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Finding a Center That Can Hold, Part 2
In the postmodern era, which some see as coincident with the post-Christian era, an era in which the tethers connecting ethics and morals to Christianity have loosened, there is no such thing as truth—even Christians speak in terms of cultural norms and choice. Those who see recent history in this way understand the rash, mercurial nature of youth as evidence of being unsettled, of erratically searching for completeness or grounded-ness, connection, or authenticity....
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Finding a Center That Can Hold, Part 1
I've been listing to Arcade Fire's 2010 album The Suburbs on a continuous loop over the last few days while I read and re-read passages of Reza Aslan's Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization. The book was chosen from a field of others to be the Common Reading text for the college where I work, which means that all of the students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to read it and attend events where the book is discussed, including a lecture by the author himself. It's an important book insofar as it describes....
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Josh T. Pearson, Last of the Country Gentlemen
Photographs of Texas troubadour Josh T. Pearson reveal a man out of time. His rail-thin body, long hair, audacious, disheveled beard, and hollow eyes call to mind a shell-shocked survivor of Gettysburg or Cold Harbor, not the victim/protagonist of the petty internecine warfare of a failed twenty-first century marriage. Listening to his solo debut album Last of the Country Gentlemen, it’s equally apparent that the wounds are no less devastating simply because they weren’t physically inflicted. It’s there to see in those vacant eyes....
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The Great CD Sale of 2010
I recently sold 4,000 CDs, the accumulated dross of a lifetime of listening and musical criticism. It wasn’t as traumatic as it sounds. Before I sponsored the Great CD Sale of 2010, I backed up the music I wanted to keep on a 2 TB external hard drive, backed that up on another 2 TB external hard drive, and then carefully transported one of the hard drives to my safe deposit box deep in a bank vault, where it theoretically ought to be safe from fire, theft, and thermonuclear war. This is serious stuff, and I wasn’t about to lose decades of musical memories....
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Already and Not Yet (10 Songs from 2010)
I buy few new albums these days, and half-heartedly listen to a lot of music while I stare blankly at glowing rectangles, so songs that actually grab hold of me are precious. Here is a list of pop songs released in 2010 which reflect where I’ve been and would like to be. They are mostly by jittery, hipstery white guys with Something to Say. What they’re saying to me has to do with a phrase I’ve been hearing a lot lately, about living in the “already and not yet” of the Kingdom of God....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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