Portside

Son House was a preacher before becoming a seminal figure in the development of blues. Here he creates short, vivid portraits of church-goers. Find more Alt-Xmas music here.

Leon Rosselson retells the Jesus-Judas story. What if Judas is scorned because he taught "shaking off the chains," rather than preaching submission?  Find more Alt-Xmas music here.

Steve Martin fills a gap in the seasonal hymnal by creating a song for atheists. Musically appropriate, if irreverent. Find more Alt-Xmas music here.

Burt Lancaster stars as the religious huckster Elmer Gantry in the 1960 movie version of Sinclair Lewis' novel.  Find more Alt-Xmas music here.

Nina Simone's album Pastel Blues, released in 1965, included her version of Strange Fruit.

Billie Holiday created the powerful classic rendition of the anti-lynching song by Abe Meeropol.

Woody Guthrie's guitar famously bore the legend, This Machine Kills Fascists. Here are the Woody lyrics (probably dating to the 1940s) that most directly spell out this message, with appropriate pictures of contemporary bad guys. Woody's confidence in the victory over fascism was the flip side of his confidence in the victory of the common people who, he sang, were Bound for Glory.

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.