I Got More Links Than...um...Canada Got Skating Rinks?
(look, it wasn't easy to come up with a good rhyme for that.)

OK. Sufjan Stevens is, like, our new Michael W. Smith or Amy Grant*, if they sang songs about serial killers and God's seeming indifference. Everyone, everywhere is giving him the serious props he deserves (Illinois is Metacritic's best-rated album of the year -- meaning it's essentially the most critically acclaimed pop album released in 2005). The wonderful thing about Stevens is that although he is both distinctly American and unabashedly Christian -- to the point of conflating the two, but listen -- he's also both without being sentimental, cute, or blindly devoted to either! Here are a few people who are giving Mr. Stevens his due...

The Seattle Weekly has Michael Daddino turning in a great piece with some surprisingly tender words in the final paragraphs:

We may see ourselves as the members of a state or a country. There may be a
kind of equality in a state of sin. But we are brought to an even greater unity
when we love Jesus, who brings us into the highest relationship with God. Yet,
in echoes of the narrator's ecstasy, the chorus is left gasping inarticulately
over the "great sights upon this state! Hallelu!/Wonders bright, and rivers,
lake." Stevens loves the country in much the same way he loves people: He senses
the infinitude of God in both, and it sets him reeling.

Then you've got Kate Bowman, who basically writes about everything I'm thinkig before I get a chance to even articulate anything, on Christianity Today's music site. She is helping push them out of the CCM comfort zone, and she does so masterfully -- plugging Sufjan all the way, naturally:

What drew Stevens to the world beyond Christian music labels? Surely it was
more than the creative freedom often lacking in CCM publishing—although Stevens'
occasionally morbid subject matter and unusual performance-art leanings might
have been considered off-putting, in the same way that Flannery O'Connor would
have had a difficult time getting her novels published by the Christian
Booksellers Association.

Ultimately, this movement among Christian artists like Stevens is a
theological one .... a refusal to separate one's faith from one's
involvement in the world at large, and a recognition that although the entire
creation is broken, God's grace and truth continue to permeate all spheres.

And then there's that one magazine, what's it called, oh yeah, Rolling Stone:

...Stevens' most intense songs are his personal ones. "Chicago" follows two
friends as they hit the road in a van, sleeping in parking lots, heading nowhere
in particular but drifting apart. "Casimir Pulaski Day" is a monstrously sad
acoustic ballad about a friend dying of cancer and leaving a lot of painful
spiritual questions behind. The singer prays for his friend, but his friend dies
anyway; the singer is too young and scared to ask God why, so the trumpet solo
has to ask

*Speaking of Amy Grant, here's some very incisive, insightful, and even sympathetic commentary on the state of Christian music from the Village Voice, of all places.