Flashback Friday

This week's Flashback Friday takes us back to the 80's and 90's to talk about CCM artist Michael Card. Card was born in Madison, Tennessee. He is the son of a doctor and the grandson of a Baptist minister. He received bachelor's and master's degrees in biblical studies from Western Kentucky University, and was awarded university's Distinguished Alumni Award in 1997. His studies in physics and astronomy led to a job at a planetarium, allowing Card to fund his education. In 2005 Card worked on a Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) in Classical Literature.[

Michael Card began writing songs at college, where he would write praise choruses for a local church service. Although pushed to earn his Ph.D. by a professor, he was lured into the recording industry by friends Randy Scruggs and John Thompson, who needed a musician to record for their production company's demos. The record label insisted they produce Card's music as their first project, and his acoustic folk sound appeared from the very start; among his records was 1981's Present Reality, 1987's Life, 1993's Come to the Cradle and 1996's Brother to Brother. In 1998, he returned with Starkindler: A Celtic Conversation Across Time.

Many of Card's albums are structured around a unifying theme. The songs from The Beginning are all based on the Pentateuch. The individual songs have subjects such as Genesis, Leviticus, Abraham, Isaac and Moses. Card is particularly adept at relating difficult or obscure concepts from the Old Testament to more understandable themes from the New Testament. The song "Jubilee" concerns the period of rest and the release from debts and slavery commanded in the Jubilee year as described in Leviticus 25, but also relates to the rest and freedom from condemnation offered through Jesus.

Card's most famous song is "El Shaddai", which was also recorded by Amy Grant. Grant's recording was named No. 326 on the RIAA's list of 365 Songs of the Century in 2001. Other popular Card songs include "Immanuel," "Joy in the Journey," and "Heal Our Land." "Heal Our Land" was commissioned as the 1993 National Day of Prayer's theme song...

Despite his success in music, Card has always maintained that his music career is secondary to his calling as a Bible teacher. He has distanced himself from the CCM industry by criticizing the promotion of personalities over musical content and the shifting emphasis away from God to sell more albums.

Michael Card is the author or co-author of twenty-two books. He originally started writing as a way to share the knowledge he accumulated while researching his songs. He found his studies were too in-depth to condense everything he had learned into one short piece. The books that resulted from album research bear the same titles as the albums. He then branched out to other subjects not specifically based on his music, such as the Gospel of John, homeschooling, and Christian discipleship and mentoring. In 2014, Card completed the Biblical Imagination Series, a four-volume set which takes a deeper look at each of the gospels and the voice of the writers behind them. He followed up on the Biblical Imagination Series next by releasing a new book (and album) on the subject of the Hebrew word חֶסֶד (ḥesed), an idea which he first explored in his two books on lament (A Sacred Sorrow and The Hidden Face of God). The book is about the bibliography of the word throughout the Old Testament, and how we can start to understand this word that is so often used to describe God and cannot be precisely expressed in the English language by the context in which it is used.