95 North. . . The Newspaper

Hiss Golden Messenger is the musical moniker for singer/songwriter MC Taylor. In 2010, he released a stark, acoustic based album entitled Bad Debt . The album is full of late night brooding. . . a kitchen table lit by candles and a baby sleeping in the other room. The kinda dark hours where you're soul bursts, explores some dark territory, and scans all corners of the mind, trying to map meaning. The best of the batch of songs featured on Bad Debt is represented by "Jesus Shot me in the Head". A provocative title, for sure, meant to convey the radical act and nature of an instantaneous religious conversion experience. Here, the metaphor of salvation- or dying to your old self- comes in the form of Jesus' killing off one's old self, in order to be "born again". Often, born again conversion experiences are preceded by a life lived on the low, which is accurately described here- the rough friends, the Motel 6, the drugs, the drinking. . .it's all pa...

About two weeks ago, I attended church the day directly after the Pride parade in Middletown, CT. I tend to remember bits and pieces of the sermon each week, and what stuck with me this particular Sunday was this proclamation: "shame is the number one inhibitor of joy in our lives". That message was relevant in light of the weeks festivities. First Church had a large presence on Main Street in Middletown for the Pride event, including but not limited to a booth, a float/marchers, and the handing out of stickers that read "God Loves You- and so do we". A brochure read "A little off Main St. . . in more ways than one", which represents a clever hint that weds our location (Court st, right off Main) and the church's bold open and affirming stance to all sexual and gender identities. This celebration of the full spectrum of humanity, one that inched my heart forward towards possessing a sort of general love and acceptance of all people, brought to ...

"This is what it means to be human “in the image of God.” It means being free to make choices instead of doing whatever our instincts would tell us to do. It means knowing that some choices are good, and others are bad, and it is our job to know the difference.” “We totally misunderstand what it means to be alive when we think of our lives as time we can use in search of rewards and pleasure. Frantically and in growing frustration, we search through our days, our years, looking for the reward, for the success that will make our lives worthwhile, like the security guard looking through the trash in the wheelbarrow for something of value and all the while missing the obvious answer. When you have learned how to live, life itself is the reward.” -Rabbi Harold Kushner

Famed North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham passed away recently. Although I didn't always agree with Graham's theological beliefs, I always admired him for his conviction and heart. A few years ago when I was living in Charlotte, NC, I even went to take a peek at his museum. Something about the guy always fascinated me.  He eschewed big money and television in favor of good ol' preaching. When he made mistakes he owned up to them.  Bob Dylan might've of put it best: "The guy was like rock n' roll personified- volatile, explosive. He had the hair, the tone, the elocution- when he spoke he brought the storm down. Clouds parted. Souls got saved. If you ever went to a Billy Graham rally, you were changed forever".  Below is a video of Graham addressing a bunch of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs. What he has to say is interesting:  Here's classic 70's Billy Graham- with the charisma to light up the screen and the funny way o...

I recently read Finding God in the Waves , a spiritual memoir by Mike McHargue. In Waves  McHargue explores the story of his own Christian faith, documenting his journey from good ol' Southern Baptist boy to atheism, all the way back to Christianity again.  The book is peppered with neuroscience, as McHargue attempts to square his spiritual experiences with what we know about the brain. The book is largely divided into three parts: McHargue's upbringing and comfortable evangelicalism, his subsequent (secret) conversion to atheism, and finally, his merging of science and faith, brought on by a mystical experience early in the morning on the beach. Needless to say, I recommend this book for anyone who has struggled to square religion with doubt, science, and what we know empirically about the world. My favorite quotes are below: On Prayer : "These days, my intercessory prayers are an act of surrender- a way to voice my hopes and my hopelessness, my power and ...

If you haven't heard SZA sing, run over to the record store and give her album CTRL a spin. Soon enough, you'll discover that she's created the freshest album in R&B since Solange's 2016 masterpiece A Seat at the Table , which I wrote about  here . While Solange's masterpiece focused on playing the long game, with drawn-out beats, lingering baselines, and vocal meditations that looked deep into the past, in many ways, SZA is the complete opposite. Her music is fresh. Immediate. Emotions? Raw. She's even sometimes crude. The world that makes up her songs is entirely relatable and real. She ponders work, being late to work, eating tacos, obsessing over TV shows, jealousy, emotional insecurity, carnal pleasures, sadness, joy, Las Vegas, New Jersey,  and everything else in between. In other words, it covers the same terrain the Bible does. As Cat Power once said, "and I'm not kidding". A few key songs: "Supermodel"  is drenched in ...

Uncle Tupelo What do you value more in music- the sound music itself or the lyrics?  Of course, the answer is somewhere in between. Or maybe somewhere else. It's all about tone, spirit, and meaning. A sense of life. The following instrumental track from alt-country friends  Uncle Tupelo fits the bill. This acoustic jam finds its joy mixed in with a touch of aching sadness, a tone that reminds us that life is short, and it is to be lived purposefully. Somehow, Uncle T was able to communicate that truth by just playing instruments- the acoustic guitar, the banjo, the bass and the drums. As Bob Dylan ironically sings in "Standing in the Doorway" there's "nothing to be gained by any explanation/ no words need to be said". Sometimes the music just has the right inflection. The right motion to give you just what you need. Take from it what you will- this one's a giver.  " Living is not a contest of duration, but a pageant of meaning. . . ...

The first songs I loved in life were Christian songs. Looking back, it makes sense to me that one of the first Bob Dylan songs I was blown away by was " Father of Night " off of 1970's New Morning . I later took to the music of Leonard Cohen, I'm sure in part, because of the spiritual themes embedded deep in his voice. In Cohen's songs, God is Grand Central Station. Everything runs through a spiritual understanding of the world. It's been said that Cohen never "met a religion he didn't like". I kinda feel the same way. I identify as a Christian-that is my inherited faith tradition, and the paradigm I view the world through. While I no longer label myself as an evangelical (sorry there's too much to discuss there) as I don't subscribe to the  atonement theory  or believe in hell, there's still so much in the Christian tradition that deeply resonates with me every day. Like hymns, otherwise known as songs of incredible depth and bea...

If you're at all interested in Bob Dylan's newest upcoming bootleg series release, you can listen to a sampler  here  thanks to NPR. I've long admired the music of Bob Dylan's so-called "gospel" era, and am fully ready to pay an arm n' a leg to listen to over 100 songs, view a concert film, and read a booklet with detailed liner notes. I've listened to some of these previously unheard live cuts- and I can say this: The band is a tight, loud, chugging unit that throws exclamation points on Bob's fiery furnace preaching and passionate, heartfelt singing. There'll always be an urgency in your music if you think the apocalypse is near. For an artist like Bob Dylan, that apocalypse, whether it was metaphorical or not, pushed him to new heights. The stinging lines of the guitar, the wooden floorboards, the overblown PA systems-ever song has a setting, and in the few I've heard, Bob'll take you there. My previous entries of Dylan...

A cold dark night on the Spanish stairs. Stage 5? I came across the idea a few weeks ago, and I think in many ways it has reshaped my thinking about religion and spirituality. Or perhaps it has helped set parameters and given shape to something that I felt was already there. I think this concept- developed by Scott Peck- is worth considering. I see a bit of myself scattered in all the stages. It's important to note that this idea should be seen as more of a tool for thinking about religion and spirituality, rather than something that should be taken as absolute truth. In other words, I think it enriches and adds to the conversation. It isn't to be all end all theory that everyone and everything fits neatly into.

I really like this poem by Shel Silverstein. Sure, it is a children's poem, but Shel dives into some deep water here. In reading it, I am reminded of Rabbi Harold Kushner's  insight into the Biblical Adam and Eve story. According to the Christian narrative I had long heard, the story went something like this: Adam and Eve were created by God. They were perfect, without sin, and enjoyed life in the garden of Eden. Then, one day, a snake (Satan in disguise) came along and tempted Adam to eat an apple from the tree of "knowledge". God didn't want them to eat from this tree, however, Adam and Eve did so anyway. Humans had sinned, and everyone born on earth after that point was born into "sin", and thus needed saving from it  in the form of atonement (first in the form of sacrifices and later in the form of Jesus). However, after reading some more about the Jewish tradition and it's take on the creation narrative, a few things became clear: 1) that t...

One day, after you've lived for years in another state, you'll pull down the street of your childhood home. Only after a significant time of living away are you able to perceive, for the first time, that street so clearly. You will finally make some sense out of that street. You will make sense out of something you once never thought needed to make sense of, something you just accepted, and at once point, probably criticized and belittled. The poet T.S. Eliot put this idea in a poem in a more efficient manner than I: "At the end of all our exploration/ We will arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time" ( Little Gidding ). Replace your childhood street with your childhood religion, and you get G.K. Chesterton's great account of the Christian faith, entitled "Orthodoxy". I don't know much about G.K. Chesterton, other than he was a journalist in late Victorian era England and was sort of a generalist. He wrote plenty about ...

For the theologically minded, some quotes from Abraham Joshua Heschel: On Biblical Literalism: "The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long distance telephone. The error or literal mindedness is in assuming that things and words have only one meaning. " Judaism & the Everyday: “This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.”  Lastly: As always, I feel like it is important to paraphrase Rabbi Harold Kushner when thinking about God: God is an abstract idea, not a person or a thing or a singular entity. If we ask when is God, not where is God, then we are asking the right question. 

Below, there's clip of Bob playing live in Toronto, 1980, during the height of his gospel era. Here, the manner in which Bob leads the band into the song "Solid Rock" is truly mesmerizing. Black leather jacket Bob preaches from the mountaintops, proclaiming that he has a "solid rock to hang on to". This solid rock, or Jesus,  is "manifested in the flesh", "seen by angels", and "preached on in the world". Tambourines hiss in the background, and the band slowly roars like a lion cut loose by the Holy Spirit, as Bob make the seamless transition from preaching to singing. See it all below as Bob speaks of the supernatural: Looking for more gems from Bob's gospel era?  Check out this "forgotten" song.

The Forgotten Gospel Song? "I Ain't Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody", which was written sometime in 1980 and never formally released. This jaunty gospel, hell-fire spittin' tune has a page on Bob Dylan's website, but no lyrics are listed. Perhaps Bob has felt that he's embarrassed that he once espoused such a dogmatic religious claims, or maybe he now feels he was too hard on himself and left room for only guilt, not mercy. In this song, Bob also claims he can "write and steal as well as anybody", so it's possible that his lawyers advised the lyrics to this tune be taken down, given Dylan's accusations of plagiarism over the years. In any event, these are all possibilities as to why the lyrics are not provided on Bob's website. The song features an introspective Dylan, reviewing his sins and acknowledging his failures with full vulnerability, proclaiming that he's after integrity before the easy approval of others and his own mu...

I just finished reading a fantastic book by Rabbi Harold Kushner of Natrick, MA, called 9 Essential things I learned about Life . It was so compelling that I'm currently tearing through another book of his that presents a case for Judaism and it's ability to lift human life above its sometimes boring or dreadful circumstances and into something holistic and life affirming. This particular book is called To Life: A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking .  Reading Kushner's book has made me appreciate Judaism's emphasis on community and real action over belief and personal will. It's long list of rituals and laws elevate normal life to the extraordinary, and have the built in effect of making humans fully aware of their humanity and their capacity to act morally. Importantly, Kushner takes the Bible to be true but not literally true. For example, he does not believe that the world was created in 6 days, but rather views the creation story as a poetic myth that ...

Memere: French Canadian/positive/New-Bedford raised/loved nature. closely connected: nature, weather, and our emotions and memories