Like many music geeks, I spent the idle moments of the last month or so ranking and re-ranking my favorite music that came out this year. A lot of factors can make an album stand out for me—music serves a lot of functions in my life. It’s a soundtrack for bus rides and reading, writing [...]

The American Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a longtime Mormon and songwriter, has written a song for Hanukkah. The story (and the video) are covered by Jeffrey Goldberg in the online magazine Tablet.
The song is simple and earnest, avoiding what Goldberg calls the “Adam Sandlerization of Judaism in America.” Hatch celebrates the story without post-modern self-deprecation [...]

A staple conversation of my church planter friends is whether or not you should have unbelievering singers leading worship. Most agree they’ll let potential pre-Christians play instruments but some get squeamish at the thought of talented vocalists leading songs they don’t believe. Me? I encourage it. I see it as proleptic fulfillment of Isaiah 60.
Proleptic [...]

I thought we could start out the week with some funny marital advice.  I first ran across Johnny and Chachi a couple of years ago at the Echo Conference.  They cracked me up, but I am a sucker for song parodies and grown men in wigs.  Regardless, there’s some good advice  in here.

(Dave Trout is a guest blogger for Think Christian.  Besides being an all around good guy, he’s the host of Under the Radar, a weekly radio program featuring the best in under-appreciated Christian music.  The program is produced by ReFrame Media just like TC.)
I returned from a summer media conference recently that talked a lot [...]

Some of the world’s best music comes from New Zealand.  People give you a blank look if you tell them this, but it’s true: so-called “kiwi rock”-generally melodic pop with a slight bitterness borrowed from punk and an eccentric streak borrowed from psychedelia-is gorgeous stuff.
It’s also impossible to find. Kiwi CDs have a way of [...]

I’ve been crazy about The Submarine’s second album Honeysuckle Weeks for the last year or so. It’s fun, catchy pop with a great sound. I recently downloaded a live-in-studio session from daytrotter and it forced me to listen to the lyrics of “You, Me and the Bourgeoisie.”  If you don’t think you know the song, [...]

Today we introduce a new feature to ThinkChristian: e-mail interviews with thoughtful Christians about faith and culture. There are many wise voices we need to hear from in addition to our own writers and readers here at TC, and we’re grateful for their willingness to join our conversation. (We’ll be doing the interviews by e-mail [...]

(Robert Keeley is a guest blogger for Think Christian.  Learn more about him here.)
A recent article on MSNBC points out the role of religion in the lives and careers of the contestants on American Idol.  According to the article more than half of the 11 finalists in the competition have “regularly performed at places of [...]

1998: Korn Rocks
I’ve never been a big Korn fan, but metal music is a guilty pleasure. Over a decade ago, a high-school student near my hometown was suspended for wearing a T-shirt featuring logos of the metal band Korn. It’s a fairly rural, conservative, religious, family-oriented community—the kind of place metal music tries hard to [...]