So Hollywood is narcissistic?  Tell me something I don't know, right?   Well, though we live here in Los Angeles, and we see our share of fantastically ridiculous behavior, I was recently surprised and grieved to learn more about the narcissism in this city and how it is effecting our culture at large.

Now, I must confess I love the current reality TV show Celebrity Rehab which is hosted by Dr. Drew Pinsky.  It's a less than glamorous show where cameras capture celebrities in the context of struggling to recover from their addictions and destructive lifestyles.  Now, I don't watch it because of some desire to see people at their worst, but rather because of the honesty.  Recovering addicts are forced be honest about their addictive and pathological struggles the way that God commands us to be honest about our struggles with sin.

Last week, my wife and I sat in a lecture here in Los Angeles listening to Dr. Drew Pinsky and Dr. Mark  Young talk about their new book for which they are co-authors, The Mirror Effect: How celebrity narcissism is seducing america. We went to this lecture to better understand some of the people we minister to here in L.A., as well as to better understand how to protect our children.  The title was intriguing, of course.  The lecture was entertaining.  The content was both surprising and heart-breaking.  At several points during the lecture, my heart was overwhelmed with grief over the dangerous situation our culture is in, and the tremendous brokenness of celebrities and their fans. 

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“What role do worship albums truly have?” asks Rachel Yoo in her Common Grounds review of Caedmon’s Call’s new CD, The World Will Sing: In the Company of Angels 2 (ICOA2).

Good question. A worship CD can provide background music to my cell phone conversations in my car — all around, a bad idea, not least because worship music as “elevator music” brings me close to what the French sociologist Baudillard might have called a “simulacrum,” a masking of there being no “there” there. (Not to mention, we’re all freaking scary drivers with cell phones glued to our ears!) A using of worship music to dull my heart to my lack of faith.

I think that’s what keeps CC fretting about doing mainstream CCM or CWM (“contemporary worship music,” to use a John Frameism). Maybe that’s why Garrett Buell and Todd Bragg both sound a little tentative about this album in their interview with Glenn Lucke. Maybe they’re worried ICOA2 is a little too easy to listen to. Thanks be, for their conscience about fostering a fatally benign neglect of holy things. As their corpus shouts, from Caedmon’s Call to 40 Acres to Long Line of Leavers to Share the Well (STW), CC isn’t about background music. And the fact is that the music of ICOA2 is more musical Koine — it’s more accessible, more common, more vernacular — than STW. But maybe by its nature, worship music has be more Koine. Read more

Fifteen years ago during the Advent season, my now 17 year old son was rescued from a drowning incident. Ever since, the weeks of Advent have been precious and poignant reminders to me of the rescuing love of God we celebrate at Christmas.

Every Christmas carol, every Christmas wreath — all of it — has charmed me with the grand Story that was being retold.

This Advent, not so much.

This year, Advent has not been easy. It’s been hard to refuse joylessness and to deflect cynics’ anti-capitalist jeremiads.

It’s not that I’m tired (which I am) or burned out (who of us doesn’t feel on the edge of that, all the time?).

No, it’s more like … well … you know, Nietzsche left the faith not because he didn’t believe. He left because he wanted more in which to believe. He left looking for a “nobler god.”

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[Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from Reggie Kidd's new book about worship, With One Voice.  Please see the review of Kidd's book (here).  To buy the book, click (here).]

           I don’t get to see the Sunday paper until after church. Because I’m a worship leader, this means my encounter with headlines & op-ed follows a morning of (largely musical) praise. From time to time as I read, I hear this little voice: “Why sing when the world is going to hell in a handbasket? The culture is disintegrating. We need a Reformation. We need a revival. We need to get the right (Right?) politicians elected and judges appointed. So...why sing?”

          Well … 

          We sing for the sake of a world that has lost the ability even to dream that the Christian vision might be true. Reformation and revival depend upon a conversion of the imagination as much as upon anything else.

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“Why all the singing in church? Why all the fuss about something so trivial? Isn’t the real stuff ‘Word and Sacrament’? Shouldn’t we be focused on more important matters like Scripture and getting our doctrine right? I just don’t see the personal payoff. Shouldn’t we be getting trained to whip people into theological shape?”

These are real questions that my students ask and that pastors ask. Because I teach worship at RTS and lead worship in my church, they want me to answer for real.  I have been thinking, studying, and talking with students and pastors and people in churches for over 25 years. I have taken the time to write all this out, and the result is With One Voice (which will be released next week). Here is an excerpt that speaks to these questions:

Fact is: for two millennia, we Christians have sung our theology—from catacombs to dorm rooms, and from cathedrals to football stadiums. We’ve done so for good reason: God is in the process of reclaiming our lost planet, and we who know the Redeemer are at the center of the action. Singing suits the way things are.
   
If I believed that “all we are is dust in the wind,” I, unlike the rock group Kansas, would have a hard time dressing the situation up with song. My motto would be, “Stuff happens, and then you die.” As it is, however, I believe that what J. R. R. Tolkien said is true: every fairy tale is a foreshadowing or an echo of the biblical drama—we were lost, and then we were found. Praise and thanks come unbidden to the surface of my being—and precisely in the unbiddenness of my singing lies its rightness.

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I was 1,000 miles away from home in a bookstore I had come upon quite by accident. A book in the $4.00 rack practically fell into my hand. It was a copy of Thomas Howard’s The Novels of Charles Williams.

I recognized Howard as an evangelical whose trip down the Canterbury Trail had taken him all the way (“Do not pass go. Do not collect $200”) to Rome. I recognized Williams as a member of the Inklings, the literary group that included C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkein, T. S. Eliot, and Dorothy Sayers. Having never read anything, however, by either Howard or Williams, I thought, “What a nice piece of summer serendipity. Here I am preparing for a 1,000 mile plane ride home from vacation, and fresh out of reading material. A chance to acquaint myself with a couple of curious Christian writers.”

To make a long story into a long sentence, I was unable to get my brain around anything except Williams’s bizarre world from the time I settled into my seat until several days later when I had finished my first Williams novel, War in Heaven (a modern telling of the quest for the Holy Grail, or Graal as Williams prefers).

Before the next academic year is out I’ve promised myself to get through all 7 of Williams’s whacked out, surreal novels.

Why? I so need them to make the whacked out, surreal biblical narrative make the sense it’s supposed to. Read more

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