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Notes 1. Beauty Limned in Violence: Experimenting with Protest Music in the Ignatian Classroom christopher pramuk 1. The remaining weeks of the Spiritual Exercises gently teach the retreatant how to do so with one’s particular gifts, through the ways of discernment, and above all, through imaginative meditation on the life of Jesus. 2. Carnegie Hall, June 19, 1965; cited in Phil Ochs, Farewells & Fantasies (Elektra R273518), liner notes, 31. 3. Ibid., 42. 4. ‘‘On the white steed of aesthetic rebellion,’’ Ochs declared in 1966, ‘‘I will attack the decadence of my future with all the arrogance of youth’’ (ibid., 53). 5. I generally present the material that follows in the context of a much broader discussion of possible responses (religious, literary, artistic, etc.) to the problem of suffering and evil, or the theodicy problem. Beyond the examples explored below, there is an enormous body of ‘‘protest’’ or justice-oriented music reaching across historical periods and musical genres, including church hymn texts, which might be explored to powerful effect in the classroom. For a range of possibilities, see James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (Maryknoll , NY: Orbis, 1972); Josh Dunson, Freedom in the Air: Song Movements of the Sixties (New York: International Publishers, 1965); Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs (Smithsonian/Folkways CD, 1992); Marianne Philbin, ed., Give Peace a Chance: Music and the Struggle for Peace (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1983); Paul Westermeyer, Let Justice Sing: Hymnody and Justice (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1998). Though historically the Society’s relationship with music is marked by certain ambiguities (e.g., the exemption from singing the Divine Office), by and large Jesuit educators from the beginning have ‘‘embraced music’s ability to arouse and move the souls of their students.’’ See David Crook, ‘‘‘A Certain Indulgence’: Music at the Jesuit College in Paris, 1575–1590,’’ in The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John O’Malley et al. (Toronto: University of 324 notes to pages 18–19 Toronto, 2006). A flourishing body of scholarship is advancing the case for a vital renewal of the engagement between theology and the arts in the academy, with particular emphasis in Jesuit circles on the reconciliation of political and aesthetic approaches to theology. Recent ground-breaking studies include Richard Viladesau, Theology and the Arts: Encountering God through Music, Art and Rhetoric (New York: Paulist, 2000); Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge, 2000); Begbie, ed., Beholding the Glory: Incarnation Through the Arts (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001); and the slight but shimmering gem by Don E. Saliers, Music and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007). Likewise an enormous body of pedagogical literature expounds the benefits and methods of integrating music and arts into the classroom. For two treatments especially resonant with the Ignatian concern for the whole person (i.e., of teacher and student alike) see Linda Carol Edwards, The Creative Arts: A Process Approach for Teachers and Children, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: PrenticeHall , 1997), and Edward Knippers, ‘‘Toward a Christian Pedagogy of Art,’’ in Teaching as an Act of Faith: Theory and Practice in Church-Related Higher Education , ed. Arlin Migliazzo (New York: Fordham University, 2002), 188–209, and references therein. 6. The praise is not a little ironic, given that six decades earlier Time had described the ballad as ‘‘a prime piece of musical propaganda for the NAACP,’’ and characterized Holiday herself as ‘‘a roly poly young colored woman with a hump in her voice,’’ who ‘‘does not care enough about her figure to watch her diet, but [who] loves to sing’’ (Margolick 2000, 74). 7. Lewis Allan (aka Abel Meeropol), ‘‘Strange Fruit’’ (1939); Billie Holiday, Essential Recordings, Hip-O Records B0007X9U2Y. For the extraordinary story of Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher and musician from New York City, who wrote the song, see ‘‘The Strange Story of the Man Behind ‘Strange Fruit,’’’ an audio podcast at http://www.npr.org/2012/09/05/158933012/. 8. The documentary Strange Fruit, directed by Joel Katz (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 2002), brings vividly to life not only the song’s historical genesis and significance, but also its varied and often contentious reception in different live performance contexts. I would recommend the film for use in college classrooms and church study groups, where it might generate fruitful cross-racial and cross-generational conversations about the history and present challenges of race relations in the United States, especially in view of the historic Obama...

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