And Jerry Lee Is Jimmy Swaggart’s Cousin

“The most unappreciated fact about the three most galvanizing performers in early rock ‘n’ roll—Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard Penniman—is that they all grew up in the Pentecostal church. Presley and Lewis were raised in the predominately white Assemblies of God, and Penniman in a variety of black Holiness and Church of God …

Commie Criticism

“By insisting that most art, high and low, exists for the sole purpose of reinforcing bourgeois-capitalist consciousness, the ‘critical theorist’ gets to be a revolutionary. But by dictating the handful of exceptions that achieve true ‘negation,’ he also gets to be a snob” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 78).

The Genesis of the Cape and Beret Problem

“For an incandescent wit like Wilde, it was possible to express that contempt with grace and skill. But the majority of decadents were not that brilliant, and the best they could do was define art in negative terms, as the absence—or better still, the inversion—of other values, especially moral ones. To establish one’s creative bona …