Meet my friend

This original piece of music seeks to extend theological aesthetics’ focus on literature and representational arts to the art form of “musicking”. The specific research question underlying this piece is the contribution of beauty to human life and Christian faith. Drawing on Karl Rahner’s theology of grace, the song playfully performs the irony of human friendship as an access point and “teacher” of how grace works. The underlying research position is that music-making is an essential form of human meaning-making beyond or even underlying the duality of verbal communication.

Meet my Friend performs this dimension of Rahner’s work, drawing on his conviction of the power of creative thought as primordial words through which the eternal Word manifests divine love. While Rahner speaks little of music or of friendship, his support of creative ways of making sense of faith and his notion of anonymous Christianity as a mode of grasping how the Spirit is at work in the world ground this output and advance his thought further. This innovative form of doing theology allows music’s specific semiotic patterning of experience and understanding to express and exteriorise aspects of conversion and Christian faith not accessed solely through theoretical reasoning.

This song was produced by Multi-Platinum Award Winning Producer Adrian Hannan at The Song Store, VIC; launched at The Cave Inn, Brisbane, while livestreamed to an international audience from across Australia, Asia, Europe, the USA, and Latin America; and released by Willow Publishing Party Ltd. Early in 2022, it was performed at the annual Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) conference in Atlanta in June 2022, and published by Bloomsbury in connection to a book on this theme.

'Meet My Friend' is also referred to as part of the chapter "Who's going to go to Heaven?" in Maeve Heaney's book 'Suspended God: Music and a Theology of Doubt' (2022).