“Beautiful Day” or “Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For”? The Wisdom of U2charist in Congregational Worship

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Notes

See, for instance, Virgil Funk's “Secular Music in the Liturgy: Are There Any Rules?” in Finding Voice to Give God Praise: Essays in the Many Languages of the Liturgy, ed. Kathleen Hughes and Gilbert Ostdeik (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002), 36–58.

Time, April 27, 1987.

Lyrics from “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” War, Island Records, 1983.

Lyrics from “Window in the Skies,” U218 Singles, Mercury Records, 2006.

See, for example, Christian Scharen's One Step Closer: Why U2 Matters to Those Seeking God (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006) and Eugene Peterson's foreword to Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog, eds. Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 2003), xi–xiv.

From the War album, Island Records, 1983.

Jamie Howison, “The Psalms, the Blues, and the Telling of Truth,” in Get Up Off Your Knees, 35.

Available at http://www.er-d.org/MDGs/ (accessed February 6, 2013).

See my “PowerPointless” in The Christian Century, July 25, 2006, pp. 10–16.

James Alison, Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-In (New York: Continuum, 2006), 40.

Alison, 43.

Alison, 42 (emphasis Alison's).

Alison, 42–43.

Alison, 42.

Philip Kenneson, “Gathering: Worship, Imagination, and Formation” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, eds. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 64–65.

Kenneson, 65.

Kenneson, 65.

These are too numerous to name. But particular U2 songs that had particular scriptural resonance for us included “Yahweh” (Mt 5:14); “Vertigo” (Mt 4:1–11; Lk 4:1–13); “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For” (Phil 3:12–13); “One” (Gal 3:28); “Mysterious Ways” (Mt 14:3–11); and “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” (Ps 13, 35, 89).

“Walk On” from All That You Can't Leave Behind, Island Records, 2001.

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Debra Dean Murphy

Debra Dean Murphy is assistant professor of religious studies at West Virginia Wesleyan College, Buckhannon, West Virginia. She is author of the blog “Intersections: Thoughts on Religion, Culture, and Politics.”