The Irish Times‘ Aengus Collins writes about two of my all-time faves: Christmas music and Alan Sparhawk.

My contribution:

Perhaps I’m wrong about the musical difference Christian belief might make. For instance, when I ask Andrew Beaujon, a journalist with US magazine Spin and author of Body Piercing Saved My Life, a book about Christian music in the US, he says he sees no correlation between Christianity and great Christmas music. “The greatest Christmas song of all time was written by a Jew,” he notes, referring to Irving Berlin’s ubiquitous White Christmas.

A couple months ago, I did an interview with Harp magazine about my book. I wasn’t entirely comfortable about it because I proofread Harp for a spell in 2004, and it didn’t go well. The reasons why aren’t important; still, there were some bad feelings lingering on both sides, and I had to admit I was surprised the magazine decided to do a feature on my book.
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A group called People Against Fundamentalism will be protesting against Mark Driscoll on Dec. 3. It doesn’t sound like an opportunity for dialogue, but to be fair, neither do most of Driscoll’s blog posts. Dan Savage fisks the latest one, in which Driscoll equates women preachers with “fluffy baby bunny rabbit[s].”

Is Driscoll pulling some sort of Ann Coulter-esque performance art here?

From yesterday’s comments field:

radosh says:

Please no David Crowder. It will confirm everyone’s worst prejudices.
11/07/06 06:05 PM
DanGibson says:

I only guessed Crowder because of Beaujon’s musical crush on him in “Body Piercing”. I still have a hard time imagining anyone outside the CCM echo chamber enjoying his music.

Sorry to confirm your suspicions, but Crowder is in fact among the MP3s I chose for today’s post!

Speaking of Christian culture, anyone see this?

Let’s move on from Mark Driscoll’s macaca moment for the time being and turn to more important things, like selling enough copies of my book that I can go back to blogging at my old schedule! The good people at Idolator were kind enough to plug Body Piercing Saved My Life today, and they’re offering three absolutely free MP3s of early Jesus People music chosen by and with comments by yours truly.

More tomorrow–who will it be? Pedro? Mute Math? The commenters want to know! (And, as usual, they’re calling for Daniel Amos and the 77s.)

Dave at Aropax Nation points out that perhaps Mrs. Driscoll isn’t the only one who oughta hit the treadmill and refers to this passage in my book:

Christian culture’s strong preference that young people marry rather than date has not just resulted in a divorce rate higher than the national average, it’s produced a bumper crop of chunky singers. It’s a sad fact that once men are freed from the fear that each woman they meet may be their last chance at happiness, they tend to scarf that third hot dog without reflection. The net effect of this is a business filled with stocky musicians whose ring fingers flash in the stage lights as they play.

I believe this, as much as anything else, is holding back Christian rock from greater commercial acceptance. Rock stars aren’t supposed to look like normal people. That’s why we pay them so much money. We want rock stars to be everything we’re not—impossibly skinny, stupid rich, unshowered, smelly and miserable. If we wanted to see happy, pudgy dudes with Van Dyke beards and spiky haircuts onstage, we’d pay more attention to the roadies.

Mark Driscoll takes an unusual rhetorical tack with the argument in this blog post:

Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.

Emphasis mine. Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.

UPDATE Apparently this post has been attracting a lot of attention. Dan Savage asks, in essence: If Haggard was straight and his wife hadn’t been lighting his candle lately, wouldn’t he have had an affair with a woman?

Logical. Yes. But that would suggest that homosexuality wasn’t a choice, a point I suspect Driscoll (as well as much of the church) isn’t willing to concede.

I honestly can’t say. My day job has kept me busier than I could have ever imagined, but book stuff has been going on. I’ll try to catch up in the next couple of days, but for now here’s a piece about my book that ran in yesterday’s Washington Times.