Larry Norman. Kristy Douglas/Courtesy of the Larry Norman Estate

By Sarah McCammon

Upon the release of his first album Upon This Rock in 1969, Larry Norman unwittingly created the billion-dollar industry of Christian rock. Author Gregory Alan Thornbury is sure that if Norman were alive today, the musician would have despaired at the state of the genre and evangelicalism.

Thornbury’s latest book Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?: Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock, out now, chronicles the life of the evangelical singer and his divergence from the audience he sought to reach.

Norman’s name is cemented among other famous evangelicals of the 1970s like Billy Graham and President Jimmy Carter. Even Vice President Mike Penceremembers “[giving] his life to Jesus Christ” at the 1978 Ichthus Music Festival in Wilmore, Kentucky, which Norman headlined.

“Over the years I’ve been listening to it, I’ve come to see Larry Norman’s voice as a machine for killing complacency in religious people, and it is my sincere hope that this book does the same,” writes Thornbury in the biography.

To read entire article, click HERE.

By Maggie Hendricks

“OK, this is it, girls.”

With 41 seconds left in Loyola-Chicago’s Sweet 16 game with Nevada, Sister Mary Fran McLaughlin points out just how close the game is — just like Loyola’s two previous games in this unexpected NCAA Tournament run.

She and two other retired Sisters of the Charity of Blessed Virgin Mary are focused on the flat screen television in their apartment on the northwest side of Chicago, about nine miles from the campus that has become the center of the city’s attention — as much for a charismatic, feisty nun as the basketball team.

“There’s our girl!” said Sister Peggy Geraghty as the camera pans to a friend they’ve known for 50 years.

Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt, a fellow BVM and the chaplain for Loyola’s men’s basketball team, is greeting well-wishers at the game in Atlanta. Jean Dolores as they call her, has become the runaway star of the Ramblers’ run, which thanks to a 69-68 win over Nevada has extended to the Elite Eight, and Saturday to the Final Four after their victory over Kansas State.

Read entire story HERE.

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it,” observed the late great Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She was truly one of our most spectacular American writers and the patron saint of Southern Gothic writing with the craziest assortment of grotesque and odd characters. Today would have been her birthday. She blew me away with “Parker’s Back,” a short story about O.E. Parker’s search for love and acceptance of a woman by getting a full back tattoo of the face of Christ. It didn’t turn out as he had planned. She was a skillful and soulful storyteller. When asked by the New York Times a few years ago what “one book that made you who you are today,” Bruce Springsteen responded: “One would be difficult, but the short stories of Flannery O’Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day. They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us.” Sadly, she died at the age of 39 of lupus. Grateful for her gift. Happy Birthday, Flannery.

Happy Birthday to Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973). The holy rolling, guitar swinging, hymn singer who arguably gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll was buried in an unmarked grave for more than 35 years. Today, the high-octane godmother of rock is finally getting the recognition and respect she deserves. For fans of Sister Rosetta – my rockabilly buddies exposed me to her back in the mid-1980s – the posthumous crown and throne of adulation is bittersweet. She will finally be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 14. Her innovative guitar playing – finger picking solos and windmill strumming – was pioneering. Her fans included Elvis, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bob Dylan. In 1942, Billboard Magazine called her music “rock-and-roll spiritual singing” – a decade before the phrase was commonplace. Today, her tombstone properly declares: “She would sing until you cried and then she would sing until you danced for joy. She helped to keep the church alive and the saints rejoicing.” Happy Birthday, Sister Rosetta! Thanks for bring the sound.

David McClister for the Guardian

By Simon Hattenstone

Guardian, August 8, 2015

Lewis almost became a preacher himself, enrolling at the Southwestern Bible Institute in Texas. But rock’n’roll got the better of him. When he turned from hymns to boogie-woogie, he was expelled. Ever since, this has been the dichotomy in Lewis’s life: a man raised on the threat of hell, fire, damnation, who could not resist the lure of the devil’s own music.

When I mention this today, he’s not having any of it. Say something’s white to Lewis, and he’ll swear it’s black. “How can it be the devil’s music? Satan didn’t give me the talent. God gave me the talent, and I’ve always told people that.”

Yet listen to an early recording made at Sun Studios, and he’s railing at boss Sam Phillips, half crazed with the notion that he has the devil inside him. There is also a famous story that he asked Presley if he believed a rock’n’roller could go to heaven.

Lewis smiles when I mention this. “I said, ‘Elvis, I’m going to ask you one thing before we part company here. If you die, do you think you’d go to heaven or hell?’ And he got real red in the face, and then he got real white in the face, and he said, ‘Jerry Lee, don’t you ever say that to me agin.’ I said, ‘Well, I won’t even say it to you again.’ Hahahaha!” He laughs, mockingly, at Elvis’s country accent. “He was very frightened.”

But Elvis wasn’t the only one who thought about hell? Lewis nods. “I was always worried whether I was going to heaven or hell,” he concedes. “I still am. I worry about it before I go to bed; it’s a very serious situation. I mean you worry, when you breathe your last breath, where are you going to go?”
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How many times a day does he pray? “Just about as many hours as there are in the day, I pray. I pray all the time.”

“He talks to God like he’s just talking to you, it’s amazing,” Judith says.

Is death something he fears? “No, I’m not too much on fear. Well, I love God, I love Jesus Christ, and I worship the precious, precious, precious Holy Ghost. But I love living, breathing, I thank God for that all the time.”

To read entire article, click HERE

By Carol Glatz
Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who said he did not believe in God, was still an esteemed member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and fostered a fruitful dialogue between science and faith. The academy, which Pope Pius IX established in 1847, tweeted, “We are deeply saddened about the passing of our remarkable Academician Stephen #Hawking who was so faithful to our Academy.”
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Pope St. John Paul named Hawking a member of the papal academy in 1986. The academy’s members are chosen on the basis of their academic credentials and professional expertise – not religious beliefs.

Blessed Paul VI, the first of four popes to meet Hawking, gave the then 33-year-old scientist the prestigious Pius XI gold medal in 1975 after a unanimous vote by the academy in recognition of his great work, exceptional promise and “important contribution of his research to scientific progress.”
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In interviews and his writings, Hawking asserted that God had no role in creating the universe. Yet his avowed atheism did not keep him from engaging in dialogue and debate with the Church as his work and contribution to the papal academy showed….

Vatican astronomer, Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, who has studied both physics and philosophy, told Catholic News Service in 2010 that “the ‘god’ that Stephen Hawking doesn’t believe in is one I don’t believe in either.”

“God is not just another force in the universe, alongside gravity or electricity,” he added. “God is the reason why existence itself exists. God is the reason why space and time and the laws of nature can be present for the forces to operate that Stephen Hawking is talking about.”

Read entire article HERE.

Lee Strobel

Do you believe in miracles? “Half of Americans (51 percent) said they believe the miracles of the Bible happened as they are described,” Lee Strobel argues. “Two out of three (67 percent) said miracles are possible today…. Nearly two out of five US adults (38 percent) said they have had an experience that they can only explain as being a miracle of God.”

Jonathan Merritt of Religion News Service provides an informative interview with Strobel, a journalist-turned-minister and author of the new book “The Case for Miracles: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Supernatural,” Here is one segment that caught my eye.

RNS: I’ve heard skeptics often say that to believe in “miracles” would be to deny science because, after all, miracles violate the established and observed laws of nature. How do you respond?

LS: Scottish skeptic David Hume called a miracle “a violation of the laws of nature” – and you can’t violate the laws of nature, right? Hume’s critique is still touted by skeptics today, but my book demonstrates that Hume’s approach is fatally flawed. In fact, philosophers have decimated Hume in recent years, as illustrated by the title of a recent book by a non-Christian scholar published by Oxford University Press: Hume’s Abject Failure.

Actually, miracles are not a violation of the laws of nature. For example, if I drop an apple, the law of gravity tells me it will hit the floor. But if I drop the apple and you reach in and grab it before it hits the floor, you haven’t violated the law of gravity – you’ve merely intervened. And that’s what God does in performing a miracle – he intervenes in the world that he created.

As philosopher William Lane Craig told me, natural laws have implicit ceteris paribus conditions, which is Latin for “all other things being equal.” In other words, natural laws assume that no other natural or supernatural factors are interfering with the operation that the law generally describes.

Craig explained that if there’s a supernatural agent that’s working in the natural world, then the idealized conditions described by the law are no longer in effect. The law isn’t violated because the law has this implicit provision that no outside forces are messing around with the conditions.

Read entire interview HERE.