¹‘The Playwright’s Take’ in J. Begbie (ed.), Sounding the Depths: Theology Through the Arts (London: SCM Press, 2002), p. 59.

² It is true that whilst some forms of Christianity may be open to the technological revolution, sometimes iPods might be filled with Christian material, and therefore it is not truly a theological engagement with culture which is occurring, but a religious use of technology to fashion a specifically Christian culture.

³ G. Lynch, Understanding Theology and Popular Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

⁴ Opposition to fun thus gets tangled up in ‘serious Protestant’ suspicion of what were in the past regarded as Roman Catholic excesses.

⁵ To counter such a tendency, it would be no bad thing if theologians could be encouraged to write and perform in a more entertaining way.

⁶ U2 interview, ‘The Culture Show’, BBC 2, 14.6.05.

⁷ There are also examples of explicit bad theology perpetuated within popular culture. I take film-reviewer Ryan Gilbey to task for what may/may not be a misreading of Titanic, but what is certainly the purveying of bad theological ideas, in my book Cinema and Sentiment (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2004), chapter 4.

‘High Theology’/‘Popular Theology’? The Arts,Popular Culture and the Contemporary Theological Task

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