This week we begin preparing ourselves for Advent – the most counter-cultural season of the Christian Year. Why counter-cultural? Because the readings and themes of the liturgy call us to wonder and wait, while all around us, the culture presses us to celebrate. The...
Last week we listened to an American Alleluia. This week, the echo of Canadian Leonard Cohen’s Halleluiah is still reverberating, many days after the announcement of his death. I attended one of Cohen’s performances in 2013. At 79, Cohen was full of joy, dancing onto...
The coming week’s lectionary focuses on two particular passages from Isaiah. For this week’s writing, I went looking for musical settings of those scripture passages. What I found was, as is often the case, the adjacent possible: the connected, but distinct, random...
Bach’s liturgical compositions comprise the vast majority of his output, as the relentless pace of weekly worship required an equally relentless development of musical resources. Bach was a Lutheran—the state church was his employer and the beneficiary of his...
We are now in the twenty-fifth week after Pentecost, the final month of Ordinary Time. The days are getting shorter, the evenings darker, and, frankly, I am weary. There are many reasons for my fatigue, but from a liturgical perspective (one of my favorite...
If you have been reading Sound Theology for a while, you may recall a post where I encouraged you to join a choir. Well, this fall I took my own advice, and joined the Concert Choir at the College where I work. One of the songs we are learning has a line that has been...
