Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.
00924 – The Arts Refresh Our Souls
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00923 – Life–New Life–Goes On
The sense of being stranded in the midst of life . . . is enough to drain a person’s very personality until there is little left to recognize. Where did the joy go all of a sudden? Where did the feeling of self-confidence disappear to in the midst of this emptiness?...
00911 – Music, Love, and Harmony
Music is expression of harmony in sound. Love is the expression of harmony in life.
00899 – The Mission of Church Music
The ideal of church music is found in its function. This function is religious: to bring to stronger and clearer consciousness and to greater vitality our inherent religious nature. At the heart of church music must be the consciousness of this religious nature: the...
00886 – Worship Expresses a Congregation’s Deepest Theological Beliefs
Good church musicians constantly ask whether the “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” of the church’s worship are sung “so that the Word of God may dwell in us richly” (the forgotten purpose clause of Col. 3:16). Good liturgical musicians worry about the link between...
00874 – The Emotional Power of Music
The use of music as an expression of emotion linked to theological truth is common in all churches. In the evangelical traditions where personal religious experience is emphasized, emotional expression is one of music’s most important meanings; it is probably that...
00872 – Life is Short; Art Eternal
What will be the judgment a century hence concerning the lorded works of our favorite composers today? Inasmuch as nearly everything is subject to the changes of time, and—more’s the pity—the fashions of time, only that which is good and true will endure like a rock...
00866 – Paying Attention to How Music “Feels”
As many philosophers and theologians have observed, music is close to “spirit”—a non-material medium of receiving and conveying a sense of the world. In our deepest attentiveness and encounters with certain forms of music, we are opened to a depth of awareness; a...
00860 – The Arts are Not Simply Skills
The arts are not simply skills: Their concern is the intellectual, ethical and spiritual maturity of human life. And in a time when religious and political institutions are so busy engraving images of marketable gods and candidates that they lose their vision of human...
00856 – God Should Be Worshiped in Rehearsal and Corporate Worship
The role of worship is foundational to the work of the church… God must be first in our private and corporate lives. If we have not placed our private and corporate relationship with God in first place, we cannot expect God to be active in our lives and church. Music...