On Praise and Worship Music: An Essay to its Cultured Despisers
“Praise and worship” music is one of the most oft-evoked and heavily contested markers of evangelical Protestantism in the United States. Its most vocal advocates herald praise and worship and its meteoric rise since the 1960s as nothing less than the rebirth of Western Christianity, citing its unique ability to attract an entire generation of “lost sheep” into the fold. On the other hand, its most virulent critics condemn praise and worship as dangerous or blatantly heretical, believing that the rock-inspired musical style and lyrics drawn from the misguided teenage sensuality of popular culture provide a feeble and treacherous theological grounding. Regardless of which side of the debate people find themselves on, their conversations demonstrate clearly that this music generates meaning in very powerful and specific ways. But in these conversations about meaning, a duality is often evoked between the musical form and textual content of musical selections. Even when it is not made explicit, this divide between form and content is evoked in nearly every positive and negative assessment of the repertory. By this account, music is little more than a container, capable of making... Read More
Theologians Don’t Know Nothing: A Thought for the Day from Wilco
Now that I have a daughter, I can look forward to some day standing in front of a puzzled class of Grade One students on Career Day explaining that I am not a doctor, lawyer or carpenter but a “theologian.” (Or better yet, a “theologue.”) I’m the first to admit that it’s a strange career choice. It sounds like I spend each day meditating on obscure and invisible conundrums, like trying to figure out how many angels... Read More
CCM, Heavy Metal, and the Lure of Possibility
Just last week, I was reading Deena Weinstein’s landmark 1991 study Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology and I was nearly stopped in my tracks by the final chapter, which deals with metal’s “detractors” from across the political spectrum. While conservative criticisms of heavy metal are well-known through the work of groups like the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC)––most often centered on its lyrical proclivities for violence, sexuality,... Read More
“Living Into Focus”: Recovering Clarity in the Age of Technology
Technology is an integral part of the human cultural “envelope.” Once we used stone implements to kill mammoths and sabretooth tigers; now we have iPads. Marshall McLuhan famously called the media the “extensions of man”; but in a sense, all technology could be described by this phrase. Our tools, as is manifestly evident in the twenty-first century, have become part of us. The problem, of course, is that like all good... Read More
James Blake and Marks of Specters
The idea of “deconstruction” has achieved a somewhat surprising ubiquity in our current culture. In addition to relatively long-standing applications in literary and cultural criticism, deconstruction has also found a home in political punditry and haute cuisine (what does it mean to “deconstruct” a meatloaf anyway?). But perhaps most enamored with the idea of deconstruction are music critics, particularly those alternative... Read More
