Chad Ashby spent four years as a DJ for WSAJ, Grove City College Radio before moving on to more grown-up endeavors at Southern Seminary (M.Div.). He now pastors at College Street Baptist Church (Newberry, SC), where he continues to cultivate a schizophrenic taste for folk, hip-hop, jazz, indie rock, funk, and 4th c. hymnody. He and his wife, Mindy, have three boys, and he blogs regularly at After+Math. Follow him on Twitter @chad_ashby.

Let Sufjan Stevens Help You Find Your “Christmas Unicorn”

Sufjan Stevens invites us to raise the mirror this Christmas and laugh to ourselves in all our absurdity: “I’m the Christmas unicorn . . . you’re the Christmas unicorn.”

Dave Eggers’s The Circle : A Social Media Dystopia

In The Circle, no one is ever known, because knowledge about others is mistaken for actually knowing others.

The Neverland Hope in Chance the Rapper’s “Same Drugs”

As Chance and his hometown quietly take turns sharing their sides of the story of his maturation, we begin to wonder who really changed—Wendy or Pan?

‘Chef’s Table’ and Our Eternal Hunger

At its heart, Chef’s Table is about the chefs’ spiritual appetites and how they seek to satiate their inner hungers.

Socialism’s Lonely Eden

Christianity’s primary critique of socialism is not that it strives for too much, but that it settles for too little.

‘1989’: Everything the Same, Only Different

Joining Swift in gazing at New York is Ryan Adams’s way of hopping into the DeLorean: perhaps revisiting his past can renew him when he gets back to the future.

“All of Me Wants All of You”: Sufjan Stevens’s Manelich and Broken Love

Sufjan Stevens’s obscure reference to Manelich is a key element in understanding how he sees his relationship with his mother Carrie.