Deadheads and Christians: You Will Know Them By Their Love

Deadheads and Christians: You Will Know Them By Their Love

A peace-and-love movement that began with itinerants living hand to mouth at the fringes of society and referring to one another as brother and sister continues to flourish decades after the death of its leader. This book explores the ways in which that description applies equally well to the early days of the Jesus movement, as recorded in Scripture, and to the current stage of the Deadhead movement, which, with the recent successful tours by Dead and Company, is as robust as ever, thirty years after the last concert by the Grateful Dead. This book is about the common attributes of Deadheads; it is not about the music they love nor the band that created that music. Its purpose is to invite people of faith to judge whether something of the same divine Spirit that animated the early Church is at work today among the Deadheads. "Inviting the faithful to come, reason, and even jam together, Tom Coogan helps us have ears to hear what many a neighbor has been listening to. Should we follow to that fountain not made by the hands of men, what a long, strange, and redemptive trip it is sure to be. Would you hear his voice come through the music? For Christ is Lord of the living and the Dead." --Mark James Edwards, author of Christ Is Time: The Gospel According to Karl Barth (and the Red Hot Chili Peppers) "Thomas Coogan has done a masterful job of examining the Grateful Dead in light of the Christian gospel. As someone who knew little about the 'Deadheads, ' I learned a lot to my surprise and delight." --George Hunsinger, McCord Professor of Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary "Tom Coogan invites Christians and Deadheads to regard their moral commitments, social ideals, and spiritual practices as analogies of each other. Think this through with me, he says to his reader, and let me know your mind. To my mind, he has given us a splendid portrait of the life that Deadheads and Christians might share." --John R. Bowlin, Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs, Stuart Professor of Philosophy and Christian Ethics, Princeton Theological Seminary Thomas A. Coogan holds degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been a member of Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey, for twenty-plus years, serving as elder, deacon, and softball coach. Equal parts Deadhead and student of the Bible, he laments the misunderstandings that persist between these communities and is attempting to bridge that divide by documenting meaningful similarities between the Deadheads and the earliest decades of the Jesus movement.