Paul O'Donnell: February 2008 Archives

The name of his first book, "God and Man at Yale," sounds so hidebound and culturally clueless, even for the early '50s, that it's hard to imagine that William F. Buckley, who died this morning, made his reputation on it. But what made Buckley's long career as a conservative author, speaker, and talk-show host lascivious fun for conservatives and liberals alike was that he was anything but clueless. He was completely aware of the stir his criticisms of liberal politics would cause and he never shied from engaging the opposition where he found them, whether they were PC legalists or wild-haired poets.

"God and Man" pointed out that Yale, like most elite American universities, were where young people's faith went to die. Buckley argued that this was because the officially nondenominational university was not as faith-neutral as it claimed. Liberals' tolerance for dissenting points of view like Marxism, feminism, and other academic "identities," Buckley concluded, didn't apply to old-school establishment values.

You may hear today about Larry Norman, who died last night at age 60. You'll hear that he was the "Father of Christian Rock," or that he was the genre's Bob Dylan, or that with his death a chapter in Christian rock will end. But when it comes to Larry Norman, the usual clichés never apply.

In the late 1960s, after leading his band People! to #14 on the Billboard chart with the radio hit "I Love You," Norman launched a solo career with an album he intended to call "We Need A Whole Lot More Jesus and A Lot Less Rock & Roll." His record company, Capitol, balked, and Norman eventually ended up releasing the album on his own. He became a role model for others who wanted to rock out without denying their faith, and created an audience for an organically Christian brand of soft rock.

Spending five decades on the black gospel circuit is called paying your dues, but now that mainstream success has come for the Blind Boys of Alabama, they aren't thinking about paying themselves back. As they sing in their new CD "Down in New Orleans," "you got to live and give."

The disc, recorded in New Orleans with local musicians was an attempt to spread their recently abundant wealth where it's needed most, and remind the rest of us that Katrina is still a daily reality for Louisianans. Oh, and it's a rare and joyful blend of traditional gospel and New Orleans blues.

Portfolio magazine blogger Jeff Bercovici calls the current state of Britney Spears a "Joseph Welch moment," referring to the U.S. Army attorney who effectively put an end to McCarthyism in the 1950s by publicly shaming anti-Communist crusader Sen. Joe McCarthy. Like Welch, Bercovici is trying to shame tabloid traders in Britney's mental-health meltdown by asking, "Have you no decency, sir?" If Britney's odd behavior is not spoiled celebrity behavior but symptoms of a real illness, should the media continue to report it?

Evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics gnash their teeth a lot about how Hollywood corrupts youth and demoralizes the faithful. But if it's true that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, Hollywood and conservative Christians, who've both been putting the hate on scientific rationalism lately, should get along just fine.

Amy Winehouse was not only the big winner at The Grammys last night, she was kind of a mascot for a broadcast that, as The New York Times pointed out today, were oddly haunted by loss. Video-ported in from London...

I bought my wife "Eat, Pray, Love" thinking the spiritual travelogue (and runaway bestseller) by Elizabeth Gilbert would match well with my beloved's belief that travel to exotic climes is essentially a spiritual endeavor: hers is the Church of the...

I go beyond a cliché when I say that Monty Python's "Life of Brian," finally out on DVD, couldn’t be made today: not because the theocrats have won, but because the anti-Christians take themselves so seriously it’s hard to imagine...

When is a Romanian movie about abortion in the dark days under Communism not about Romania or Communism? When it opens in the United States, where abortion and childbirth is not only a political issue, but a hot topic in...

The culture wars have officially gotten too complicated for me. Ben Stein, a Nixon Republican--as well as a game-show host and financial columnist--has made "Expelled," a documentary defending the rights of neo-Creationist scientists to question the arguments of neo-Darwinians. Roger...