Author: Andrew Sullivan

by Chris Bodenner

In contrast to this response, a reader writes:

As a longtime reader of this blog and a professional church musician, I must say that I have found the series, "Can the Church be Hip?" mildly irritating and was moved by the reader who wrote this:

Based on the material you've been showcasing, "Can church be hip?" is not the question you're actually exploring. Those songs may make reference to Christian concepts or images, but they are lyrics; they display an intimate, personal, unique and emotionally charged state of mind, and are clearly intended for performance or for private listening as recordings.  They are manifestly not appropriate for "church" in any sense that I as a lifelong churchgoer would recognize.  They are not songs for worship – communal in nature and addressed to God or expressing the community's universal understanding of God or the faith story.

Indeed, the music of the ancient traditions, when true to itself, is always of a cultic (in the anthropological sense) and communal nature. It is music that has been shaped in an organic fashion over thousands of years and is meant to be sung by a body of believers. It is not meant to be entertaining in a passive way like all of the music you have highlighted.

One of my teachers who was a respected liturgist, author, and college professor once quipped that "today's relevance (hipness) often ends up being tomorrow's embarrassment." His remedy for that was that the church's liturgy and its music should always be done the way one orders a drink – straight up!  Inevitably, such an approach will always command the respect of those who are listening for a deeper resonance which transcends the merely superficial. The music you have highlighted, while fun, will not survive in the church, nor is it meant to. Naturally none of this applies to the mega-fundamentalist churches. For them all of the music you have highlighted would work just fine in their worship, which is essentially consumer-driven entertainment.

By the way, I think Andrew may agree with me on this one. This paragraph, in which he describes his attraction to Catholicism, comes to mind:

Why would I want to forget all of that precious inheritance – the humility of Mary, the foolishness of Peter, the genius of Paul, the candor of Augustine, the genius of Francis, the glory of Chartres cathedral, the haunting music of Tallis, the art of Michelangelo, the ecstasies of Teresa, the rigor of Ignatius, the whole astonishing, ravishing panoply of ancient Christianity that suddenly arrived at my door, in a banal little town in an ordinary family in the grim nights of the 1970s in England?

by Chris Bodenner

Everyone Forever Now – "Shooting a Gun" from Everynone on Vimeo.

by Zoe Pollock

"August Walk" by Rosanna Warren:

The forest fungal, and a seethe of rain.
Indian pipes prod white, crooked fingers up through mulch,
boletus and inky caps glutton in the dank.
Lichen glues coral to moist granite.
We follow cleft hoofprints
of a bull moose, you striding ahead, I lagging;
you reading woods lore–ice-stripped bark, deer-nibble,
last winter's furry, matted fisher-cat spoor; I distracted,
musing. The soil springs at our tread, mossbanks
bristle with spores. Rainlight shivers down.
The felled giant sugar maple has broken out
in boles: baroque, all bulging eyes,
beaks, foreheads, claws, diseased
and dark as a mahogany Roman choir stall.
Off the moose path now, it's an old farm you seek:
rock piles from last century's sheepfolds;
inward-lapsing cellar hole;
a tumble where the chimney stood;
at the threshold, by the granite doorslab,
a cluster of weed-choked lilies sprouted from lilies
the farm wife planted before the Civil War.
The road is a soft cesarean scar in tufted grass.
Each rain-glossed leaf emits a stab of green.
Somewhere here survives the idea of home.

The poem was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 2002.

by Zoe Pollock

Andrew O'Hehir reviews "A Film Unfinished," a documentary on the partially staged Nazi propaganda film shot in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942:

You might view "A Film Unfinished" as an exploration of the film-theory idea that movies always embody lies and the truth at the same time. The fact that Nazis compelled well-dressed Jews to walk past dead bodies, over and over again, or forced groups of men and women to strip naked and plunge into the mikvah, or ritual bath, in front of the cameramen exposes the regime's cruelty and cynicism.

But those dead people were really dead, and the anguish and humiliation we see on the face of one of those naked women in the bath speak loudly and clearly and directly to the heart, across all that time and history and death. It's a truism to say that history always teaches us about the present, but the lessons of "A Film Unfinished" may be useful the next time you hear someone ranting about the "ground zero mosque." "Das Ghetto" sat on the shelf because its lies were insufficient to cover up its truth, and because even the most evil works of propaganda always reveal more about its creators than they want you to see.

My former coworkers, the team behind The PBS NewsHour's Art Beat, spoke to the filmmaker here.

by Zoe Pollock

Jeff Sharlet reports from the front lines of Uganda's political anti-gay persecutions. Sharlet interviews the people behind Uganda's Fellowship movement and its roots in and ties to the American evangelical movement, the Family. It's behind the pay wall but it's pretty scary stuff:

Every year, right before Uganda's Independence Day, the government holds a National Prayer Breakfast modelled on the Family's event in Washington. Americans, among them Republican Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahama, former attorney general John Ashcroft – both longtime Family men and outspoken antigay activists – and Pastor Rick Warren, are a frequent attraction at the Ugandan Fellowship's weekly meetings. "He said homosexuality is a sin and that we should fight it," Bahati recalled of Warren's visits.

Inhofe and Warren, like most American fundamentalists, came out in muted opposition to Uganda's gay death penalty, but they didn't dispute the motive behind it: the eradication of homosexuality. The may disagree on the means, favoring a "cure" rather than killing, but not the ends.

by Zoe Pollock

Get Religion dissects the AP's coverage of the revised Roman Missal, the Catholic prayer book that will feature some new English translations by noting that:

Arguments about sex will stir things up, but if you really want to touch people at the local level all you really need to do is change their prayer books and hymnals.

by Zoe Pollock

Alex Jung interviews Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer in Chicago and author of "Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life." He makes a pretty convincing case for moving to Germany:

Why do we work so much in the first place?

• Continue reading

There aren’t any historical or cultural reasons for it. Americans had more leisure time than Europeans back in the 1960s. I would say if you did a survey of most people who are in their late 50s or 60s, they will tell you that they take fewer vacations than their parents did. Now why did that change? It wasn’t because of the Pilgrims. People work hard in America, but there was a period where leisure time was increasing. I quoted Linda Bell and Richard Freeman in an article they wrote about what happened during the ‘90s. There was nobody to stop you from working longer. There was no government check, there was no union check as there is on excessive work as there is in Germany or elsewhere in Europe. These institutional checks are gone. So people feel like lab rats: "If I work an extra 10 minutes over the person in the cubicle next to me, then I’m less likely to get laid off." It’s a very rational response…

 

by Patrick Appel

Deep Glamour interviews Matt Novak, the proprietor of  Paleofuture. Novak:

Nostalgia as a symptom of fear is far too broad of an idea, and frankly I regret saying it so matter of factly. There is an important distinction I feel that we should make between personal nostalgia and societal nostalgia. Personal nostalgia is that smell of your first teddy bear or the feeling of your first kiss. Personal nostalgia is a wonderful part of the human experience. But I feel that personal nostalgia is anecdotal and thus dangerous when used as ammunition to describe this desire to return to a "better time." I find that more often than not, the time and place that society is nostalgic for never existed. Romanticizing the past, while perfectly fine when applied individually, can stifle progress.

Image from NASA Ames Research Center.

by Zoe Pollock

Last weekend I finished Anthony Doerr's recent collection of stories, "Memory Wall." It's a breathtaking book, not only for the range of stories it tells and the near-perfect writing, but for its ability to capture memories and how we spend our entire adult lives reliving them. In one of my favorite passages, near the end of "Afterworld," the grandson of the protagonist takes his newly adopted Chinese sisters to play in the snow for the first time:

Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.

In the five days Robert will be home his sisters will learn to say "rocks," "heavy," and "snowman." They'll learn the different smells of snow and the slick feel of a plastic sled as their brother drags them down the driveway.

We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines. "You've grown up so fast," Robert's mother tells him at breakfast, at dinner. "Look at you." But she's wrong, thinks Robert. You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come and dig it back up.

Montreal, Canada, 9 am