Seventeen years later, Commit This to Memory remains a visceral account of one man’s search for that reality, an empty bottle ebenezer reminding us that self-actualization is a messy, painful, and ultimately impossible process. Without help, that is.
Reviewing the products of 1981 and 2021 reveals our desperate search for salvation from death… and salvation from modern daily life.
Here’s what everyone was reading at Christ and Pop Culture in 2021.
You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.
When Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin were killed, when children die around the world of preventable disease, when children and teens experience the “death” of family and get bounced around foster homes, evil is manifest. Suffering has a face. Suddenly questioning God’s plan seems the most reasonable course of action.
Even as Solar Power knocks at the hollow of everything that we seem to live for, these are questions that, even at the end, remain unanswered.
The Off-Season might just be an “okay” album for some J. Cole fans’ standards; but if we take into account its purpose as a work of art, it wouldn’t be an overstatement to categorize it as great.
Most of us have some knowledge of the Woodstock festival. But why don’t we know about the Harlem Cultural Festival, which was held at the same time?
So now you had a nationwide craze over a genre of music that barely existed (having just broken off from Motown and R&B), based on a piece of long-form journalism that was entirely fictional and a movie made by people with no real connections to the original disco scene.
Leave it to a band from the city of bright lights and long odds to show us how to live out our points along history’s timeline.
These contributions are birthed from joy and lament, celebration and sadness, commemoration of the past and considerations of what can be in the future.
Until This Shakes Apart collects Five Iron Frenzy’s most dynamic, urgent set of songs to date.
Those who eschew a revisionist view of Scripture around the issue of sex will be viewed as the “do-badders” and no longer the “do-gooders.”
Our team highlights their favorite music and podcasts from 2020 that managed to break through the dark days and deliver a bit of goodness.
Perhaps it was inevitable that, back when I was looking forward to a summer of attending and reviewing performances of all nine symphonies, it was all about to crash and burn.
Goodness takes time, so why not live with hopeful ambiguity instead of bitter snap judgement?
