The American South’s major contribution to the world

In a post for The Imaginative Conservative Sean Busick notes that historian Michael O’Brien has called the South’s music Southern culture’s “major contribution” to the world (Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History). In that spirit, he offers some recent Southern albums (and an older box set) as musical suggestions for giving as Christmas presents. 

His list includes: The Secret Sisters, “Put Your Needle Down”; Doc Watson, “Southbound”; Johnny Cash, “Out Among the Stars”; Gram Parsons, “180 Gram”; R.E.M., “MTV Unplugged 1991/2001” and Goodbye, Babylon, an amazing 2003 gospel box set. He also notes that The Civil Wars, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, the Alabama Shakes, and Jason Isbell have all recorded albums worth giving a listen. 

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The Secret Sisters - River Jordan.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely

'Joseph Pearce, who himself has written articles and chapters on the political significance of Tolkien’s work, testified in his book Literary Giants, Literary Catholics, “If much has been written on the religious significance of The Lord of the Rings, less has been written on its political significance—and the little that has been written is often erroneous in its conclusions and ignorant of Tolkien’s intentions…. Much more work is needed in this area, not least because Tolkien stated, implicitly at least, that the political significance of the work was second only to the religious in its importance.”

Several books ably explore how Tolkien’s Catholic faith informed his fiction. None until now have centered on how his passion for liberty and limited government also shaped his work, or how this passion grew directly from his theological vision of man and creation.'

The Hobbit Party, by Jonathan Witt and Jay Wesley Richards, fills this void by examining Tolkien’s exploration of totalitarian power and rings of power.

Witt and Wesley Richards write, in a post at The Imaginative Conservative, that:

'Tolkien’s ring is also used to sound a warning against any grand political plan that depends on unchecked power to get things done. The novel is about many other things, of course, but it is no overstatement to say the temptation posed by the ring conveys the novel’s central political theme—that, as Lord Acton put it, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So dangerous do the wise leaders among the free peoples of Middle-Earth consider this ring of power that they determine to risk everything in a desperate gambit to destroy the ring rather than using it against their enemy, the evil Sauron ... Tolkien, through faith in the transcendent God, understood the source of true sublimity. He also understood the source of the thirst for power for power’s sake: the desire to make of oneself a god in the place of God.'

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Howard Shore - Minas Morgul.

I find men and women struggling to answer the deepest questions we can ask freeing

'I find men and women struggling to answer the deepest questions we can ask freeing.' So said Bruce Springsteen when interviewed about his tastes in literature. I found this interview via 'The Imaginative Conservative'.

Springsteen spoke about the way that Flannery O’Connor, James M. Cain, John Cheever, Sherwood Anderson and Jim Thompson contributed greatly to the turn his music took around 1978-82:

'They brought out a sense of geography and the dark strain in my writing, broadened my horizons about what might be accomplished with a pop song and are still the cornerstone literally for what I try to accomplish today ... the short stories of Flannery O’Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day. They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us.'

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Bruce Springsteen - Reason To Believe.