1 – Shallow Bed, Dry the River

This British band has been described as a combination of Fleet Foxes and Mumford & Sons. Though I’m not a fan of such lazy descriptions (they remind me of the one James Patterson novel I had the misfortune to read in college — he described an attacker swinging his knife “Psycho-style”), they do become valuable shorthand in a marketplace saturated with options. But Dry the River has a distinctive sound all their own (British quasi-folk songs about America), and their lyrics have a way of lingering long after the song has ended. Some have bemoaned the decidedly plugged-in feel of what was promoted as a folk album, so these guys didn’t miss a beat. The mesmerizing acoustic version of the album debuted last month and is well worth the price. Need one more reason to check these guys out? They sort of make beer.

2 – The Lion’s Roar, First Aid Kit

This was another album that never left rotation – Johanna and Klara Söderberg truly deliver on the promise of their solid 2010 debut The Big Black & The Blue. There’s a degree of confidence and maturity in these songs that stares into the warm glow of happiness only to often find it little more than a bittersweet memory. It’s a great album to play — whether driving home from work or trying to rock a baby to sleep. Listening to the determined search for salvation in this world that rings so desperately, and so timely, on “New Year’s Eve”, and I’ve got to think this album will be sticking around for a while.

3 – Life is People, Bill Fay

Some called this album a comeback for Fay, but he’s been quick to point out that one can only come back after arriving in the first place. Though he’s had fans in high places (e.g., Jeff Tweedy), Fay’s never quite found a large following. But with this new album, his first straight studio piece in over 40 years, that may change. These 12 songs, including a cover of Wilco’s “Jesus, Etc.“, rise up in a redemption narrative for our jaded age. “Every silly bar brawl, every fistfight, every bullet from a gun / is written upon the palms of the holy one,” he sings in “There Is A Valley“. His label promotes the album as deeply humanistic, but these songs are nothing short of a prayer.

4 – Lift Your Eyes to the Hills, Thayer Sarrano

I must admit I’d probably never have listened to Thayer Sarrano had I not seen her described as in the vein of Mazzy Star. But Sarrano surprised me beyond expectations. A relatively new voice on the Athens, GA music scene (she cut her teeth singing R.E.M. covers of course), this self-published album has a surprisingly spiritual bite. The album’s title comes from Psalm 121, which she describes as “a psalm my grandmother and I liked when I was little”, and the songs are filled with a gripping sense of the search. By the time you get to the halfway point, and Sarrano is strumming along to “I Miss My Lord”, she pulls you along in prayer as the “my” changes to “you” — and she never lets go.

5 – The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, Fiona Apple

Fiona Apple returned from a seven-year hiatus with her best album yet, and her cathartic defiance cries out from any attempt to even utter its overlong title in one breath. Apple’s never really been one to hold back, and she’s practically shouting from the confessional here: “That’s when the pain comes in / Like a second skeleton / Trying to fit beneath the skin / I can’t fit the feelings in”. This taut record explodes with an in-depth exploration of pain — both our ragged attempts to learn from the pain we feel and the hurt we bring to others. She taps into the darkness, yields to it in many ways, but there’s no doubt she’s better for it.

6 - Blunderbuss, Jack White

Jack White’s pretty much all over the place in his first solo album, and it comes together so well that much of what’s come before (The White Stripes, Dead Weather, The Raconteurs) suddenly feels like some kind of audition. White’s dabbled in a bit of everything, performing with and producing all sorts of artists over the years. What’s clear with Blunderbuss is that he’s been paying careful attention, honing his own voice.

7 – Boys & Girls, Alabama Shakes

Just when 2012 started to drag (i.e., ‘How many more months until this election is over?’), this little soul-rock gem came along with nothing less than the pure promise of “Hold On”. When Brittany Howard shouts to us, “Yeah — you got to wait!”, a meandering year sort of stumbled on an anthem.

8 – Wrecking Ball, Bruce Springsteen

Since the Boss holds a high place in my heart, I went through this album song-by-song back around the time it first came out. It’s definitely a gem — one that gets better with age. And some of what seemed stumbles on the record really came alive when Bruce and the band were on the stage. (It was a true gift this year to see this guy twice, including once in Philadelphia on blessed ground.) Even “We Take Care of Our Own” fills out, albeit in an acoustic set.

9 - The Carpenter, The Avett Brothers

In the hands of most modern songwriters, the graces of parenthood often turn to treacle. But in the hands of poets, the moments that change our lives become more than memories. Consider “A Father’s First Spring” on the Avett Brothers latest album: “The realest thing I ever felt/ Was the blood on the floor and the love in your yell/ I was a child before the day that I met Eleanor.” To hear that song while holding your infant daughter in your arms, well — let’s just say it takes you to a different place than “Butterfly Kisses.”

10 – To The Horses, Lanie Lane

Though technically this one came out toward the end of 2011, that was pretty much only in Australia. Jack White promoted Lanie Lane a little stateside with one of Third Man’s Blue Series singles, and it was a little tough to hunt this one down for a while. One listen though, and I was hooked.

And a little more quickly, here’s the rest of the best:

11 – Hell Dragon, Black Girls

Local boys made good. When “Broadway” starts and the No BS! Brass Band joins the groove, your head starts bobbing and you smile because these guys — they’re from Richmond.

12 – Bear Creek, Brandi Carlile

Just when you think Brandi Carlile’s due to start dialing in, out she comes with not only another gem of a record, but maybe even her most complete album to date.

13 – Django Django, Django Django

Sprinkle a little electronica pop with a surf vocal vibe and and you get something that makes you wonder why all the really decent pop bands keep coming out of Britain and Canada.

14 - Old Ideas, Leonard Cohen

When I first read the lyrics to “Going Home” in the New Yorker back at the beginning of 2012, I hoped for the best. When the album came out shortly thereafter, it was clear that the poet had put together his best work in 20 years.

15 – Slipstream, Bonnie Raitt

Bonnie Raitt’s latest album (produced by Joe Henry) ranks among her best, with a couple of glorious covers of some neo-classic Bob Dylan songs to boot.

16 – Carnivale Electricos, Galactic

With release date mp3 albums so cheap nowadays, this was the first of many album I ended up buying twice this year (e.g., later on vinyl). But it came out on Mardi Gras, so it wasn’t like I had a choice. And its infectious groove never lets up, even after Ash Wednesday.

17 – Strange Land, Yellow Ostrich

Yellow Ostrich’s second album finds the band, well, becoming a band, or a trio at least, and the welcome, wider sound brings just a touch more focus to Alex Schaaf’s lyrics. 

18 – Glad Rag Doll, Diana Krall

From vaudeville to rootsy rockabilly, T Bone Burnett gives us Diana Krall’s fun new romp, playfully tripping through some tunes from the 1920s and 30s. 

19 – Stronger For It, Janiva Magness

Janiva reminded Alligator Records why they fell in love with her in the first place after her 2006 breakthrough. And it reminded me that it’s been too long since we’ve had the pleasure of seeing Janiva live here in Virginia. If only she spent more time on the east coast.

20 – Twin Peaks Archive, Angelo Badalamenti

I’m a Twin Peaks fan from way back. The show may have redefined television in the early 1990s, but it has inspired and intrigued me ever since. Even the odd last several episodes. I confess to being the proud owner of a cherished Brazilian vinyl pressing of Badalamenti’s soundtrack to the original series. When the Season 2 set finally saw the light of day five years ago, it was a happy day. But when I discovered that 212 songs were available on David Lynch’s website, well — it was a reminder: “Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it. Don’t wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot black coffee.” And hey, it’s only $77!

But what we actually have here is a theological problem, where cultural and commercial symbols are confused with truly Christian ones, and the meaning of the holy season is missed all together. The war on Christmas is really about what brand of “civil religion” America should have. The particular (read: biblical) meaning of Christmas, for Christians, has almost nothing to do with the media war. What a surprise.

What is Christmas? It is the celebration of the Incarnation, God’s becoming flesh — human — and entering into history in the form of a vulnerable baby born to a poor, teenage mother in a dirty animal stall. Simply amazing. That Mary was homeless at the time, a member of a people oppressed by the imperial power of an occupied country whose local political leader, Herod, was so threatened by the baby’s birth that he killed countless children in a vain attempt to destroy the Christ child, all adds compelling historical and political context to the Advent season.

The theological claim that sets Christianity apart from any other faith tradition is the Incarnation. God has come into the world to save us. God became like us to bring us back to God and show us what it means to be truly human. That is the meaning of the Incarnation. That is the reason for the season. In Jesus Christ, God hits the streets.

But once upon a time – 100 years ago actually – the War was on unnecessary Christmas giving. Literary detective Paul Collins marks the anniversary of the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving over at Slate:

“BE A SPUG AND STOP FOOLISH XMAS GIVING” the New York Times announced the next day. The society’s objection was not to Christmas, its founders explained, but to what it had become—a cause that found widespread sympathy in newspapers across the country…. And advertisers responded in their usual way: by instantly co-opting the movement. “RUGS FOR SPUGS,” a Harlem furniture store crowed in the New York Evening World, adding its own explanation of the acronym: ”Special Prices on Useful Gifts.” […]

The great challenge for a Christmas movement is to keep it going after the holiday, though—and as the first glimmers of the next holiday season arrived in November 1913, the Times announced that “The Spugs are on the warpath again.”

This time they boasted even more advocates, including the quiet support of some chastened department store owners. New York’s district attorney spoke to a SPUG assembly of 1,200 as part of a “War on Christmas Graft,” and muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell lauded the fight against “the vulgar habit of giving where when gifts are but a kind of bribe.”

Click here to read more.

For Julie Drizin, being an atheist parent means being deliberate. She rewrote the words to “Silent Night” when her daughters were babies to remove words like “holy,” found a secular Sunday school where the children light candles “of understanding,” and selects gifts carefully to promote science, art and wonder at nature.

The purpose of the story is to report about how a growing number of self-described atheists discuss the horror of tragedies like Newtown with their children. Here’s Ms. Drizin:

“I’ve explained to them [in the past] that some people believe God is waiting for them, but I don’t believe that. I believe when you die, it’s over and you live on in the memory of people you love and who love you. I can’t offer them the comfort of a better place. Despite all the evils and problems in the world, this is the heaven — we’re living in the heaven and it’s the one we work to make. It’s not a paradise.”

Further down the piece, Jamilia Bey says something similar:

“We are a science-based family. When we don’t know the answer, we say, ‘We don’t know.’ We don’t say ‘Jesus did it,’.… When people die, it’s just like before they were ever born. They’re not scared, they’re not hungry, they’re not cold. But the people left behind miss them.’ I didn’t fill him with ideas of celestial kingdoms where you get wings and [expletive].”

I guess “We don’t know” is not an acceptable answer to the death question.

I’ve always felt devout atheism – not simple agnostic indifference, but determined nonbelief – requires a tremendous level of faith. It may not be faith in the specifically spiritual sense, but it’s a faith nonetheless – faith in oneself, from the outset, and in the unassailability of one’s conclusions, whether led by scientific analysis or philosophical reasoning. Faith in the great apparent random nature of the whole of creation to bring mankind to where we are today.

Faith is a relationship built on trust – relationship’s the key word there because you have to trust in the source of whatever guides your faith. The atheist points to what he or she sees as a lack of certainty in the existence of a monotheistic God and demands proof. But if that sort of certifiable, scientific proof existed, then there would be no need for faith. As a Catholic, I have faith in Jesus Christ and believe that He is the son of God primarily because I trust the writings of the apostles who knew him, the teachings of the Church they established, and the witnesses of the saints they inspired.

By the same token, an atheist has faith that God does not exist, because he or she trusts in scientific understanding, illuminated by the writings of those who have gone before. They point to the absence of empirical evidence and ascribe to that absence the certainty that suitable evidence cannot and will not possibly ever exist. It’s an interesting article of faith, especially given the respect for science.

I mean, I too have an enormous respect for science. But one of the wonders of science is that as experimentation evolves with each subsequent generation of scientists, some scientific findings are often recast, fine-tuned or even outright dismissed. Remember when Pluto used to be a planet? In choosing to believe in God, I concede that scientific knowledge has its limitations and that ignorance alone or even sprinkled with a generous dose of fact, can only lead but so far.

Agnosticism at least makes more sense. Faith and devotion take time, and time requires a certain level of commitment. Therefore, choosing to unplug from belief systems in general requires much less commitment than atheism. But the growing degree to which some adherents practice apologetic atheism, if not downright evangelical disbelief, speaks to a higher level of devotion.

As the number of Americans rises who say they don’t believe in a supernatural God, atheists have become more public and confident, spurring a boomlet of church-like Sunday schools for children where secular ethics are taught, and parenting groups where people meet to discuss things like the overbearing religious grandparent, how to teach world religions in the home and ways to help children navigate conversations with religious friends. Such institutions and groups reveal a range of child-rearing views among atheist parents.

Many want their children to have regular rituals tied to traditional religion, like attending a house of worship, lighting Hanukkah candles or decorating Christmas trees. Some began giving thanks before meals when their children were born, directing their gratitude to the people who grew and made the food. Others say a pre-meal thanks to “God,” a non-supernatural concept they have shaped. Polls show 11 percent of atheists say they pray occasionally (6 percent say daily) and many consider themselves highly spiritual, experiencing transcendence in the wonder of space, nature and connections with other human beings.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but meaningful rituals, holiday observances, occasional if not regular prayer, and even seeking transcendence, there’s a reason many declared faith traditions embrace such sacramental touchstones. Maybe the predominant voice of modern American Christianity paints itself in narrow strokes these days, but responding to the universal tug upon the thread inherent in such touchstones used to be understood as a spiritual search. Life’s meant to be a journey after all. Perhaps once we get to the point where atheists start passing the collection plate for a building campaign and their youth groups start waving signs advertising car washes, organized disbelief would have jumped the proverbial shark.

I caught the end of an NPR segment today that continues the theodicial thread in the wake of the Newtown tragedy:

Steven Folberg, senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel in Austin, Texas, has been asked this question before. On his front porch on a balmy December day, a reporter asks him again: Please explain the nature of God, in light of the slaughter of innocents in Connecticut….”I saw a bumper sticker once that said, ‘God is good. Evil is real. And God is all powerful. Pick two,’ ” Folberg says.

“The idea was to say, if one accepts those three propositions as true, then they’re logically inconsistent. And how do you wiggle your way out of that issue?” You cannot wiggle your way out, the rabbi continues. You have to admit that we live in a world that is, by turns, beautiful and shattered.

Folberg says he draws instruction from his own faith, which says, “I have a responsibility as a human being — and in my case, as a Jew — to look at what’s broken in the world, to mend it and then, using old Jewish language, to be a partner with God in completing the work of creation which is incomplete.”

Worth the read or the listen.

The 66-year-old priest is known as Father Bob to the 3,500 families who belong to St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church. On Sunday, what Father Bob craved — after long hours of counseling and grieving and not enough sleep — was a good Scotch and a place to let go. Half of the 20 children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary were members of Weiss’s congregation, and he had baptized many of them.

After the 10:30 a.m. Mass on Sunday, in a rectory full of law enforcement officers and priests, Weiss wept. Nothing at seminary had trained him for this week. Nothing about his 13 years at St. Rose. Nothing about his understanding of the world.

“I thought about Paul,” said Weiss, his black clergy shirt unbuttoned and his white collar in his shirt pocket like a pen. “Paul said, ‘In my weakness I find my greatest strength.’ ”

At Mass, it was Monsignor Jerald Doyle who gave the homily on Sunday. ”You won’t remember what I say, and it will become unimportant,” he said. “But you will really hear deep down that Word that will finally and ultimately bring peace and joy. That is the Word by which we live. That is the Word by which we hope. That is the Word by which we love.”

And this is the season that we look with joyful hope through the darkness to the Word made flesh. Immediately after reading Monsignor Doyle’s words yesterday, I opened my email to find the daily Catechism reading focused on addressing the question: Why did the Word become flesh?

Taking up St. John’s expression, “The Word became flesh”, the Church calls “Incarnation” the fact that the Son of God assumed a human nature in order to accomplish our salvation in it. In a hymn cited by St. Paul, the Church sings the mystery of the Incarnation:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. (CCC 461)

Some media outlets have noted that, like many of the victims, the young man who unleashed this horror and the mother he murdered also attended St. Rose of Lima. As a parish, a community and the nation look to bind painful wounds, may we look to St. Rose, patron saint of the resolution of family quarrels, to prayerfully show us the way.

(Note: If you’ve not signed up for the Daily Catechism email, you can do so here. The Year of Faith began on the 20th anniversary of the Catechism’s publication, and I’ve found the daily email an accessible resource for ”providing real support for the faith, especially for those concerned with the formation of Christians, so crucial in our cultural context.” (Porta Fidei, 12)

After tucking our kids into bed tonight, my wife turned on the television news for the first time today. Following the brief update on the mass shooting in Connecticut, a woman came on to explain how people should discuss this tragedy with children. It was an odd segment – a brief tutorial on how to project your fears onto your child. What’s worse is that children are, to some degree, already likely to be desensitized to such violence so far removed from their day-to-day reality. Many children could not imagine one child dying, let alone 20.

Gun violence timelines use to span multiple years, but the many I’ve seen today focus on just the shootings of 2012. And before we even have a final body count, we’re subjected to the political posturing of gun lobby apologists. Opening a serious discussion on this issue cannot be ignored, and the pro-life movement should demand action.

Driving home late tonight from a Christmas party, listening to the holly jolly Christmas songs on the radio as the kids debated the possible merits of the reindeer food they’d just made, it was the surrounding darkness of the country roads that seemed to matter most.

It seemed no accident then as I grew weary of reading the day’s news online, I stumbled upon this post from Andrew Ratelle. He starts with a look at Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, tying the already classic film to the demons of Yuletide folk tradition, like Krampus. Maybe it will be enough to remind me, after my 13-year-old sees the headline on tomorrow’s paper, that it’s not quite time for Christmas just yet.

If all Christmas was nothing more than a time for superficial cheer and merriment (as the culture would have us believe), there would be little reason to take it to heart, and the lengths to which the secular holiday season goes to rob the average person of their peace and sanity would only tinge the affair with a bit of cruel irony. But the coming of Christ (and the preparation therefor) deals with something greater—deliverance from the coils of a fallen world and the entry into a life of warmth and grace. Far from the sugary-sweetness of the secular Holidays, it is the darkness and exile of Advent that make the joy and hope of Christmas shine out all the brighter.

Though they may seem little more than distractions in comparison to the troubles of Christmases past, we would do well to remember that the Yuletide demons are still as active today as they ever were, often making a moment of peace and quiet as difficult to find as a room at the inn. However, we must also remember that even in the face of all the trouble and anxiety we may encounter this season, we still have reason to rejoice. For unto us a child is born, at midnight, among the beasts, in piercing cold, and in whom we find redemption from every worry and fear.

Michael Gerson summarized it so beautifully in yesterday’s Post:

Sainthood for Day — still a long procedural road — would also be a reminder that the Christian church is not defined or bounded by political ideology. The views of Day’s Catholic Worker Movement resist easy categorization. Her pacifism was of the muscular variety that opposed World War II. She criticized the profit motive but also distrusted all concentrations of governmental power. Her socialism was patterned on the communal provision of the early Christian church and medieval religious orders. Day’s ideology might best be called localism — a vision she described as consisting of “land, bread, work, children and the joys of community in play and work and worship.”

It is a tribute to the breadth of Catholicism that Day shared the same faith, at the same time, in the same city, with another prominent Catholic layman: William F. Buckley Jr. The church is an institution strengthened by such political contradictions — between pacifists and just-war theorists, distributionists and free marketeers, establishment figures and impatient prophets — because they serve to highlight the place of overlap. The Eucharistic altar is large — as large as politics and the world.

Above all, Saint Dorothy would be a reminder of the radical, shocking demands of human dignity. Day was gobsmacked by the notion. “The mystery of the poor,” she said, “is this: That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for him.” It may be pious overstatement. If true, however, we yawn at duties that should cause us to tremble. And those who take those duties literally and seriously are already saints.

Dorothy Day, pray for us.

This well-funded narrative turns a blind eye to the growing splinter lodged firmly in the mind of what we used to called conservatism in America. Certainly both political parties have been mired in secularity for decades if not longer. Republicans just do a better job of at least paying lip service to the issues that drive the faithful to the polls. But how has the GOP used their political capital in recent years? A couple of wars, defending torture, trumpeting military spending, denying climate change, cracking down on immigration, and fighting for tax cuts more than anything else hardly seems a script focused on protecting and preserving life.

As the pundits line up to dissect what remains of the GOP in the wake of the recent election results, some on the right have clamored to adopt the language of the left, while others (including Mr. Romney) sadly fall back on the divisive and derisive language of the narrow Randian mindset of takers and makers. Blessedly, many Republican governors are openly denouncing such dismal language. Perhaps out of this period of reflection, the GOP might discern a path toward a true conservatism – a conservatism that actually conserves rather than liberally doles out public funds to powerful interests and the machinery of death.

Mark Shea posted this bit below from something Mark Gordon wrote on election night:

If it is to survive, the GOP must come to represent a conservatism that hews closer to the vision of Burke, Kirk, Fleming, Oakeshott, Burnham, Weaver, Scruton, Berry and Blond; a conservatism that stands opposed to the corrosive cultural influence of laissez-faire capitalism and the mass consumer society; opposed to the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of private interests or the state; opposed to empire and the militarization of foreign policy; a conservatism focused on the care of creation, including the land and sea, as well as the small human ecologies of family, congregation, town, and small business; a conservatism that privileges the farmer, the industrial worker, the teacher and the Main Street merchant over the financial baron, the defense contractor, the big box retailer and the Washington lobbyist; a conservatism of the town hall meeting, not of slick ad campaigns; a conservatism of communities, not corporations. And yes, it must be a conservatism that defends the unborn, but also one that supports and honors their mothers, both before they give birth and long after. And yes, it must be a conservatism that defends marriage, but not by demonizing or marginalizing families that don’t fit a certain mold. Yes, it must be a conservatism of limited government, but within limits defined by justice, equality before the law, peaceableness, and the care of the aged, the infirm, the poor, and the unemployed. A friend of mine tweeted that the big loser tonight was Ayn Rand. Thanks be to God. In the years ahead, may Republicans come to see this as the night when they began to fashion a different kind of conservatism. If they don’t they have no future.

Amen to that.

–C. S. Lewis, “Learning in Wartime,” in The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses