith. One of my English profs at Baylor was Greg Garrett, an excellent writer of fiction, nonfiction, and a blog. He recently wrote a book on U2 that should come out later this year. Last month he posted a blog entry about U2 that I thought you might enjoy:  http://theotherjesus.com/?p=120

I found that post to be very enjoyable as Garrett talked about his experience as a young magazine reporter interviewing Adam and Bono after an Oklahoma City gig in front of 300 people, and then goes into U2’s spiritual journey from Shalom (a charismatic Christian community in Dublin) to today.

The link is posted above, but here’s a snippet:

At last, the religious members of U2 reached the conclusion that they could—and should—be a Christian rock band on their own terms, that their music and their faith could have a symbiotic relationship in which each fed the other—and both fed their audience. They left Shalom and organized religion behind. Still, the tensions between the Christian and secular worlds did not go away. Perhaps in a world that always tries to label things in order to understand them, they could not go away. Although U2 contains band members who are deeply religious, Bono, The Edge, and Larry turned away from organized religion because of their experiences with Shalom, and because of the continuing religious clashes between Protestants and Catholics in their homeland. (As Larry noted, “The IRA would say ‘God is with me. I went to Mass every Sunday.’ And the Unionists said virtually the same thing. And then they would go out and murder each other.”)