This is exciting news: In July 1973, Johnny Cash spent several days in the studio at his House of Cash offices in Hendersonville, Tennessee, recording songs and telling tales with just an acoustic guitar and his virile craggy baritone. He sang Tin Pan Alley hits, traditional folk and gospel tunes, new originals and favorite covers…

Friend of this blog and Lutheran pastor Chip Frontz (pictured) has set up a blog to accompany a Lenten class he’s teaching on the Ten Commandments. He invites feedback, questions, and comments regarding both the content and format. It also has a very clever title: DECAbLOGUE. Check it out.

A couple of noteworthy items from Christianity Today‘s Books & Culture: Alan Jacobs has a fine essay on Christians as a “counterculture for good” (via Kim at Think Christian). Kenneth G. Elzinga reviews Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.

While the Oscars are still a relatively fresh topic, here’s a question: Why is it that for so many people Joe McCarthy remains the symbol of the suppression of civil liberties in America when there have been far worse offenders in U.S. history? I even heard one of the announcers during the Oscar pre-show refer…

A group of Vatican Radio employees gave Pope Benedict XVI a brand new iPod nano loaded with special Vatican Radio programming and classical music. To honor the pope’s first visit to the radio’s broadcasting headquarters, the radio’s technical staff decided the pencil-thin, state-of-the-art audio player would make the perfect gift. Now that Vatican Radio offers…

The Iraq sanctions appear to have “worked” in that it seems Saddam Hussein was unable to reconstitute his WMD programs, but at what cost? With a confrontation with Iran looming, this article at In These Times revisits the issue (via Antiwar.com).

This article by Ira Chernus, a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, makes several good points with respect to religion and politics. First, he points out that belief in a transcendent moral order is not the sole property of the political Right. Thoreau and Martin Luther King, for example, both justified their…

Um, I only watched an hour’s worth because it was soooo mind-numbingly boring. And I’m sure it didn’t help that I haven’t seen any of the movies that were nominated for best picture. Happy to see that Reese Witherspoon won the best actress award for Walk the Line though, being a fan of the movie…

Here’s an article about a trend among churches using the “contemporary” praise-band-and-overhead-screen format to reintroduce what some are calling a “classic service,” complete with choir and hymnals: No one can dispute that the contemporary-style worship has helped churches grow by pulling in “unchurched” young and middle-age people, who tend to like the informality and rock-influenced…

I’ve never had a problem with the idea that the opening chapters of Genesis, which I re-read just the other day, are to be read in a way alternately described as “myth,” “legend,” “metaphor,” “saga” or what have you. Moreover, I think reading Genesis in this way is fully compatible with as robust a theory…