1a. This week featured a point-counter-point on the religious decline in America. Fewer people are going to church, particularly millennials. Accordingly, Christine Emba sees genuine cause for alarm. Millennials prefer low-cost, substitute religions (read: seculosities!), and the church may not be there as a fallback option in the future: Faith and practice can’t persevere through […]
The Moral Dilemma of Jesus is King
My friends and I approached the concession counter. (One of us wanted Milk Duds.) An employee, a black woman, glanced over and inquired which movie we three white men were seeing. I replied, “Kanye’s,” with a hopefully self-aware smirk. She rolled her eyes and shook her head wryly. A lot of people have some thoughts […]
Yeezus of Nazareth
Mockingbird has had an awful lot to say about Kanye West over the years. Nothing lately, however, which is somewhat surprising given just how prolific Kanye has become in the news cycle. The most recent example was his stunning performance of “Ghost Town” at the end of last week’s SNL, coupled with the controversy of wearing […]
No More Parties with Kanye: A Review of Kanye West’s “Life of Pablo”
“Name one genius that ain’t crazy.” –Kanye West, “Feedback,” The Life of Pablo No one who is actually crazy calls himself “crazy.” A healthy person admits her illness. A truly mentally ill person never admits his mental illness. A borderline class of person exists who calls himself “crazy” not in earnestness but in flippancy, as […]
Another Week Ends: Kanye, Mavis, Scalia, Narcissism, Cancer, and A Saintly Smackdown
Click here to listen to the accompanying episode of The Mockingcast, which features, among other things, Jacob Smith discussing “A Lenten Theology of the Cross”. 1. Following the release of Kanye’s new album, The Life of Pablo, which dropped on Valentine’s Day, but which is only available on Tidal, many of us find ourselves once […]
Another Week Ends: Anselmian Austerity, Finding Your Passions, Gallbladder Cleanses, Descents Into Hell and a Few Conference Updates
1. Giles Fraser at The Guardian is at it again, making a bit of stretch – though an interesting one – on the role of Anselm’s atonement theory on the Greek debt crisis: According to Anselm, and the Reformation thinkers that followed him, the story of Easter is basically God’s response to a debt crisis. The argument is […]
Another Week Ends: Silent Treatment, 1st-World Problems, Rectify & Rev, Robinson’s Lila, Phillips’ Freud, Heresy Help, Tragic Soccer, and Soviet Propaganda
1. Under the auspices of “How and Why to Ban the Silent Treatment from Your Relationship”, The Wall Street Journal issued a perceptive and even quite touching treatise on how the dynamic of demand and withdrawal comes to poison so many loving relationships. The article starts out with the same old line about judgment and […]
The Selfie on the Mount
Instagram enhances Facebook’s most essential quality. Facebook allows you to keep in touch with old “friends,” but keeping in touch means subjecting yourself to climate-change rants from that girl who failed biology in high school, college football highlight videos from that guy who never went to college, and (if you’re friends with me) shameless plugging of […]
Impossible Takes a Weak
“Difficult takes a day; impossible takes a week.” -Jay Z “My biggest weakness is that I’m a perfectionist.” This clichéd job-interview response speaks to a wide variety of human frailties: our inability to recognize our own weakness; our inability to admit weakness to ourselves, even if we recognize it; our fear of others judging us […]
Ain’t Nuthin’ But Frontin’: Best Hip-Hop of 2013
My good friend, Jeff, and I are on the eve of a six-year project–all the brainchild of Jeff, but with my full participation. Most hip-hop heads place the golden era of the genre between 1988 or 89 to 1994. So we are celebrating 1989-1994 hip-hop by listening to and reviewing every album that came out […]
The Irritating, Infantile, Irresistible Mr. West: A Review of Kanye West’s Yeezus
What in the world happened to Kanye West? He once gave a fresh, whimsical sound to Jay-Z and others, and then, armed with courage and a robust cleverness sufficient to overcome his limited lyrical abilities, he became a novel, thought-provoking voice in a musical genre that had become suffocated by the reflexive fulfillment of its […]
Another Week Ends: Celebrity Religion, Superman Myths, More Spufford, and Santa Uncrossed
1. Rod Dreher blogged on a Martin Heidegger interview from 1966, with some incredibly prescient observations about our religious urges amidst the decline of Christianity in Europe/America: HEIDEGGER: … Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all […]
