Don’t try to tell me you don’t like this song. Don’t try to say that it’s too earnest and simplistic or that the big dumb chord progression is too big and dumb or that Kevin Cronin sounds too much like a dweeb or that his clothes or his acting in this video are too ridiculous for you to take anything he’s ever done seriously ever. Don’t try to tell me that you never wrote this song’s lyrics into a love note to an old ex-girlfriend you were trying to win back. Don’t try to tell me that you don’t turn up the volume and sing along aloud every time it [...]

Vexed French bishops are expressing their displeasure against a confessional service "set up at the beginning of the Christian fasting period of Lent by Paris-based telephone messaging service AABAS" for the benefit of penitents who are too busy to get themselves to a church. The Daily Mail reports that the clerics reject Phoneline to the Lord as "utterly unacceptable," noting the sacramental value of parishioner-to-priest contact. The phoneline "charges users 30p a minute to confess their sins to an automated answering machine," which sounds to me about as good a description of God as you're likely to get.

UPDATE: Awl pal Juli Weiner did some real reporting and [...]

The determined forays of hallowed Western faith traditions into the digital-media world rarely produce a non-embarrassing outcome. There are your teen-themed “Bible-zine” translations. There are your evangelical trade shows. There are your media churches. But the recent news that the Catholic Church was launching a quasi-official confession app on the iPhone was something else again—and not just because it got snapped up in the related Maureen Dowd column-generating software.

To be fair, the app—the brainchild of a pair of entrepreneurial Indiana-based Catholic brothers, Patrick and Chip Leinen—is not designed to supplant the traditional rite of confession, spoken in anonymity to a real-life [...]

Wow. This is very crazy. Even by the very crazy standards of the very crazy rap game. Harlem rapper Trevell "G. Dep" Coleman, who had a sizeable hit in 2001 with a song called "Special Delivery" and released a good and under-appreciated album, Child of the Ghetto, that year for Bad Boy Records, walked into the 25th precinct on 119th Street on Wednesday and confessed to a murder he committed in October 1993, when he was 18 years old.