<![CDATA[It's a signpost of any trend's maturity when it becomes unshackled by the genre conventions that previously came to define it. Hip-hop has gone through this plenty of times… hip-hop started as party music, created by DJs who played beat breaks over and over and amused the crowd with rhyming chants, then it turned into…

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<![CDATA[With her latest record, recording artist and worship leader Nikki Lerner is aiming to get some things off her chest. Not in the I’m-angry-and-I-just-need-to-vent sense, but in the these-are-the-things-I-think-about-all-the-time-but-now-I’m-actually-going-to-say-them-out-loud sense … hence the album’s title, The Things We Never Say. And my sense, after both listening to the record and talking to her directly (FULL DISCLOSURE: she…

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<![CDATA[Today, October 1st, I updated my Facebook status thusly: Sometime around 1988, an enterprising urban pastor asked his youngest son to put together a rap for an outreach event. He dutifully complied, and although it was kind of awkward and he didn’t have any beats so he had to use his favorite EPMD instrumental, the…

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<![CDATA[GUEST POST! My good friend Amanda Pifer, who has some experience in and with the Quiverfull / homeschooling movement, decided she had some things to say about the ongoing Josh Duggar fiasco, who was recently back in the news for having been outed in the Ashley Madison leak. She let loose today on Facebook, and…

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<![CDATA[Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is out in theaters, and it dutifully fills all the boxes in the spy thriller checklist. Lifelike masks? Death-defying stunts? Car chases? Gunplay and physical combat? Glamorous locales? Check, check, checkity-pop-zoom-bam-BOOM. One thing that stuck with me was the title; an interesting development, because action movie titles are…

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<![CDATA[So for those who don't know, occasionally I do comedy. And I like it. And people, by and large, enjoy when I do it. So why don’t I do it more often?   I get this question a lot, and in fact, I ask myself this question a lot. Or at least I used to, when…

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<![CDATA[To Whom It May Concern,*   Ladies and gentlemen, the Confederate flag, a symbol of southern pride and heritage for generations, is under attack. Because of one isolated incident with a mentally ill young man who just happened to be seen with the flag several days before gunning down nine African-Americans at a random church, suddenly…

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<![CDATA[#GamesSoWhite. If you don't play video games, this hashtag probably hasn't crossed your social media feed… or if it has, you may not understand what it means or why it exists. Such is the challenge of any kind of hashtag activism — it’s difficult to have meaningful exchanges when limited to 140 characters or less. Consequently,…

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<![CDATA[ This is a poem that I wrote during a guided writing exercise led by Seth Haines at this year’s Faith & Culture Writers Conference at Warner Pacific College. I do not write many poems, but this one came to me as I gazed outside and watched the wind blow.

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