A Soundtrack for Hope: A Spotify Playlist for AWAITING THE KING
I’m not sure when it started, but in most of my books I like to note the “soundtrack” that accompanied their production–what I was listening to while writing in coffee shops and airports and my home office. Each one is a snapshot of a phase of my listening life, as well as a kind of interpretive horizon for each book. No doubt my listening seeps into my writing.
So with the launch of Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology, the third volume of my Cultural Liturgies trilogy, I thought it would be fun to create a Spotify playlist to accompany the book.
This playlist isn’t just a soundtrack of the writing process–it’s a curated list that embodies key themes of the book. It moves from lament to hope. It begins with songs that name the disorder and injustice of the earthly city and culminates in songs that reach toward the eschatological hope of the city of God. It includes songs that testify to the redeemed sociality we’re hoping for, and the inbreakings of that in the here and now. And John Coltrane’s “Love Supreme” is the motif that threads it altogether.
