Christian Music: Not Safe and Fun for the Whole Family

I haven't listened to a lot of Christian music in a long time, certainly not on the radio, for reasons I'm sure many of you can guess. But music is a particularly powerful influencer. Good music often carries a lyric into the subconscious and a song can stick in your head for days. For me (and I suspect for most folks) music is an important habit of my mind, whether intentional or unintentional.

For this reason, I've recently been more intentional about the role of music in my need to to "take every thought captive to obey Christ" (2 Cor 10) and to think on "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable" (Phil 4).

Since the stuff on Christian radio isn't my style, among other things, it doesn't have much power to help me in this endeavor. (It does help many, many Christians "set [their] minds on things above" (Col 3:1), so I won't judge it too harshly, and I chide myself for doing so so disdainfully in the past.)

Fortunately, there is a good amount of "inde" music out there these days that reaches out to me and others like me (and others not like me!). Thanks to sites like Amazon and Noisetrade with their automatic, you-may-also-like suggestion boxes, out-of-the-mainstream music gets easier and easier to find.

Here are some of my recent finds.

The Vespers

As you can plainly see from the cover of their album, The Fourth Wall, The Vespers belie my bias for folk and bluegrass. They could be described as inde folk, or neo-folk, rockin' out their pickin-n-strumin' instruments in their vintage clothing. What you can't see are their at times haunting, at times playful vocals and lyrics. You can sample those here.

The Vespers don't only help us rejoice with those who rejoice, they also help us weep with those who weep, a holistic truth telling.

Gungor

Note the cover art on Beautiful Things: this is not your typical Christian music scene. Paradox is a significant part of the Christian understanding of truth, and Gungor reminds us of one of the most crucial paradoxes: 

You make beautiful things

You make beautiful things out of the dust

You make beautiful things

You make beautiful things out of us

Psalm-like, "Beautiful Things" opens with doubts and a sense of being overwhelmed and beat down by the ugly things in this world and in our hearts, but it is the refrain that remains in the mind---the reminder, the affirmation, the hope.

Wilder Adkins

Wilder Adkins's Oak & Apple presents new, acoustic remakes of old, beloved hymns. This choice exposes my preference for hymns over other kinds of Christian music. I'm not the only one, apparently, because there have been several projects in this vein of late. I prefer acoustic, folk-oriented albums like this one, but there are a significant number of neo-hymn albums with more pop-rock flavor.

One reason I appreciate these kinds of albums is because, along with familiar favorites, I'm always introduced to hymns I didn't grow up with. I love learning new hymns; the hymn is such a rich heritage, and learning the hymns from outside my own tradition links me to the wide, deep heritage of the faith.

You can find her latest album here.

Christine Hand

You might recognize that name. It just so happens that one of my very favorite musicians is our very own Christine Hand. Christine's music appeals to me pretty much for all the same reasons the above albums and artists do: the woman and her band can play their instruments! roots in folk, folk-rock, and blues; soulful, holistic vocals and lyrics. Her song, "The Face of All the World", is one of my long-time favorites, and I often turn to it when I feel overwhelmed by the world and am in need of encouragement and a reminder that God is everywhere and in everything:

You're every sweet sound

You are the cold rain

And every tear that from my eyes will fall for joy or pain

You are the best thing that I have found

And this world is wide and round

I haven't given up "secular" music---as we often like to say, all truth is God's truth. There are many, many songs of all stripes that remind me of Christ or the absence of him, of the glory and the horror of this life; and many songs of many stripes that are just plain fun! But as music is a powerful influencer, it's something we should at times be intentional about. The above albums and artists disciple my mind and nurture my soul. 

Your turn. I'm always on the lookout for good music. Share with us in the comments: What have been some of your favorite finds? What music gives you courage and hope? 

The Theological Importance of Reading Fiction

Several months ago, I wrote a post called "The Theological Importance of Imagination" in which I attempted to dispel that nasty Modernist rumor that imagination is childish at best and evil at worst. I discussed how imagination is childlike and as such, essential to faith, hope, and love.

Since imagination is so vital to Christianity, we ought to be keenly interested in developing our capacity for imagination and prayerfully disciplining our hearts and minds, for imagination can be employed viciously just as it can be employed lovingly. This, like most true Christian work, is countercultural.

I argue today, as you may guess from my title, that reading fiction is one of the best ways to cultivate our capacity to "envision that which is not," as JK Rowling puts it, and reading good fiction is a way of disciplining ourselves in virtue.

This is not Anna Karenina.
(Fan-fiction is the funnest!)

The most common expression of a loving imagination is empathy, the ability to "think [our]selves into other people's places." Empathy always results from reading good stories. When we read good stories, we enter a reality through the perspective of an other: a narrator or character or multiple narrating characters. When we're reading a fictional reality through first person narration, we've put ourselves, not merely in the shoes, more like in the skin of that other, walking around in that new skin for sometimes hundreds of pages.

I've never been to Russia in "real life." But I've spent months there, in the 1870s no less, with Anna Karenina. And through the people I met in 19th-century Russia, I learned about human nature, love, forgiveness, and a tiny bit about early turn-of-the-Industrial-century farming too.

Fiction helps us empathize with individuals and people groups we don’t understand, whether because of long distances of time and space and/or large gaps between their ideology and ours. This is huge. What we don’t understand we fear. When we act out of fear, we fail to live by faith and act out of love. So fiction serves as a bridge to other people, but it also works to connect us to the Other, to God. We need imagination to envision the Kingdom of God, a world which Jesus said is here but not yet here. We need our God-given imaginations to pray, Father, make it on Earth as it is in heaven. Fiction helps us go there, helps us engage our imaginations by journeying us to otherworldly places like Narnia and Hogwarts and Middle Earth. When stories depict light and life and love, they are, whether we realize it or not, whether the author intended it or not, pointing us to the Source of light, life and love, to Light, Life and Love himself.

I have a difficult time imagining the world completely devoid of hope, but when I first read Heart of Darkness, my capacity for understanding and empathy expanded. Heart of Darkness is a stunningly crafted world that is horrendously bleak, desolate, and violent. It's a world in which depravity has rejected grace. I have never experienced such a world in "real life," but reading this story gave me compassion for those who have.

Even when novels and short stories show us the shadows, when we’re forced to face all that is dark and dead and ugly in the world (and in our hearts), this too points to Christ. Like the negative of a photograph shows us what should be fully there but isn’t, dark, "ugly" art shows us our fallen condition and points to the realities that begin to take shape when God is taken out of the picture, when sin has pushed him out of the framework of our lives.

Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite writers, puts it this way:

There would be a strong argument for saying that much of the most powerful preaching of our time is the preaching of the poets, playwrights, novelists because it is often they better than the rest of us who speak with awful honesty about the absence of God in the world, and about the storm of his absence, both without and within, which, because it is unendurable, unlivable, drives us to look to the eye of the storm [to God himself]. (Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale 44)

In short, reading good fiction... by which I don't mean only 1000-page Russian novels and horribly dark high school required reading... reading good fiction is a remarkably fruitful form of spiritual discipline and spiritual formation.

October is National Book Month. We here at Thinking through Christianity, naturally, are celebrating. In the next few weeks we'll be discussing our favorite books, so I thought I'd tee up the ball and introduce our upcoming series by talking about why we think good books are worth celebrating and discussing on a site about a faith tradition that sometimes eschews itself from fiction.