Mark Joseph: Coldplay Takes On the Pope

One of the things that I hoped to accomplish with my two books The Rock & Roll Rebellion , Faith, God & Rock 'n' Roll and my next, Rock Gets Religion , was to encourage artists to use their music to grapple with the big issues of life. Theology, the study of our beliefs about God is of course one of those big issues of life that smart people like to sit around and speculate about, and U2 has always done a good job of talking theology, albeit obliquely. For many U2 fans, Bono's religious lessons were easy to swallow because he always gave them an out. After all, though he didn't have a sex act in mind when he sang "If you want to touch the sky better learn to kneel," some of his fans may have thought so and few likely understood that The Joshua Tree referenced the cross that Christ died on, (Joshua being another name for Jesus ). In fact Bono explicitly gave his more secular listeners an alternate reading with his song about the theological notion of "Grace" when he sang "It's the name ... (link)