By Erik Pederson

“Alice Cooper, whose theatricality is the stuff of legend, is the perfect rock star to play Herod in our live production,” said Robert Greenblatt, Chairman of NBC Entertainment. “Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice wrote a showstopping musical number for Herod, and we all look forward to the ‘King of Shock Rock’ taking on the King of Judea.”
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As the polarizing King Herod might have said 2,000 years ago: No more Mr. Nice Guy. Or, perhaps, welcome to my nightmare. NBC said today that Alice Cooper — yes, that Alice Cooper — will play the ruler of Judea in its Easter Sunday production of Jesus Christ Superstar Live!
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Cooper has fronted his eponymous band for five decades and is known for wild, twisted concerts that include snakes, mock beheadings and lots of blood. The group has released more than two dozen studios albums, several of which went platinum  including the 1973 chart-topper Billion Dollar Babies and its 1972 predecessor School’s Out.
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As an actor, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Cooper has appeared in numerous films and TV series including a brief but memorable role in Wayne’s World (“We’re not worthy!”) and playing the Sun King in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — in which the band played a decidedly warped take on the Beatles’ “Because.” He also played himself in the 2012 Johnny Depp starrer Dark Shadows.

Click HERE to read entire article

By Steve Beard

It will be well worth watching the reaction to Snoop Dogg’s gospel album, “Bible of Love,” when it is released next month. Supporters and detractors of the world-famous rapper and music producer are sure to be in for a certifiable off-speed pitch delivered from the hip-hop legend. The 32-track double album will feature Faith Evans, Tye Tribbet, the Clark Sisters, and Rance Allen – as well as his mother, Beverly Tate, an evangelist. The album is scheduled to be released March 16th.

“It’s always been on my heart. I just never got around to it because I always be doing ‘gangsta’ business or doing this or doing that,” he said during an interview with Beats 1 Radio. “I just felt like it’s been on my heart too long. I need to do it now.”

Snoop Dogg attended the NFL-sanctioned Super Bowl Gospel Celebration at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota on Thursday, February 1.

“The record’s all about love from start to finish,” Snoop Dogg told the Bethel Clarion. “That’s the way you change the world, by putting love in it.”

The Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, center, in 1961 with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and another King aide, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, in Montgomery, Ala. Getty.

By Fernanda Santos

The Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, who was chief of staff to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a key strategist behind civil rights protests that turned the tide against racial injustice in the Jim Crow South of the 1960s, died early on Tuesday at an assisted-living facility near his home in Chester, Va. He was 88.
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“I was fully committed to nonviolence, and I believe with all my heart that for the civil rights movement to prove itself, its nonviolent actions had to work in Birmingham,” he continued. “If it wasn’t for Birmingham, there wouldn’t have been a Selma march, there wouldn’t have been a 1965 civil rights bill. Birmingham was the birthplace and affirmation of the nonviolent movement in America.”

Dr. Walker helped circulate “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” one of the most important documents of the civil rights movement, in which Dr. King argued for civil disobedience as a legitimate response to racial segregation. He also helped organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which culminated with Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
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St. Vincent. Photo: Chris Willman

By Chris Willman, Variety

Is St. Vincent our only real current female rock star? There’s a case to be made for her singularity, if we’re talking “rock star” not in the Post Malone sense, or even the Gaga/Pink/Madonna model of a pop goddess with rock attitude, but a star who actually plays rock and roll… and who’s leading it into the future, not reliving glory days. In these lean times for the genre, if there has to be just one, it’s a handy thing to have Annie Clark filling the position: She’s got enough style, ambition, chops, and complications for a half-dozen rock auteurs.
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You might hesitate to append “female” to St. Vincent’s status as a rock star — they’re rare enough in either gender nowadays — but there’s something thrilling about the way she plays with gender archetypes that makes the tag feel not so superfluous. There haven’t been many times in history when a rocker could first appear on the stage in what Clark refers to as her “bunny outfit” — puffy neckband and armbands, vinyl-looking bustier and leotard, thigh-high boots, all rabid pink — and not have to fear she wouldn’t be taken seriously. With her outfits, her slightly racy new album cover, and some stage videos that have her looking like a more demure model or housewife out of the ‘60s, you get the idea she’s using herself as a palette to playfully toy with our or her own ideas of what counts as feminine, feminist, or fierce.

Read Chris Willman’s entire article HERE.

By Dwain Head, Arkansas Catholic

St. Francis of Assisi is credited with the familiar directive, “Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.”

It’s unlikely that St. Francis meant to use hip checks and elbow pads, but then he didn’t say not to, either. And thus, these have become the tools of Catholic campus minister Kasey Miller’s trade as KC/DC, a member of the Rock Town Roller Derby club.

“A lot of things I’ve learned in derby have helped me empower and encourage my students and vice versa,” she said. “It helps me be more fully myself.”

To read entire article, click HERE

By Steve Beard

Her spiritual journey began by asking about a tattoo of Jesus on the wrist of a client. Aimee Burke cuts and styles hair in a hipster neighborhood in Toronto. “She partied a lot and was partial to coke,” reports The Globe and Mail, one of the largest newspapers in Canada. “Her hookups comprised partners both male and female. She was unhappy.”

The question about the image of Christ was the spark that first got Burke to visit church. “I’m pretty sure I went to the service hungover from the night before,” she recalled. But she found herself weeping during the service. “I just felt less empty,” she recalled.

As she looked around, Burke realized she was surrounded by people her age talking about God – “but they looked like people I could party with,” she recalled. “I felt like I could be myself right away.”

Burke’s turnaround is a refreshingly unconventional conversion story, especially splashed on the pages of a newspaper in a country where the numbers of those who reject faith are on the rise. According to the news magazine Maclean’s, the percentage of Canadians rejecting religion (26 percent) is nearly the number of those embracing it (30 percent) with 45 percent saying they were “somewhere in between.”

“As the Christians would say, I’ve surrendered over my life,” Burke said. “I do everything. I pray in the morning, I pray at night, I read my Bible every day. … Now I’m waiting for marriage. I’ve been sober for almost two years.”

As anyone who has battled with addiction or alcohol dependency can testify, this is an enormous lifestyle transformation. While church attendance numbers are not on the upswing for young men and women in Burke’s age demographic, there is still a detectable spiritual hunger. “I think people are looking for something to believe in,” Burke observed, “even if it’s just themselves.”

According to the story, the C3 Church service (formerly known as Christian City Church) has an upbeat vibe that attracts a younger generation of those living in Toronto. “It is making worshippers out of people who might otherwise have spent their Sundays scrolling through Tinder in a coffee shop,” reports Eric Andrew-Gee of The Globe and Mail. There are nearly a dozen C3 congregations in Canada and more than 450 around the world.

“The big thing here is people come and they don’t feel pressured to be anything other than who they are,” said Jonathan Li, 30, another C3 parishioner. “It’s more about having people to do life together. I think people are a lot lonelier these days, even with social media. … I think there’s a false sense of connectedness there.”

The accepting nature of the congregation appears to be one of the key draws to C3. For seekers like Aimee Burke, the congregation allowed her to feel like she could be herself, without feeling “self-condemned.”

All the jokes about saying Hail Marys when she swears at work are worth it, she told the newspaper. “This is going to sound really Christian-y,” she said, “but it felt like the chains came off of me.”

It may sound religious – but it also sounds authentic. And for Ms. Burke’s generation, that is a top-shelf priority and a story that rings true.

To read Eric Andrew-Gee’s entire article in The Globe and Mail, click HERE.

By Christopher Fenoglio

The more I read and learn about John Wesley’s convictions, hard work, and austere lifestyle, the more I believe Methodism’s founder could have made an excellent Jedi.

(CNS photo/Arben Celi, Reuters).

By Cameron Dezen Hammon, America

Dolores O’Riordan, the lead singer of the Irish band The Cranberries, was born in County Limerick to a Catholic mother who named her for Our Lady of the Seven Dolours (or Sorrows), in 1971. She was born with a disposition suited to her namesake, a fact revealed in her bouts with depression and rage, poetry and punk rock. She was born four years and five days before I was, but we shared a disposition.

When I first heard Dolores’s voice, the delicate, brogue-inflected mezzo issuing from the radio of a street vendor or taxicab, I was struggling with my own sorrows. I was 18 and Dolores was just 23. She was a singer in a band, on the radio. I was a bulimic, a wannabe poet who had yet to put my two discernible skills—singing and writing—together to any effect. But watching Dolores do it—watching her front the band and write the songs (thesong), even if from afar—made me believe that I could do it also.

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Linger was unlike anything else on the radio in 1993—and was nothing like the muscular “Zombie” that would closely follow it. No, Linger had an affect of angels, and so did Dolores’s look then—the much-copied pixie haircut and ’40s movie star eyebrows, the dark lipstick. She was Dickensian, if Dickens had written a Gaelic warrior-waif, a hero with a voice that could thrill and comfort. She seemed like a person in the temporal world but somehow not of it.

To read entire column, click HERE

Photo: Yui Mok

Dolores O’Riordan, lead singer of the Irish band the Cranberries, died Monday in London. She was 46. The Cranberries’ Noel and Mike Hogan and Fergal Lawler said, “We are devastated on the passing of our friend Dolores. She was an extraordinary talent and we feel very privileged to have been part of her life from 1989 when we started the Cranberries. The world has lost a true artist today.”

The Irish Times notes that the Cranberries were forced to cancel tour dates in 2017 due to O’Riordan’s ill health; the band cited “medical reasons associated with a back problem.” O’Riordan had also been diagnosed as bi-polar in 2014.

President of Ireland Michael Higgins said in a statement, “It is with great sadness that I have learned of the death of Dolores O’Riordan, musician, singer and song writer. Dolores O’Riordan and The Cranberries had an immense influence on rock and pop music in Ireland and internationally. I recall with fondness the late Limerick TD Jim Kemmy’s introduction of her and The Cranberries to me, and the pride he and so many others took in their successes. To all those who follow and support Irish music, Irish musicians and the performing arts her death will be a big loss.”

“The band are floored but it’s of course her family we’re all thinking of right now,” U2 said in a statement. “Out of the West came this storm of a voice – she had such strength of conviction, yet she could speak to the fragility in all of us. Limerick’s ‘Bel canto.'”

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She was raised as a Catholic. Her mother chose her daughter’s name in honour of Our Lady of the Dolours. Ms O’Riordan admired Pope John Paul II. After meeting him, Ms O’Riordan said: “(He) was lovely, very saintly. I was mad about him. I thought he really cared for the poor and he loved to meet the people. I saw him when he came to Limerick, when I was a kid. So it was pretty mindblowing to take my mum out to meet him.” She met Pope John Paul II twice, in 2001 and 2002.

She performed at the invitation of Pope Francis in 2013 at the Vatican’s Christmas concert. Ms O’Riordan said in 2013 her faith as one of her greatest musical influences. “The Church influenced a lot of my development as an artist and as a musician. I learned an awful lot of my music through the church and stuff like that. For me It’s always been a good thing, a positive thing in my life,” she said.

To read the Rolling Stone article, click HERE.

To read the Catholic Leader article, click HERE.