Cheapening the Western Musical Tradition: Some Thoughts Inspired by Theodore Gioia and Andy Crouch
Theodore Gioia in the L.A. Review of Books: In the mass-media era, the general public primarily experiences classical music through detached snippets of larger pieces extracted to lend their symbolic power to a commercial agenda. Artists and advertisers dissect classical works into short melodies — quotable passages severed from their original context — assembling a menu of musical leitmotifs to bolster their message with a desired tone, mood, or association. Like artificial flavoring for the...
Wisdom from Peter Williams on Textual Criticism
Peter Williams is a treasure. These lectures contain some absolute gold, and they give me that lovely feeling of being right, of being validated by someone smarter than oneself. Indeed, some of his key points are things I have come to realize on my own—though he states them so much better, and he bases them on greater quantities of nerdy gumshoeing in primary sources. (For example, he went digging in Erasmus’ Annotations in order to show that he was aware of a huge number of textual variants...
The Authorized Documentary
The Authorized documentary ships today. It’s the culmination of a lot of work, and I pray that its message will be persuasive and spread widely. Here’s that message: we should all read the Bible in our English, not someone else’s. The “false friends” in the otherwise beautiful and valuable KJV—the words and syntax and punctuation that we still use today but use differently than they did in 1611—mean that modern readers simply cannot know what they’re missing if the KJV is their only Bible. I’m...
Is the KJV the Most Concordant English Bible Translation?
A friend and reader who has good training in linguistics wrote to ask me to evaluate a claim she found in an article online. Here’s what the writer said (and I won’t link to it because I don’t want to seem to be critical of this writer in particular—hers is a very common viewpoint, and the rest of her post is really quite good): TIP: The King James Version is a great one to use for this kind of studying! Though this version uses older English and can be a bit hard to understand if you are not...
Review: Ember Rising
Ember Rising by S.D. Smith My rating: 5 of 5 stars Loved it. So did the kids. (And the illustrations, by my respected friend Zach Franzen, were also excellent.) For a good while I was thinking that this book is The Benedict Option for kids—and for adults who dutifully read Dreher's hot-title-of-2017 but whose affections were not fully engaged by his more prosaic approach (which I did find helpful—this is not a criticism). Ember Rising, by contrast, engages the heart with a stirring story. In...