"The most concrete thing"

"God is basic Fact. He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. He is the most concrete thing there is.

~ C.S. Lewis

"Sing Them Again"

My friend sent me an article on my Facebook wall, saying, "We are not connected to anyone in this article... it is good to know the Spirit has us right in the heart of change." I agree. I think our church is reviving it's knowledge of good, sound church music. And it's not just us, but there seems to be a movement afoot.

Cultural Barometer: The Grammys

I love music, and for some reason I'm always confusingly drawn to watching the Grammys, even though I'm more and more dissatisfied with the whole popular music scene with each passing year. This year, since my wife and I are going without TV for a while, I had to find some highlights to watch online (Mumford and Sons were playing with the Avett Brothers and Bob Dylan - what else could I do?). This was probably good, since I wasn't tempted to waste any more time on the awards than was absolutely necessary. I thought the Mumford/Avett/Dylan performance was pretty cool by the way, even though Dylan's vocals are sounding a little rough.

Denny Burk wrote a great article reflecting on the cultural significance of the Grammys (you can read it here), and says a lot of things far better than I could. I thought the article was just great, and helped me wrap my head around some of the brilliance, and absurdity that I saw as I watched some highlights of the whole thing. Below is one of my favorite quotes from Burk's article.

In as much as the Grammys are a cultural barometer, I saw no surprises in last night’s spectacle. There were the flickers of image-bearing brilliance, but there was also the darkness of God-ignoring art. I was reminded of just how needy we all are of real beauty and real truth (which are of a piece in my view). I was also reminded that we are a people in desperate need of the only real profundity that there is in the world—the gospel of King Jesus crucified and raised for sinners-from-birth.

A film score rooted in hymns

As you've probably heard, the music to the Coen Brothers' True Grit is rooted and based around 19th century hymns. Here's what the composer, Carter Burwell, says about coming up with the film score:

“Ethan and Joel and I had the same idea—a score rooted in 19th-century hymns. The songs Mattie would sing if she had time for such frivolity. Our model was the hymn ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’, composed in 1888 by Anthony Showalter, an elder of the First Presbyterian Church in Dalton, Georgia, and used memorably in the film The Night of the Hunter. This, together with other hymns of the period, forms the backbone of the score, which grows from church piano to orchestra as Mattie gets farther and farther from home.”

You can read Burwell's narration through the film scoring process here. Definitely worth the read if you like music (and I'm pretty sure you do).

Put the seminaries out of business!

Sometime last week I came across this quote by Al Mohler in an article from The Gospel Coalition. Our local church is currently trying to do more of its own training of teachers (and potentially pastors), and I thought the quote spoke to a lot of what we're trying to do. It was encouraging at the very least, and a little contrary (in a good way) to our modern way of training pastors.

“My hope is that we can put the [seminary] institution out of business. What I want to see is more godly, biblically grounded, gospel-driven local churches begin to prepare pastors, because it’s in the local church where that should primarily take place.”

~ Al Mohler

Why N.D. Wilson writes children's fiction

N.D. Wilson is becoming one of my favorite authors as of late. He writes essays, fiction, children's fiction, and is currently on the task of writing the screenplay for a film version of C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. He is a regular contributor to the Christian publication The Credenda Agenda, where I found this article by him (go here to read it), on writing children's literature. Below are some of my favorite quotes from Wilson's article. And who says adults can't read children's books?

Adults. We are very important, and we need to read important things. Sure, a lot of us read romance novels and humor and pulp fantasy and feel-goodistic schlock, but those aren’t the important people. Important people read deep, thoughtful, ponderous, bitter, empty, foul, and incisive things—the stuff of wonderful fiction.

The assumption [of critics who think children's literature shouldn't be too "real"] is that kids don’t need/can’t handle the truth. They need some time to be happy before they discover how much the world sucks and/or how boring it really is. Lie to the kids now, and they will look back on it fondly later. (Santa anyone?)

I don’t want to lie to kids. Ever. I don’t want to lull them to sleep before the real world wakes them up with a head slap and a wet-willy in the ear sometime during adolescence.

I want to paint a picture of this world that is accurate (if impressionistic), and I don’t want a single young reader to grow up and look back on me as the peddler of sweet youthful falsehoods. I want them to get a world vision that can grow and mature and age with them until, like all exoskeletons, it must be cast aside—not as false, but as a shallow introduction to things even deeper and stranger and more wonderful [...]

It is because I try to write this way that I use so much darkness. Evil is more than a prop. True sacrifice is not a sleight of hand. Laughter in the face of adversity is the first step to profound joy in triumph.

True Grit and Redemption

I went to the movies with my dad on Monday and watched the Coen Brothers' True Grit. I was skeptical when I first heard about this film, being a fan of the original John Wayne version. But the more I heard about it, read a couple of reviews, and watched the trailer multiple times, I couldn't wait to see it. And it didn't disappoint. Follow the links below to 2 articles that analyze the film a lot better than I could. All I have to say is, that I almost couldn't believe how redemptive the movie was, and how an umbrella of true, solid Christian hope colored the entire story. It's no accident that almost all of the film's musical score has parts of the hymn "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" running through it. The soundtrack is definitely worth the purchase, by the way.

2 great articles to read:

Article # 1: A review of the film by Stanley Fish, from the New York Times.

Article # 2: A review by Mike Cosper, at The Gospel Coalition, providing a distinctly Christian, biblical critique of the film.