I was intrigued because the Ph.D. he was just finishing (had just finished) dovetailed with my own in several interesting ways:
we were both interested in popular culture performances,
we were both interested in the rhetorical dimension of these performances,
we were both making connections between ritual theory, performance theory and (me more than him) rhetorical theory.
Jonny was also clearly someone devoted to Christianity, keenly committed to the arts, and very interested in building genuine community in cutting edge ways. All these factors made me really interested in his blog.
I had done a gig as a "worship pastor" (many years ago) but was completely turned off by the formal disconnect between the artistic ghetto that my particular branch of Christianity had become. I spent a while at two conservative evangelical churches, trying to translate some cultural forms into the worship, but the interest level was nominal -- certainly not a priority, so I decided to focus my life energy and artistic interests elsewhere. (Obviously that story could be written in a much longer way, but it's a bit off track for this blog.)
It was, though, this vested interested in the the forms of church worship and their (dis/)connect to/from cultural forms in the cultural spheres that surround churches that really generated a lot of interest in reading Jonny's Tricks section.
He's been chronicling for years the formal devices used by artists and worship leaders to articulate meaningful and fresh expressions of worship.
Viewing Viola's art through this context, encouraged me to think about how something LIKE this might be used in a liturgical art setting.
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