If not for his tragic suicide back in 2008, today would have been the fifty-first birthday of award-winning writer David Foster Wallace. By nearly any account, Wallace was the greatest talent of his generation. In addition to his sparkling fiction, which included sprawling, encyclopedic novels such as Infinite Jest and beautifully crystalline short short stories […]
In the interest of full disclosure, let me begin by saying that I am a registered independent in North Carolina, and that last week, I cast my presidential ballot for Barack Obama. But despite the fact that I clearly felt it was important to exercise this right, I’m still not sure that my vote “counted” in […]
Earlier this week, I had the good fortune to attend a lecture by the preeminent music scholar (and frequent NY Times contributor) Richard Taruskin. Taruskin was on campus as part of a weekend-long conference which commemorated the centenary of Stravinsky’s (in)famous ballet The Rite of Spring, but his lecture this morning commemorated a slightly different […]
Over the past several days, I have seen at least two dozen friends and acquaintances on Facebook and Twitter post a link to this web comic from The Oatmeal entitled “How To Suck at Your Religion.” This comic, written by Oatmeal founder Matthew Inman, was re-posted several times by friends of mine who are atheists and agnostics […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]