averyfineline

Via Daniel Mount, I see the Crabbs are staging a “reunion” at NQC. Huh? The engines on their buses haven’t even had time to cool down since the family’s “retirement” and we’re already having a reunion? This seems like a fine example of taking a good idea, running it into the ground, and breaking it […]

That’s the title of Sinclair Lewis’s insightful – if also deeply jaundiced – 1922 novel that sends up celebrity evangelists and fundamentalist Christianity in the early part of the 20th century. I teach it whenever I can (most recently in a religion and sex course … Lewis understood all too well that many popular Christian […]

Via reader CH, a study from the Annenberg School for Communication’s Lear Center on politics and Christian entertainment. Lots of interesting stuff (and plenty of silly things too, to be honest … the red, blue and purple oversimplifications are grating), especially in light of some of the conversation we’ve had before about the place of […]

Kyle Boreing digs up the stuff of gospel music folklore: a youtube clip of the Cathedrals at the Dove Awards with their shortlived tenor, Kurt Young (Boreing explains the history and has some good commentary on the video). No one really remembers Kurt Young, and yet everyone seems to remember that legendary ending at the […]

Thankfully, only the title of this album sounds like a show at Branson.

Whitmire’s cd of old-timey gospel standards has been in my car for the past however many weeks (months?) since Mark Lowry was in town, and it’s captivated me, even though finally it leaves me disappointed (more on that in a moment). […]

I’m teaching an advanced creative writing course this semester on blogging (which is one of the many things keeping me from actually attending to my own blog, as it turns out). And so I’m thinking a lot about blogs and blogging in slightly deeper ways than is usual (or perhaps is even healthy).

No […]

For whatever reason, I’m thinking a lot lately about all those embarassing / shameful / repellant / underhanded / scheming things about gospel music that we all just love to hate. Such as …

The so-called Nashville conversion: this involves a performer (usually one whose career is on the rocks or whose popularity needs a jolt […]

From reader DD:
We can all moan and complain about the state of SG music, but in reality it comes down to the fans. People who expect a group to show for “love offering” (and there is little love in it), but this same schmo will crab and complain when he doesn’t get his annual 3-4% […]

Sorry to have left you hanging so long with that airplanes post (for the record, I don’t really care how the Pfeifers get from point A to point B, but making the purchase of a plane a ministerial priority strikes me as way too Oral Robertsy). I meant to follow up sooner and got waylaid […]

Via reader AG, I notice that the Pfeifers are soliciting money from fans to help them pay for an airplane.
Discuss.