Category: Of Random Interest

Things Which Interested Glen Last Week

Things I bookmarked last week on del.icio.us.

Disclaimer: these links are posted automatically using the excellent yawd hack and are merely things that were interesting enough to bookmark for future reference–I may or may not agree with the views expressed by the linked pages. In fact, I may not have even read them yet.

Hymnody

I sent this email to our worship leaders and I thought others might be interested in it.

Why do we try to incorporate a hymn each week into worship?

The shortest answer I can give is to quote C. S. Lewis on old books: “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook–even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. None of us can escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.” (from his introduction to Athanasius’ On The Incarnation).

The same thing is true of songs. There are some great worship songs out today and I want the majority of our worship to feature them. But I don’t want us to just feature them. They have notable weaknesses (pdf link) and so I want the “sea breeze of the centuries” to blow through our worship and keep us rooted.

Having said that, traditional hymn music doesn’t really connect with today’s students. That’s why I urge you to seek out or make up (yes, you are allowed to do that) contemporary arrangements for the hymns that we do sing.

I’ve found a few that illustrate what I’m talking about. Check out http://igracemusic.com/igracemusic/hymnbook/hymns.html

Each one has a sample mp3, lead sheets, tab sheets, and other resources available for worship teams.

Another excellent example is the Dave Crowder band’s recording of “All Creatures Of Our God And King.”

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to explain myself on that for a while but I’ve never actually gotten around to it.

So there.

Things Which Interested Glen Last Week

Things I bookmarked last week on del.icio.us.

Disclaimer: these links are posted automatically using the excellent yawd hack and are merely things that were interesting enough to bookmark for future reference–I may or may not agree with the views expressed by the linked pages. In fact, I may not have even read them yet.

Footnotes Are Infinitely Superior To Endnotes

I hate endnotes. In fact, I loathe them. They force me to read with two bookmarks and for no good reason. Footnotes are a fundamentally superior way to attribute information and are even better for digressing without interrupting an argument.

Yet more books use endnotes than footnotes. Why?

Turning A Phrase

Our neighbor is applying for a job as a professor and part of her job interview will involve lecturing to a class, so last night a bunch of us got together and listened to her practice her Salem Witch Hunt lecture (her expertise is in colonial history). It was quite good. She’s got a lot of knowledge and presents it well.

At one point she mentioned how the confessing witches described in lurid detail their covenant with the Devil which, along with several other intriguing details, involved kissing his butt. Literally. To make a deal with the Evil One they believed you had to apply your lips to his posterior.

And they described this in lurid detail. Lurid.

Being a lover of words, I immediately began to think of ways to allude to the act of kissing demon tush that would fall short of lurid but would nonetheless be evocative. I came up with three:

  • giving the Enemy of All Flesh a hiney hickey
  • kissing the heinous anus
  • smooching the sulfurous sphincter (alternate ending: Satanic sphincter)

Coming soon to a sermon near you…

update: my neighbor has blogged about the evening as well. With a photo. And yes, I am the one who remains nameless. Also, I edited one of my wordplays because I felt a verb that I had chosen for variety was stronger than I had intended to be. There’s a distinction between humor and vulgarity, and I think my original verb was too crass.