Berdyaev and the death of the Episcopal Church

I’m on a Heschel and Berdyaev kick lately. I’m returning to some of the authors that shaped me some 20 years ago. Whilst reading a Berdyaev essay tonight, I realized my central issue with the national body of the Episcopal Church suing congregations that...

Theodicy

I heard a rather brilliant short sermon this week from one of our seminarians. He took a text from the Hebrew Scriptures and tied up the theodicy in a very elegant package. The most striking image in his sermon was the plumb line of Amos.. We can’t ascribe an...

Fox News has actually interested me…sort of

It is true that I don’t really watch TV.  My perspective on Fox News is certainly biased.  I only find out about what they are doing through Twitter.  Amazingly enough, something that went viral actually interested me, though maybe not directly....

Music as a tool for contemplation

I don’t always have the chance to work in larger forms.  One of my current writing projects is a one woman short opera on Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. I’m writing it for my dear friend Rebecca Shane, and I can’t wait to...

The new language of worship

I am still reflecting deeply on Krista Tippet’s interview with Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry Magazine.  In the interview, Wiman references a few familiar passages from Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. From p. 281, “I often...

Putting music in context

One of my musicology teachers wrote a short post that I got via email the other day. She was imagining a musicologist attempting to contextualize rap in the year 2093.  She is a brilliant mind, and I always find her thoughts compelling.  Go vistit her...

Improvising my way out of a paper bag #7

We finished three days of intense recording today. The day began with “Currents”. It’s a sort of new age thing but it’s mostly in 9/8. We had a few takes and moved on to a wild animal of Jonah’s invention that we call “Hanon from...

Improvising my way out of a paper bag #6

Every job and almost every task we do requires split second decisions. Even cooking eggs requires choices, but you have certain parameters and rules that need to be followed in order for the final product to be palatable. In many ways, this project is rather...

Improvising my way out of a paper bag #5

It was a long challenging day of recording. We had some fruitful product by the end.We started off with something we call “like a real pop song”. It’s actually something that draws inspiration from the early Sting song “Black Seam”, but...

Improvising my way out of a paper bag #4

As we were recording yesterday, we briefly commented on what a strange experience it was to come into this session. Strange because it was extremely difficult to guage whether we were/are prepared. With such loose structures involved, we usually have to look up some...