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She means it. "God is underemployed, when there are a lot of problems in the world that could get fixed very quickly if people actually believed in God. I know that sounds very childish," she told Beliefnet. "I do believe a whole lot could be changed if we were to ask God to help. But because of religion, people often don't think there is a God—therefore they don't ask."

So, in Theology, she sets out to "rescue God from religion." At times, her God sounds awfully tragic, as on "Out of the Depths":

You're like a ghost in your own home
Nobody hears U crying all alone
Oh U are the one true really voiceless one
They have their backs turned to you for worship of gold and stone …
It's sad but true how the old saying goes
If God lived on earth people would break his windows.

Then again, the rest of the song is taken straight from Psalm 130:

Out of the depths I cry to U, oh Lord
Don't let my cries for mercy be ignored
If U keep account of sins oh who would stand?
But U have forgiveness in your hands

The rest of the album has selections from Jeremiah, Isaiah, Song of Solomon, Job, 1 Samuel, and Psalms 33, 91, 104, and 137. There's no trace of pagan goddesses on Theology, and Sinead's Rastafarianism seems not to the kind that focuses on former Ethiopian king Haile Selassie as God but rather the kind that focuses on the God of the Eastern Orthodox Selassie.

What you won't find on Theology is much about Jesus—or anything from the New Testament, for that matter.

"I wanted it to be on the right side of the line between corny and cool," she told the Associated Press. "When it comes to religious music there is a very fine line between cool and very uncool. … If you start writing songs about the New Testament, you're doomed no matter how you say it; people have such a prejudice about it. If you start writing songs about Jesus you know no one is going to listen to you. Obviously, I do believe in Jesus, but I am not stupid."

Still, Jesus does appear on the album, just not by name, in the second of two cover songs. The first is Curtis Mayfield's "We People Who Are Darker than Blue." The second is Jesus Christ Superstar's "I Don't Know How to Love Him." It's a remarkable inclusion, not only because of its implicit confession, but also because its closing line, "He scares me so," provides a counterbalance to "Out of the Depths," where she sings, "I've heard religion say you're to be feared, but I don't buy into everything I hear."

Jesus, or at least Christian theology, also appears in Theology's first track, "Something Beautiful" — "You give life through blood, blood, blood, blood, blood, oh blood." The song provides a kind of introduction to the rest of the album:

I wanna make something
So lovely for U
'Cause I promised that's what I'd do for U
With the Bible I stole
I know you U forgave my soul
Because such was my need on a chronic Christmas Eve

The song then transitions into several passages from Jeremiah:

They dress the wounds of my poor people
As though they're nothing
Saying 'peace, peace'
When there's no peace
Now can a bride forget her jewels?
Or a maid her ornaments?
Yet my people forgotten me

It's not the kind of thing you hear on a typical Christian album, even one focusing on Scripture. Nor is it the kind of verse you hear taken seriously in liberal pulpits. O'Connor told Christianity Today sister publication Christian Music Today, "I don't think God judges anybody," but her music specifically says otherwise. The songs here are full of both the pain of sin and forgiveness from it.

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July (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51