A biog of our web page host with specific reference to his U2 book...
Steve Stockman was born in 1961 in Ballymena, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland. At the age of ten his cousin peer pressured him into pop music and he has spent thirty years of his life buying records and absorbing himself in any information he can he can find to make more sensed of the songs that accompany his life. From The Beatles to Bob Dylan to U2 and on to Ryan Adams and David Gray he has untangled words and rhymes to think through what is above and below as well as on the lines and how it applies to his culture, his troubled land as well as his inner soul and romantic heart; his entire life in fact.
For various reasons at seventeen years of age Steve decided that his atheistic ideology was ill founded and began a journey of following Jesus allowing his teaching and the rest of the Bible to caress and collide with his world and living. Quickly this new faith was being applied to his discerning look at music. Dylan’s conversion led him to see how faith and art could marry to allow Christianity to enter into the dialogue of the rock culture.
U2 came at a timely moment, their exuberant rock hymns on October thrilling his youthful spirituality and he stepped on board as the Dublin band journeyed on a similar pilgrimage as him. “I guess U2 have prophesied into my world, provoked my mind, preached to my heart and pastured my soul,” he says.
Steve was ordained into The Presbyterian Church In Ireland in February 1988. He has served as Assistant minister in First Antrim Presbyterian Church (86-91), twenty miles north of Belfast, been The Presbyterian Church’s Youth Development Officer in The Republic of Ireland (91-94), based in Dublin, where he lived at the other end of Killiney beach from Bono, and has been living with 88 students at Queens University, Belfast for the past 8 years where he currently Presbyterian Chaplain. He married Janice in 1996 and they have two children Caitlin (1998) and Jasmine Grace (2000).
A dynamic speaker he has spoken at most major Conferences and Festivals in Ireland and is a regular speaker at Greenbelt, the biggest Christian Arts Festival in Europe, where he was on the Board for some time and booked the bands for three years. He is also editor of Juice magazine, hosts his own radio show on BBC Radio Ulster. As a poet he has brought out five collections mainly for charity and this year was the spoken word half of a duo Stevenson and Samuel who released their first album Gracenotes. His website, Rhythms Of Redemption, is a popular stopping off place for a variety of people who are interested in Christian faith and art and culture and he contributes to the American site Phantom Tollbooth, frequently.
He has been quoting U2 for almost twenty years in sermons and articles and has spoken at many Festivals about the band’s work. He is not only convinced the band has remained faithful to their Christian beginnings but claims that they have many a prophetic message for not only culture but the Church. He just believes that on the whole the Church has missed it. How the Church, especially the evangelical wing of it has been robbed of art is an obsession for him and a theme among many of Walk On his first book for Relevant Books.
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