Features
Negative numbers: The decline narrative reaches evangelicals
Popular music
Modern Vampires of the City, by Vampire Weekend. The chamber-pop quartet’s third LP finds the band in a more introspective state than the Afropop-infused bounce of its earlier albums. If the effect is a sometimes sleepier sound, it also results in the group’s most stylistically varied set of songs. Ezra Koenig’s dense lyrics remain sneakily profound, but here he largely turns his attention away from the group’s usual Salingeresque prep-school characters and toward matters of faith.
The witness of sinners: Theologian Jennifer McBride on the nontriumphal church
Classical music
Preludes and Dreams, Lera Auerbach, piano. Lera Auerbach, a Russian Jew who has lived in the United States for over 20 years, is not only a pianist but a visual artist and award-winning poet. She is the creator of an impressive number of large-scale works such as the ballet The Little Mermaid and the recent Ode to Peace. Preludes and Dreams, an album of piano pieces completed between 1999 and 2003, is typical of Auerbach’s idiom.
Books
Present Shock, by Douglas Rushkoff
Do smartphones make us smarter? Have breakthroughs in communications technology improved the quality of our lives? Media guru Douglas Rushkoff takes these questions on.
Anti-Judaism, by David Nirenberg
David Nirenberg has produced a highly learned intellectual history of anti-Judaism that is also lively, engaging and accessible.
Making Jesus look good
As with many memoirists, Bolz-Weber's personal faults beget literary ones. Yet our regard for the narrator becomes less important than our regard for Christ.
Poetry
History
Young adult fiction
Fiction
Theology/spirituality
Departments
All nature sings
She’s every woman
Life after high school
Adoration of the Shepherds, by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448–1494)
Gifts of the table
