Finn’s songs somehow manage to avoid cheap nihilism in favor of a palpable sense of mercy.
Music
Posted inArts & Culture, Music
Arcade Fire looks for God in a material world.
A tension between materialism and a yearning for greater meaning runs throughout the band’s new album.
Posted inArts & Culture, Music
Why does U2 irk so many people? A look at their struggle for pop hits and social justice
Is it possible to seek total global pop domination and to remain somehow soulful, sane and socially righteous?
Posted inArts & Culture, Music
What theologians and environmentalists can learn from Sufjan Stevens
The texture and variety of Stevens’s new album creates liminal spaces between the sacred and the profane.
Posted inArts & Culture, Music
The Prayers of Chris Cornell
So many of Cornell’s songs are filled with Christological and sacramental imagery.
Posted inArts & Culture, Music
What does it mean to be a Christian rapper? A conversation with Sho Baraka
Christian rapper Sho Baraka makes his faith a part of his art, but he doesn’t proselytize.
Posted inArts & Culture, Music
What’s behind hip-hop’s religious revival?
Kanye West and Chance the Rapper are singing about Jesus on network television. What’s going on?
Posted inArts & Culture, Music
The Vague Christianity of Folk Rock
Mumford and Sons, The Head and the Heart, Hozier and other artists use Christian language in their secular songs. Should Christians care?
Posted inMusic
Sinatra’s Century: The legacy of a tough guy with a heartbreaking voice
Sinatra invites us to participate in an act of the imagination in which we are aware of our limitations and yet, at the same time, believe that we are not defined by them.
Posted inArts & Culture, Music
False Beauty? The tension between ethics and aesthetics in Wagner
I first listened to the operas of Richard Wagner when I was 11 or 12 years old. I have come to realize that spinning Wagner recordings was more an impish attempt at bravado than evidence of any great love for opera. When I found thick albums of Wagner at the local library and impulsively brought the