Art and Music: A Student's Guide by Paul Munson My rating: 4 of 5 stars This was really an excellent little book. Accessible, perceptive, engaging, and rooted in that Christian intellectual tradition this little Crossway series is aiming to reclaim. It loses one star...
Music
New Song Based on Psalm 51 by Dustin Battles and Joey Holscher
Computer-generated statistics tell me that a full fifty-percent of my blog readership is a budding lyricist. Check this out. Rich stuff based on my favorite psalm. I hear people who pay better attention to congregational song than I do say that we need to sing...
Hometown Boy Makes Good
BJU alum Dan Forrest receives well-deserved praise for oft-performed new work.
Church Music
I sometimes wonder: if "attractional" churches which use a genre of music called "bone-shaking" had their way, would the kind of music below just disappear? That would be very, very sad. The composer of that piece, Paul Mealor, wrote one of the beautiful pieces played...
Pop Music and Twinkies
May conservative Christians pause long enough in our denunciations of pop music to wonder out loud what our biggest problem with it is? Is pop music wrong with a capital WRONG, or is it just, well, dumb? And is it possible to be something other than a cultural...
Let Me Make the Songs of a Nation, and I Care Not Who Makes Its Laws
Andrew Fletcher famously said, "Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws." I've heard this and similar arguments many times, and I just read another example in a helpful book, Gordon Wenham's The Psalter Reclaimed: The words hymn writers...
Another Level of Meaning for Those Asking What Rap Means
Russell Moore, speaking to Andy Crouch about his excellent book Playing God: Every time I say this I feel curmudgeonly… I grew up in a church where I just happened to have—I am able to worship in almost any setting—but there’s something about the sort of hymnody that...
What Rap Means
I was the first to post on a thread that developed into a major blogosphere brouhaha, and I spent some time trying to write out my own thoughts for that thread. But I prefer the obscurity of my own blog to the harsh spotlight Scott Aniol is now under (see his...
James K. A. Smith on CCM
While doing a little Internet poking around on James K. A. Smith, I stumbled across this choice quotation from the pleistocine era of the blogosphere (namely about eight months ago). Sorry I missed it: Trevin Wax: How would you respond to the person who says the forms...
Spotify Ads
I like Spotify. I can listen to just about any music I want, explore new music from my favorite artists (I found a new one today from the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir that was just exquisite!), see recommendations from friends on Facebook, and pay precisely...
Review: Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal
Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal by T. David Gordon My rating: 4 of 5 stars Like most of us, T. David Gordon is a professional media ecologist and a former conservative Presbyterian pastor. Okay, perhaps that combination is not so...
BJU Releases Music Document
My alma mater has released a policy document—more like a principles document—on music. If I understand correctly, one of the major drafters of the statement appears to be my church's beloved and respected assistant music director, Peter Davis. I do see in the document...