When I was growing up in a white Southern working-class home, country music was simply the air we breathed. Even as a rock and roll-crazed teenager, I still...
Music
Read U.S. Catholic articles on music and faith, exploring how song, prayer, and creativity deepen spiritual life and community.
We face no shortage of celebrities who have responded to our troubled world with anger, with protest, or by joining the Resistance. Those who have responded...
Fifty years from now, if anyone still studies the humanities, perhaps there will be a great debate in the departments of cultural studies over who was the...
By and large, I am not a fan of pop music. Hip-hop, soul, blues, and grunge rock are more my style. But there I was on a cold and rainy Sunday night in May at...
It is not easy to summarize Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy and premiered as part of The Kennedy Center’s opening in 1971, it...
Anyone who has trouble grasping the notion that human nature is simultaneously divine and depraved just doesn’t know enough about the history of the popular...
Little ditty about Jack and Diane. Two American kids growin’ up in the heartland. John Mellencamp’s popular song makes me uneasy. Whenever it comes on the...
One of my core childhood memories is of singing at Mass. It’s neither a sappy nor a prayerful story, however. This was one of my rare moments of rebellion...
Everyone has a favorite Mass song. Maybe it’s “All Are Welcome,” that song you could never get out of your head after elementary school Mass. Or maybe...
On an exotic vacation our son took with my brother and sister-in-law, all travelers brought a playlist of five songs that said something about them. Fallen not...
