Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 72
June 9, 2017
Is Contemporary Christian Music Dead?
Contemporary Christian music used to sell some 50 million albums per year. Lately, it's been more like 17 million.
The Comey show
James Comey, the FBI director fired by President Trump, was interrogated in a congressional committee in a much-hyped event that gives ammunition to both Trump’s critics and his defenders. Comey agreed that Trump was not under criminal investigation, that the Russian probe is a counter-intelligence matter. MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews, a liberal who is no fan [Read More...]
Is saying Jesus is the only way to salvation hate speech and discrimination?
Russell Vought is a Wheaton College alumnus who weighed in on the controversy over the faculty member who insisted that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. He disagreed. He wrote on a website, “They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.” Now, at his confirmation [Read More...]
June 8, 2017
From preoccupation with society to preoccupation with the self
Still more things I’ve picked up from Kenneth L. Woodward’s Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama. (See my earlier posts on Woodward’s book here and here and here.) After the disillusionment with “the secular city,” liberal theology turned to a new frontier. It was the Sixties. Lucy was [Read More...]
June 7, 2017
“When the secular was sacred”
I grew up in a liberal mainline denomination in the 1950s and 1960s, going to the conventions and participating in the youth conferences. Reading Kenneth L. Woodward’s account of this phase of church history in Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama explains a lot of things that [Read More...]
Trump undercuts his travel ban defenders
President Trump’s restrictions on travelers from terrorist-supporting countries was thrown out by the courts. So new restrictions were drawn up that avoided the court’s objections. It too was thrown out, so now the ban is being taken up by the Supreme Court. Once again, though, President Trump is his own worst enemy. He fired off [Read More...]
Dilbert creator likes Trump & questions climate change
One of the funniest comic strips still going is Dilbert, Scott Adams’ satirical takedown of office culture and the corporate world. Adams would appear to be anti-corporation, which would stereotype him as a liberal. But he isn’t. He is apparently in the tradition of Al Capp, as a very funny conservative cartoonist. (Actually, it has [Read More...]
June 6, 2017
What conservative churches & liberal churches have in common today
More from Kenneth L. Woodward’s Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama. . . . Movements take place outside of denominations, so one legacy of the dominance of “movement religions” over “embedded religions” is the erosion of denominational distinctives. There is thus a new ecumenism among both [Read More...]
NSA report says Russia hacked voting technology company
The big news is that a leaker of top secret intelligence information has been arrested. But what she leaked is unsettling. The National Security Association report given to a reporter by a 25-year-old intelligence contractor named Reality Leigh Winner documents a Russian hack of a company that provides voting technology software, including systems that handle [Read More...]
Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture
Bob Dylan finally delivered his lecture for the Nobel Prize for Literature, submitting a 26-minute audio file, which you hear for yourself after the jump. Or you can read the transcript. He reflects on the sense in which his songs can be construed as literature. He discusses the three literary works that have left the biggest [Read More...]
