Abstract
The German Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz makes a convincing case that in the face of the catastrophes of the 20th century, Christian theology can no longer isolate itself from its role as a perpetrator of injustice. To that end, he seeks to challenge abstract answers to theological questions with a renewed sensitivity to past transgressions. For Metz, Christian faith cannot simply be a matter of assent to theoretical propositions, but rather a practical engagement with "dangerous memories" of systematic injustice. In this paper, the author takes up Metz's conceptual framework for political theology and uses it to examine Kendrick Lamar's "Sing about Me, I'm Dying of Thirst" as a theological, and specifically soteriological, performance. By re-telling in his own voice the stories of friends who have died, Kendrick both documents the struggle they lived and reveals his own vulnerability to the same conditions (of sin). But in addressing this vulnerability, he transcends it, protecting himself from sin precisely by telling the story. The paper closes with some reflections on how Kendrick's track might gesture towards a mode of doing theology that subverts the abstract tendencies of the hegemonic Western tradition.
Highlights
Towards the end of his life, the philosopher Walter Benja- does not account for histories of suffering) reenacts the min wrote that, “the true picture of the past flits by...[and] bourgeois banishment of religion to the private sphere, thereby uncritically affirming the moment when it can be recognized and is never seen prevailing socio-political order
I read this song as a soteriological losopher as “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a performance, one in which the artist struggles for remoment of danger,” and to establish these memories as demption from what he explicitly frames as a condition the inaugural site of a constructive, critical response
Reacting against a corrupted theological discourse that he ates on two levels: On the one hand, Lamar’s stories of terms “bourgeois religion,”4 Metz articulates the need for friends who have passed function as representations of a “practical, fundamental theology of the subject” that does the lived experience he characterizes elsewhere as “[grownot flee from history but rather attempts to talk about God ing] up ‘round some people livin’ they life in bottles.”10 In in view of history’s victims
Summary
Towards the end of his life, the philosopher Walter Benja- does not account for histories of suffering) reenacts the min wrote that, “the true picture of the past flits by...[and] bourgeois banishment of religion to the private (and can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the non-political) sphere, thereby uncritically affirming the moment when it can be recognized and is never seen prevailing socio-political order.
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