Fostering Cultural Inclusivity in our Church Music

Openness to hearing, engaging, and loving other cultures is not a musical issue; it is a heart issue. Posting about ­­­­­­­­musical variety in corporate worship from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation. https://inallthings.org/fostering-cultural-inclusivity-in-our-church-music

Book Review: Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community

The desire of concert attendees for an authentic spiritual experience maps onto the search for other authentic experiences by consumers today. Posting about ­­­­­­­­the book Singing the Congregation from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation. https://inallthings.org/book-review-singing-the-congregation-how-contemporary-worship-music-forms-evangelical-community

A Medium for Meeting God : C.S. Lewis and Music (Especially Wagner)

This essay will survey Lewis’s writings and outline the development of his aesthetic ideas in relation to music, emphasizing his enjoyment of Wagner and explaining nuanced references to Wagner throughout Lewis’s works. Moreover, this essay will describe how Lewis’s ideas about God advanced in counterpoint to his ideas about music and how Lewis came to eventually conclude that music is a medium for meeting God. To conclude, I share ways in which Lewis’s ideas have influenced and strengthened my own teaching of Wagner in Music History and Literature classes

The Harmony of All Things : Music, Soul, and Cosmos in the Writings of John Scottus Eriugena

In his prodigious philosophical work Periphyseon, the foremost intellectual of the ninth century, John Scottus Eriugena (ca. 800–877 CE), defined musica broadly and in a way that solicits interdisciplinary applications: “Music is the discipline discerning by the light of reason the harmony of all things in natural proportions which are either in motion or at rest.” In this dissertation, I trace resonances of the ars musica in Eriugena’s writings using selections from his three greatest works: Periphyseon, his glosses on Martianus Capella’s textbook De Nuptiis, and his commentary over Pseudo-Dionysius’s treatise on the Celestial Hierarchy of Angels. Beginning with his comments on Capella, I present ways in which Eriugena’s reflections on music as a liberal art intersect with his discussions of the cosmos and the human soul. For Eriugena and earlier Neoplatonists, the consideration of quantity related to quantity in ratio was the proper province of musica, and this natural ordering corresponded to the overall coherence observed throughout the cosmos. That is, the “natural proportions” in Eriugena’s definition of music included all things that can be studied, visible or invisible. Although some previous musicological considerations of Eriugena’s writings have sought insights on performance practices of the ninth century (e.g., the organicum melos question), most have dealt almost exclusively with his description of the harmony of the spheres; this project extends these discussions and explores a fundamental element in Platonic thought neglected in previous studies, i.e., music related to the spheres and the human soul. Eriugena’s writings provide a perfect opportunity for such a study. Using my own translation of Eriugena’s glosses on Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis, I demonstrate how Eriugena’s short treatise on the harmony of the spheres incorporates a discussion on the motions of human souls superimposed upon the planetary system. Furthermore, ix the ordering of the celestial hierarchy of angels emanating from God is itself proportionally organized, in terms of the nature of each angelic hierarchy and how they interact while relaying the divine oracles. In the end, I demonstrate that a unifying theme in Eriugena’s philosophical writings is the need for central, proportionally defined mediators, whether the sun, which modulates the celestial spheres, the mese in the Immutable System of tetrachords, or even specific ranks within the hierarchy of angels

7 Lies Creative People Believe

If every human has been given some measure of imagination and creativeness, what keeps some people from living creatively? Posting about roadblocks that prevent people from using their gifts from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world. http://inallthings.org/7-lies-creative-people-believe

Playing Before the Lord: The Life and Work of Joseph Haydn (Book Review)

Reviewed Title: Stapert, Calvin. Playing Before the Lord: The Life and Work of Joseph Haydn. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014. 304 pages. ISBN 978-0802868527

Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community (Book Review)

This review is published with permission of inallthings.org, a project of the Andreas Center at Dordt University, where it was published Dec. 18, 2019

Longing for Spring: Songs of Lament

Hope cannot be divorced from lament; our hope for tomorrow has a context in the suffering and sorrow that surround us today. Posting about ­­­­­­­­songs that encourage us from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation. https://inallthings.org/longing-for-spring-songs-of-lament

Teaching Music in the Reformed/Calvinist Tradition

Editor’s Note: This article (© 2017 by the author) was submitted for possible open access publication under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). It was first published in Religions on March 31, 2017, in the Special Issue Teaching the Reformations and was edited for that publication by academic editor Christopher Metress

Mendelssohn, the Organ, and the Music of the Past: Constructing Historical Legacies (Book Review)

Reviewed Title: Mendelssohn, the Organ, and the Music of the Past: Constructing Historical Legacies by Jurgen Thym. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014. 339 pp. ISBN: 9781580464741