All who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons and daughters. 15 You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to lead you back again into fear, but you received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “ Abba, Father. ” 16 The same Spirit agrees with our spirit, that we are God’s children. 17 But if we are children, we are also heirs. We are God’s heirs and fellow heirs with Christ, if we really suffer with him so that we can also be glorified with him.
The author, who interviewed the fledgling band on their second U.S. tour, takes us from their upbringing in Ireland, to their dominance over the music scene in the early 1990s, and then to their role as spiritual ambassadors to post-9/11 America. Throughout we get a picture of the spirituality that flows out of U2's music and how their influence has spread beyond music into issues such as AIDS activism, debt relief for developing nations, and the crisis in Darfur. "U2's private practice and public presentation of Jesus' good news are often discussed, but almost never are they subject to sound critical and theological analysis. In this book, Greg Garrett has corrected that situation handsomely. Bringing to his task the tools of both musical and ecclesiological scholarship, Garrett also writes with the humility of genuine affection and gratitude. If you care at all about the role of music in western Christianity today, you'll want to read this book." - Phyllis Tickle, author of the Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why