Dear Contemporary Christian Music, I wouldn’t be writing this letter if I hadn’t heard you were feeling a bit better. After all, you have been off-color the last hundred years or so. I’d like to make sure you know that I’m sorry you haven’t been well. I’ve said harsh words, but, truly, I...

While legislators spit and snarl about if and how government will pay for health care, engineers are inventing technologies to make it cheaper. On February 25th, Popular Science’s Susannah Locke outlined nine new technologies that will potentially impact future health care costs. The incredible...

As if four vocalists, two drum sets, guitars, organ and piano aren’t enough, Mumford & Sons also employs banjo, dobro, mandolin, and well-crafted lyrics to pierce their listener with sublime melodies. A brand new folk indie-rock band based out of London, Mumford & Sons‘ first album,...

“Is it not strange,” Benedick of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing muses, “that sheeps’ guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?” Tell us something we don’t know, says Terry Teachout, writing about yet another study that affirms the mysterious sway...

She’s only three, but our differing taste in music is already a source of conflict. When I turn on Johnny Cash or Regina Spektor, she is adamant: “No.  Songs ’bout Jesus.”  In other words, the local contemporary Christian music station. At first this seemed OK.   Like many...

Technically, I’ve never seen the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. But while hearing Sufjan Stevens’ new album, an orchestral suite inspired by and named after the ‘BQE’, pictures of the highway instilled in my mind. They look like this: The view from an overpass at night. Cityscape...

Some people are filled with a loud joy, as if naturally disposed to see the light in life. For others, the road to discovering light is hard-won: they arise to a place of perspective and authenticity–a quiet joy–only through experiencing and witnessing painful descents. John Darnielle, singer/songwriter...

Mainstream music is now a better place because, with the Warner Brothers June release of her new album Far, Regina Spektor officially has a place within it. Moreover, if “Far” is an accurate indicator, Spektor’s career is headed to a corner office with a view. Some find the growing...

“Meh. …I wish I didn’t mean that.” Welcome to post-postmodernism, a new reaction to believing in epistemic tragedy: that is, that nothing can be known-for-certain. In the period loosely described as post-modernity, men like Foucault and Nietzsche asserted that timeless, absolute knowledge was...

I hail from Generation X while my fifteen-year-old daughter is a member of Generation Y. Yet while our generations are alphabetically close, there is a vast chasm between us musically. She’s grown up in the American Idol-era of Kelly Clarkson, Chris Daugherty, and Carrie Underwood. To her, N’Sync...