Joshua Busman

Interpreting Sea Change

  This has been a rough six weeks for all us progressives living in North Carolina. Back on May 8th, we became the 31st state in the union to restrict the rights of same-sex couples through a constitutional “marriage” amendment (NC Amendment One), and this week the state legislature voted to allow “fracking,” a largely untested […]

Joshua Busman

The Spiritual Children of Sigur Rós

Before moving to North Carolina to begin a Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill, I lived just outside of Nashville, TN. During my four years there, many of my friends were Nashville natives and even more of them were aspiring audio engineers, producers, and recordings artists who came to the city hoping to find work on Music […]

Joshua Busman

Exercising Your Second Commandment Rights: Luther and Calvin on Music

Many of the most important debates of the recent “worship wars” in evangelicalism (including the form/content divide identified in yesterday’s post) have their origins in two important conflicts from the first few decades of the Reformation: first, the debate over the exegesis of the Ten Commandments or “Decalogue,” and second, a broader conversation about the […]

Joshua Busman

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 […]

Joshua Busman

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 […]

Jeffrey Overstreet

Taylor-Made: Why You're Missing Out If You Don't Go See Blue Like Jazz

Blue Like Jazz, the new film by director Steve Taylor, is based on Donald Miller’s New York Times-bestselling memoir. It’s the biggest filmmaking success story in the history of the Kickstarter program, earning $345,000 in donations to help cover its costs. Were their investments rewarded? If you skim through the reviews, you might be inclined […]

Joshua Busman

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 […]

Chad Lakies

CFP: The Christian Evasion of Popular Culture

Following is a new CFP that might be of interest to churchandpomo readers: Andreas Center for Reformed Scholarship and Service THE CHRISTIAN EVASION OF POPULAR CULTURE Christianity is often the focus of popular culture, whether it is through the blood and gore of The Passion of the Christ, the satire of South Park and Family […]