I guess the obvious joke is: Aren’t most energy drinks faith-based?

PITCH: America‚s First Faith-Based Energy Drink

I thought the readers at [REDACTED] might like to hear about America’s first faith-based energy drink ˆ one that energizes your body and soul! Not only does the combination of pomegranate and grape make for an abundant taste, but 1in3Trinity also serves as a high-powered energy drink to give an extra boost any time of day. I’d love to send you some samples to try it yourself, and if you’re not the best contact for this can you let me know who is?

1in3Trinity is made of a special blend handed down from the flourishing vines and trees of the Holy Land mixed with B-vitamins, Vitamin C, herbs and antioxidants. With only 10 calories and 3 grams of sugar per serving, 1in3Trinity still manages to pack mighty flavor into every heavenly sip.

Taking its cue from Galatians 5:22, the 1in3Trinity product line is designed to empower Christians to be bold in their faith and reflect the Fruits of the Spirit to the world with confidence. For more details and high-res photos you can download, visit: www.ultimatepresspicks.com.

Please be sure to let me know if you’d like me to send you samples.

In March, as winter fades in the mid-Atlantic, I will head northward to enjoy my last chances of the year to get frostbite.

March 5 through 7, I’ll be at Booth College in Winnipeg, Manitoba, for the college’s conversation series. It’ll be two nights and two days’ worth of me yakking about the book, Christian culture and criticism of both.

March 30 & 31, I’ll head back to Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., for the biennial Festival of Faith & Music. I wrote about the last one in the book, and I’m looking forward to, among other things, uncomfortable dinner conversation with David Dark. I’m going to present a workshop (working title: “Ironic Mind Meets Literal Mind: Does pop culture owe Christian culture anything?”)

I stole the precolonic idea from Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great , an advance copy of which I’m reading and the title of which is self-explanatory. With the success of Sam Harris’ books and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (No. 17 on Amazon!), the appetite for these books seems to beg for a cover story in Time, at the very least. At my paper we’d give it a headline like “Creata Hatas,” but I’m sure they’ll do something classier.

Hey, I’m sorry if your comment hasn’t shown up, or if I deleted it accidentally; this blog gets about 50 spam comments a week, and I try to stay on top of it, but sometimes the “mark all as spam” button gets pretty tempting. There’s an email address here if you hunt around; please let me know if I inadvertently blocked you.

These parodies of the Mac vs. PC ads, featuring a schlubby, cool “Christ Follower” in the former role and a straitlaced, dorky “Christian” in the latter, aren’t as awful as they sound on paper. (I’m partial to No. 3, which tackles Christian rock.) Still, I can’t imagine them changing anyone’s mind–they seem more geared toward reinforcing “cool” Christians’ feelings of superiority toward their matching-belt-and-shoes brethren (come to think of it, Mac users–of which I’m one–are an amazingly apt comparison, smugness-wise).

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?

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.

You know, defaults by nature suck, but what better title for your first blog post than “Hello, World!” (the default on Wordpress)? I’m hoping it’ll seem like some wry, meta comment on blog culture, but seriously, I couldn’t think of anything better. And anyway, if you used Google Calendar, and you ran across a band with the name Dinner at Pancho’s, you’d smile, wouldn’t you, knowing you had something in common with them?

Hi, my name is Andrew Beaujon, and Body Piercing Saved My Life is my first book. This project began two years ago with a conversation at Thai Diner Too in Richmond, Virginia, with my friends Jim and Beth Coe, both of whom grew up loving, to some degree, Christian music. Jim had just finished divinity school at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond and had decided that he didn’t want to become a clergyman after all. Those reasons are best explained by him, but he was enthusiastic about my interest in Christian music. He wasn’t trying to convert me to Christianity (as I say in the book, I consider atheism to be too much of a commitment); he was just trying to explain a segment of American culture that I didn’t know anything about.

He told me about the Cornerstone Festival, and then he loaned me a tray of CDs from a church whose youth group he was running. I grew ever-more fascinated with this world of music so close to the one I covered but still rarely reported on in a non-snide way by the non-Christian media. Moreover, I kept finding out that more and more people I knew had Christian-rock pasts, or even presents. I looked for a book that would explain the whole phenomenon to me.

And that’s where the idea of me writing this book really began. I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t written by Christians who loved Christian rock or Christians who hated Christian rock. Wouldn’t it be interesting, I thought, for a non-Christian such as myself to try to learn about Christian pop culture?

The first step was figuring out if there really was a story here. So I pitched a story to the Washington Post on Cornerstone, and my editor, Peter Kaufman, went for it, with the caveat that he wasn’t interested in a piece making fun of people who believed in something. You tell me how I did. That became my philosophy for writing this book: Even though I encountered plenty of things worth poking fun at, I tried to approach the subject with respect, even when I found something to criticize. I hope you agree.

Body Piercing Saved My Life is the result of a year of research following that article’s publication in July 2004. I visited a youth-oriented megachurch in Seattle, learned about drinking blood out of skulls in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and nearly had an existential breakdown on a fairground in Florida when I saw just one singer/songwriter too many. It wasn’t always a good time, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything; I feel like in the past two years I’ve learned another language, one that half of America speaks. And I’ve also made some pretty good friends, whom I hope will remain that way once they’ve read the book.

This site, designed by my good friend and fellow former Richmonder Paul Goode, will serve as a place for me and anyone who’s interested to talk about the book, to read what other people in the media are saying about it, and to look at photos from the book research and from the next year while I try to get people to buy this thing. I hope the website will be fun for everyone involved (if not, I’ll go back to learning how to play golf).

Alexandria, Va., Mother’s Day 2006