At my Christian elementary school, we sang, “Jesus loves the little children…red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight.” In alignment with this song, white people often professed, “I don’t even see color,” reassuring me that I would be safe from...
One Song Every war and every conflictbetween human beings has happenedbecause of some disagreement about names.It is such an unnecessary foolishness,because just beyond the arguingthere is a long table of companionshipset and waiting for us to sit down.What is praised...
We sing because life is God-given, God-sustained. and God-claimed. Our singing is our glad assent to that God-givenness and refusal to have our lives be less than, more than, or other than that. from "A Glad Obedience: Why and What We Sing"
To paraphrase William Sloane Coffin, a contemporary author and activist for us as Christians, God is defined by Jesus, but not confined to Jesus. To paraphrase Krister Stendahl, a New Testament scholar, former dean of Harvard Divinity School, and bishop of the Church...
A hymn can be defined as a poetic statement of a personal religious encounter or insight, universal in its truth, and suitable for corporate expression when sung in stanzas to a hymn tune. Perhaps few forms of poetry are so widely known and used, and so generally...
Choral music was founded, nurtured, and developed almost exclusively within the Christian church for hundreds of years. To participate in choral singing is to participate in a historically Christian art form. If you choose to sing in a choir and do it with an accurate...
A major part of life is spent looking for community. The fact that people can reach the extraordinary intellectual precocity of great music, and experience its beauty and ethical integrity by singing together with 50 or 100 other people, that's an extraordinary thing....
Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comesWherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,The bird of dawning singeth all night long,And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to...
The signs of his presence are blind people who can see, the lame who walk again, those whose skin diseases are cleared, the deaf who can hear, the dead who are brought back to life, and the poor who have reason for delighting in the good news they hear. If these are...
There is wonder all around us, and it is God’s will to fill us with that wonder that makes life enchanting and sacred. We cannot help but sing when that happens. Maybe that is why, of all the religions in the world, there is none with the wealth of music that the...