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Grace Notes is a weekly exploration by Jason Morehead of signs of common grace in the music world. We hope to alert you to wonderful music, some of which will be spiritual in nature but all of which will be unique and worthy of your attention. Each week we will share brief reviews of albums worthy of your attention and maybe a video or two.

Minecraft

I’ve never played Minecraft the video game, so I can’t personally confirm whether or not it deserves to be CAPC’s favorite game of 2011 or not (though I trust Drew’s opinion). But I can say that I’ve been rather obsessed with C418′s Minecraft soundtrack over the last couple of weeks. I stumbled across it when I did a search for “ambient” music on Bandcamp, and was quickly won over by its charming atmospherics. While it does venture into some darker and more abstract territory (e.g., “Death”, “Oxygène”, ”Clark”), the majority of C418′s work reveals a more melodic, even whimsical side: watery synths, sparse piano and woodwind melodies, stirring string arrangements, and exotic rhythms come together to evoke shades of Joe Hisaishi’s Studio Ghibli soundtracks as well as “true” ambient artists such as Vidna Obmana and Tangerine Dream. And whereas a lot of “ambient” music requires the use of long-form pieces to evoke a sense of space, C418 does it in a more condensed form — the longest track just crosses the four minute mark — which adds to the impact. By turns contemplative and exuberant, uplifting but with a melancholy streak, C418′s soundtrack paints a picture of an intriguing and wonder-filled environment, and beckons you to enter it and explore to your heart’s content. Highly recommended, even if you’re not that much of a gamer.

You can listen to, and purchase, the Minecraft soundtrack from C418′s Bandcamp page.

Christ and Pop Culture

Justin Beiber recently said in an interview, “A lot of people who are religious, I think they get lost. They go to church just to go to church. . . . I’m not trying to disrespect them … but for me, I focus more on praying and talking to Him. I don’t have to go to church.”

Dan Kimball, pastor of Vintage Church in Santa Cruz, Calif. responded:

We aren’t Christians based on whether we go to a church meeting or not, that is based on our faith in Jesus. So I agree with him there, but having faith in Jesus then means we should then be functioning in a local church according to the guidelines of Scripture. It would be sad thinking of a Christian living out their faith on their own without being in a faith community.

In other incredibly important Beiber news, the teen star got a portrait of Jesus tattooed on the back of his calf.

Christ and Pop Culture

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: contrary to popular belief, racism and race related social issues remain one of the biggest problems in our society. These issues result in high unemployment, high numbers of venereal diseases, abortions, murder, poor educational opportunities, obesity, single-parent families, substance abuse, lowered expectations, prosperity gospels, heretical theologies, etc. As a society, as communities, and as churches, these are the ugly facts that we must face up to.

But it is not good for us to think of ourselves as Great White Saviors who swoop down from our safe communities in our new cars, listening to Arcade Fire singing about the plight of white suburbia just to condescend to help the poor, helpless black or Hispanic family by providing them with The Answers. It’s going to look a lot uglier, messier, and harder than that.

We need to humbly work alongside minority brothers and sisters to learn how we can help. And that is going to take time and a lot of conversations.

Anthony Bradley has just edited a collection of essays by top, scholarly, New Black Christian leaders, entitled: Keep Your Head Up.

While I have not had a chance to read it yet myself (darn grad school), knowing Bradley’s reputation, I suspect it will be a great place to start some of these practical discussions about moving towards race reconciliation and social justice. If you get a chance, take a look at the book’s site and read the free except.

If we desire to see significant and redeeming change in race issues in our country, the church ought to be at the forefront. And Bradley’s collection, which emphasizes the Gospel, looks to be a thoughtful beginning to this discussion.

Christ and Pop Culture

We have talked about how stories and narratives change in the medium of video games quite a lot here at CaPC. In this feature article from Paul Dean over at IGN, he offers interesting thoughts and quotations from some game-makers and storytellers in the industry. One video game writer admits, ”We’re sort of making it up as we go along.” I think a lot of us would agree that we on the editorial and critical side of video game writing often feel that we’re sort of making it up along the way as well.

Christ and Pop Culture

Each Wednesday in What Memes Mean, Kirk Bozeman questions the significance, humor, and subtexts of viral videos, memes, and other Internet fads.

More changes to our beloved Facebook are being forced upon us by the trampling hordes of social media developers, the programmers who seek to uncaringly pillage our consistencies and set fire to our comforts. This time they call it “Timeline.”

If you haven’t checked out Timeline, you should. This update is big — perhaps the biggest one to date — mainly because of what it seems to signify.

Timeline represents a major shift in Facebook’s philosophy of what it is supposed to be and do. It will be moving our profiles away from a simple platform for share-as-you-go posting to a more ambitious attempt at encapsulating our entire lives from birth to now on a Web page. Instead of being a marketplace for haphazard interpersonal interaction, Facebook wants to be an intensive personal scrapbook for every human being, replete with all life events chronicled in multiple forms of media from birth to now.

When you turn it on, the obvious becomes obvious: Timeline is an actual timeline for each person — just like the timelines we studied and drew in eighth grade history class. It’s a line marked in years with dots pertaining to each of my inputs to the Facebook grid. If I already have school and birthday information entered, Facebook automatically adds it. If I keep scrolling down, Facebook is basically begging me to upload my baby pic. From recent new feeds, my friends are already beginning to key in their special extra “life events” as well.

This is pretty big. Thus far we’ve crafted our digital self-representations out of random Likes and Pages, school and work info, a few boxes for our own text, and a wall for posting our “whatevers.” But now we are being asked to create a history lesson of ourselves, a full presentation of “where we’ve been to where we are now.” The emphasis seems to be shifting from interaction with others through an online profile to an online profile through which we can potentially interact with others. That’s a pretty big shift.

I won’t say here whether I think this shift is good or bad or neutral, but I will say this: It creeps me out a bit. Facebook is emphasizing birth to now (reference the promo video at the Timeline link above), with the arrow happily continuing forward. But when you attach a timeline to a human being, that line will eventually end. There’s really no way to avoid that realization.

And to force us all to face life as beginning/middle/end every time we check our profile seems a tad morbid to me. I can’t imagine discussions of mortality didn’t come up during Timeline programmer meetings. But though it’s kind of creepy, maybe it’s kind of helpful.

Is Timeline Facebook’s attempt at encouraging us to cherish our lives, to look beyond the potential pettiness inherent in social media? Is Facebook starting to categorize our updates and life events as “important” and “not as important” to try to teach us that this is actually, in fact, how life really works? Is the movement to these points on lines an attempt to “teach us to number our days” and to “[redeem] the time”? A bit over the top, I know, but perhaps pillaging programmers can tap into the wisdom of the ages. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe Timeline is Facebook’s conscious attempt at making us face life as life: something beautiful and brief we are called to fill with as many meaningful dots as we can. That’s almost an anti-social media form of social media.

Christ and Pop Culture

Each week in Eat Your Vegetables, Jonathan Sircy shares the benefit and appeal of some of the culture’s more inaccessible or intimidating artifacts.

Cultural Vegetable of the Week: Beowulf (the poem)

Vegetable Equivalent: Spinach, the vegetable of warriors

Nutritional Value: A Christian perspective on what’s worth keeping and discarding from the non-Christian past

Recommended Serving Size: The Seamus Heaney translation read loud in 200-line chunks

The Beowulf poet lived in Christian culture, but the legacy of England’s pagan past was all around him: the remains of Roman buildings, the offspring and cultural legacy of three Germanic tribes, and even the language he spoke and wrote in. Consequently, Beowulf is filled with bittersweet reminiscences. Although it was written in England, its action is set in Scandinavia. Although its poet was Christian, its protagonists are pagan. And although its titular hero is powerful, the poem ends with Beowulf dying as a result of the very pride that made him formidable.

The poem’s tone is more elegiac than nostalgic. Think, for instance, of the verse from Genesis 6 — “There were giants in the earth in those days” — with the mixture of awe and ethical complications such a statement implies. The world of Genesis 6 offers a good analogue for the poem’s action as we learn that two of the poem’s monsters are the demon-offspring of Cain. The warriors of this world believe in God but not in an afterlife. Immortality can only be achieved through earthly fame. God may grant a warrior his strength, but a warrior earns salvation through his own bloody works.

As an epic poem, Beowulf contracts into its title character the culture’s representative strengths and weaknesses; namely, Beowulf is powerful but proud. The poem does not biographically record Beowulf’s adventures from the cradle to the grave, but instead focuses on his three greatest adventures. The first two happen in Beowulf’s youth. A demon named Grendel has invaded the mead-hall of the renowned king and held sway for a dozen years. Beowulf visits and rids the kingdom of Cain’s spawn. But Grendel’s mother seeks revenge, and Beowulf must travel to her underwater lair to dispose of her. The poem’s conclusion records the aged Beowoulf, having served as king for fifty years, fighting a dragon to the death.

The poet critiques the violence of his Germanic ancestors, revealing revenge as a brutal cycle because its logic can be adopted by anyone. Beowulf uses it to avenge the men Grendel has killed, but Grendel’s mother can just as legitimately use it against Beowulf and his men after her son’s death. This culture was physically imposing but ethically corrupt. Its moral code ensured its demise.

The poem reminds us of a culture’s fragility, not only through its contents but by its very existence. It is the longest epic poem in the Old English language, yet only a single thousand-year-old copy of the manuscript survives. An eighteenth-century fire damaged this sole manuscript, and careless handling by readers further deteriorated its condition. There is no way of knowing if the poem was part of a larger tradition of oral epics or if Beowulf was regarded in its time as it is today, a quintessential statement of Anglo-Saxon values.

The poem provides an interesting juxtaposition with a later English epic, Paradise Lost. Milton’s epic heroes — Adam and Eve — must demonstrate a very different kind of heroism than Beowulf. Epic action, Milton maintains, does not require protagonists to fight dragons or conquer an opposing nation. Rather, real epic heroism is saying no to a tempting serpent. Beowulf’s heroism is external. His failings are internal. From the poet’s perspective, this is why Bewoulf’s story is so bittersweet.

Christ and Pop Culture

Music at Mars Hill is a weekly column by Luke Larsen that seeks to find God amidst the newest trends in both mainstream music and independent music.

Christmas is over, and it’s that time of the year when we start looking forward to another year and the dreadful idea of considering New Year’s resolutions once again. This is what’s on my mind heading into another year of music-listening . . . feel free to add some of these to your own resolution list.

Don’t let genres or stereotypes hold you back from experiencing different kinds of music.

It’s easy to fall into very specific music circles — reading certain publications, visiting the same blogs, and following the same artists. I can totally understand that, after all, we like what we like. But a year ago, I was at a point where I was turned off by anything that fell into the category of “Christian music” or “CCM,” feeling that it was too easy to pander to my faith to sell CDs. While that might still be true in some respects, several artists have released albums this year (like Switchfoot, John Mark McMillan, and Derek Webb) that have shown me how expanding the possibilities of subgenres like Christian rock can sometimes happen from within. Similarly, albums like Florence + The Machine’s Ceremonials and Beyonce’s 4 have helped me open up to mainstream pop in a new way.

Monitor your listening habits.

There are seemingly endless ways to do this these days. Whether it’s last.fm or Spotify, it’s now easier than ever to access music and see what you have been listening to throughout the year. However, beyond that, in this next year, I am going to attempt to pay more attention to how much time I spend with albums and in what setting I do that. There’s no question the ever-changing digital audio scene is changing what music is and what it means, but we will never know the positive or negative effects of the changes unless we are aware of how they are affecting us as music-listeners.

See more live music and buy more vinyl.

As much as going out to see bands or going down to a record store seems irrelevant, rarely have I ever regretted doing such things. Often times seeing a band perform live or even putting on a record with friends can totally change how the music hits us. Next year, I want to spend less time listening to music while staring at my computer screen with headphones on and more time experiencing music in more physical, tangible ways (see fellow CaPC writer Jason Morehead’s excellent article “Music Made Physical” for more on this). In a sort-of related side note, I am also going to attempt to see more films next year even just for the point of hearing more soundtracks (because I can’t get enough of them!).

Give every album you encounter a chance.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been caught off guard by a number of albums in the past year. One of the biggest examples for me was M83′s new album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. You can read my reflections on the album in a previous post, but I will say that it was only when I allowed myself to dive into the album without any preconceptions that was I able to experience it for all it was worth. It’s important to remember that not every kind of music is meant to hit you on the first listen. While first impressions on important, I’m afraid it’s become far too easy to pass off an album based on a 30-second iTunes preview. After all, we’ve been taught not too judge books by their cover or people based on Facebook profiles (or did I just make that up?) — why wouldn’t we do the same with music?

Those are my New Year’s resolutions for music in 2012, and I hope they gave you something to think about and look forward to in 2012. If you have any of your own, feel free to share below!

Christ and Pop Culture

Every Friday in Sacred Space, Brad Williams explores the place of popular culture in the local church.

This year, Christmas will fall on a Sunday, the day set aside to gather with a local body of believers to worship the One True God. This Sunday, we will be able to place special attention on the fact that this God invaded our world as a man, that he took on flesh and blood, that he became a baby, then a toddler, then a teenager, and finally a grown man, and that he did this to save us from our sins.

I confess that it is hard for me to get my head clear for worship this Sunday, and I suspect it may be for you as well. We’ve had so many distractions: buying gifts, wondering if Wal-Mart greeters will say “Merry Christmas”, Santa Claus manger scenes, what to tell kids about Santa, elves on shelves, and putting up Christmas Trees. On top of all of this we have to juggle our Christmas schedules to include, mom, dad, and the spouse’s mom and dad, and if both your parents and your spouse’s parents are divorced and you have living grandparents, Christmas gets busy in a hurry.

So Sunday’s service will probably feel a little rushed for us, won’t it? We’ll be thinking of gifts and family and food and places we have to get to after church. It’s madness, really. So much to do and so many things competing for our attention. It sure makes it hard for a Christian to have  a moment of peace to contemplate the glory of God’s peace offering in Christ, which is a tremendous irony when you think about the angelic announcement on that first Christmas morning:

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased! (Luke 2:14).

Peace? Peace at Christmas? Yes! We ought to have peace and great joy at Christmas, and I pray that you will find it in the haven of your local church this Christmas Sunday. Here are a few suggestions of how you might find peace on Christmas morning:

First, try not to look at Christmas’ service as one more thing you do on Christmas. Think of it this way, brother or sister, the closest you will ever get to a manger scene in this life is being with a bunch of people who have gathered to worship Jesus. The wise men came from the east to see the Christ, and in your fellowship you will see gathered men and women from everywhere, all walks of life, some perhaps from far away places, to sit and adore the one God made flesh. You will sing songs to Jesus on Sunday, songs we Christians have been singing for hundreds of years to express our gratitude and amazement that God would condescend to make his cradle in a food trough.

And all those people, every last one of them that you will see, they all need this baby boy who was born a pauper king. We need him, not only to save us, but to rule over us. God sent His Son to give us peace, peace from our struggle with sin, peace from family strife, and peace from wars that will maim and kills hundreds this year. But most of all, Jesus has come to offer us peace with God. What other thing could God have given us to better show us His willingness to demonstrate His earnestness to be reconciled? He has said, “Here…I’m serious. Stop rebelling. I give you my Son, my only Son in whom I am well-pleased. Repent and love Him and all will be forgiven.”

Please, this Christmas Sunday, don’t let the Christmas hustle cause you to make church one more thing on your busy schedule. Be at peace, and rejoice with your family: God has given us His Son!

Christ and Pop Culture

Podcast #108: The Year In Music, With Special Guest Jay Tholen

This week, we continue our year in review podcast series with a look at the year in music, with special guest Jay Tholen. Jay Tholen is one of the most unique and exciting musicians to emerge from the indie “Christian” music scene. Mostly considered a chiptune artist, he often transgresses those boundaries to produce consistently surprising and polarizing music – all of it charmingly blatant in its Christian foundation. He, Drew Dixon (editor), and Jason Morehead (associate editor) discuss the year in music, recent trends in the contemporary Christian scene, and more.

Check out Jay Tholen’s music – his latest album is free!

Every week, various Christ and Pop Culture writers delve deeper into recent articles and address some of the bigger issues in popular culture.

We love feedback. If you’d like to respond, you can comment on the Web site or send an e-mail to christandpopculture@gmail.com. We would love to respond to feedback on the show, so do it now!

Subscribe to us in iTunes by clicking here. While you’re at it, review us in iTunes. We’ll love you forever!

Christ and Pop Culture

Every week in The Kiddy Pool, Erin Newcomb confronts one of many issues that parents must deal with related to popular culture.

If you haven’t yet heard of The Elf on the Shelf, look out. Quite likely there is a small, plush elf surveying your every move and reporting it back to the big guy at the North Pole. That’s the basic premise behind the product, which sells online for .95 for the story and accompanying elf. Children are instructed to name their elves, thus activating the elfish magical powers that enable the little sprite to report back to Santa each night on the children’s behavior. Parents are encouraged to perpetuate this tradition and move the elf to a new location before the children wake up each morning. I can understand the origins of this product—children wondering how Santa constructs his naughty/nice list and manages his worldwide Panopticon-style surveillance. I also see the appeal of the hide-and-seek aspect of the elf; we’d do the same thing with our cats each morning, but, honestly, they don’t move that much.

I happen to find the elf’s appearance creepy rather than cute, but when it comes to holiday kitsch, I realize aesthetics often fly out the window for many of us. My biggest question regarding the elf is the purpose. It seems possible to enjoy the story and the doll without taking either’s implications too far, but that’s not the intention suggested by the manufacturers. I’ve often wondered what families who use “Santa is watching” during the month of December do for discipline the other eleven months of the year. The language of the website is positive, emphasizing the “catch ‘em being good” philosophy:

Excellent listeners and even better observers, these scout elves are the eyes and ears of Santa Claus. Although they cannot be touched, or else they may lose their magic, the elf will always listen and relay messages back to Santa. Taking in all the day-to-day activities around the house, no good deed goes unnoticed; these scout elves take their job seriously.

The underlying implication remains though, that these elves report the naughty just as assiduously as the nice, and that the elf is always watching to keep kids in check. And, based on the Amazon.com reviews, that’s precisely how many parents use it.

It reminds me of the same way that so many people view God, always watching, keeping score, perpetually enforcing penalties. What gets lost in that view is that God sets limits for our own good, not because He requires our good behavior; holiness is its own reward, and God wants us to obey Him out of love, not fear of punishment. That doesn’t mean that punishments and consequences aren’t real, but I always get the impression that our sin saddens God because (as even we flawed earthly parents understand), parents hate to watch their children suffer and sin leads to eventual and sometimes eternal suffering. At Christmas, we celebrate God coming to live and suffer with us to be reminded on Resurrection Sunday that He already did everything to protect us from our own sinful selves. That’s the powerful corollary message of Christmas—the babe born in the manger grows up to die on the cross. So keep your elf on the shelf, if you like. Move it around each day and enjoy the family fun it can inspire. But remember too how far beyond naughty and nice Christmas ought to take all of us, how the Christ child—perfect and pure and holy—took on human flesh, not to be “Big Brother” but to be the Messiah.

Christ and Pop Culture