'Imagine There's No Heaven': John Lennon, Atheism and the Possibility of Public Theology
‘IMAGINE THERE’S NO HEAVEN’: JOHN LENNON, ATHEISM AND THE POSSIBILITY OF PUBLIC THEOLOGY Since the advent of global communication there have been a number of events which have metaphorically „stopped the world‟. Unexpected, sudden, shocking, perhaps outrageous, they have had the effect, not only of preoccupying news editors and opinion formers for months and even years thereafter, but of momentarily disorientating all of us as onlookers, of giving us a sense that the world has shifted a little on its axis and will never be quite the same again. Whether of natural or human causation, these are the events which, according to the cliché, we never forget where we were when we first heard of them. In recent times we would include 9/11 and the Boxing Day tsunami; in the slightly more distant past, the death of Princess Diana; and in the experience of those of more mature years, the death of Elvis Presley, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague and, most famously of all, the assassination of President John F Kennedy. And into this category, I suggest, would also come the shooting of John Lennon, 30 years ago this coming December. Lennon‟s death impacted upon us, not simply because it was so „out of the blue‟, so senseless, so brazen, but because it removed in an instant a person who had seemed, both in his heyday with the Beatles and subsequently as an activist, peace campaigner and independent musician, to personify the hopes which many entertained in the 1960s and early 1970s of an end to costly and futile conflicts like Vietnam, and the possibility of a new social order.
[Show full text]