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A long time ago — nearly a quarter century ago, alas — I had a long conversation with a young songwriter named Bono about a question that fascinated both of us: Why is most Contemporary Christian Music so lame? Bono had, at that point, all but given up hope of finding work by other believers that really fired him up.
The aspect I appreciate most about The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is how it has raised the public profile of the concept of faith. The controversy behind the factual basis of the book has led the curious down a twisted and confusing historical path that forces one to raise one’s hands and surrender to the crushing blackness that is those things in the past that we just cannot know absolutely.
Reader Charlie Lehardy sent in a story from his local paper, the Arizona Daily Star. The paper regularly runs prominent articles on alternative spirituality, he said. Erin White’s interesting profile of a shamanic energy healer begins with the story of a woman, Susan Luzader Prust, who bought a piece of land to run a resort for dogs but felt that parts of the property were “a little spooky and scary.”
You know, you just know, that the powers that be at the CBS Evening News have been focus-group testing this big move for months.
We know presidential wannabe Rudy Giuliani is trying to get religion. Is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)?
I remember hearing a joke about a Sunday school teacher who was telling her young students about the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. This teacher was more learned than the average Sunday school teacher so she explained that the Moses hadn’t miraculously parted the water to enable the crossing. Rather, the sea was actually very shallow — only a couple of inches or feet deep, in fact. So while God did rescue his people, he didn’t use supernatural means.
Daylight-saving time in Indiana is a long debated issue that can destroy families, ruin relationships and divide political parties. As my good friend Daniel Bradley wrote, “frightened residents” will “take to the streets in horror, turning cars, setting fires and looking to the sky for the Four Horsemen.”
The creators of the National Council of Churches’ 2006 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches have decided that the two hot trends at the beginning of the 21st century are blogging and the “Emerging Church” and that one of the places that postmodern, hip, emerging church leaders do that dialogue thing they do is at GetReligion (honest).
A $2.4 million study on the effect of intercessory prayer came out last week and received a bunch of coverage. Researchers studying 1,800 heart-bypass patients at three hospitals found that intercessory prayer by strangers has no effect on the health of the person being prayed for. They also found that people fared worse — in the short-term at least — if they knew they were being prayed for.
