Happy New Year!
As we kick off the new year, we have compiled a new edition of our "What we're reading..." Blog. As always, we hope that you enjoy this variety of articles that we have found to be inspiring, thought-provoking or intriguing, and that these pieces continue to help to shape ongoing conversations. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below as you read these!
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Teach Children to Play Beautiful Music Through Stories - Mrs. Marie Greenway Prelude to Postlude: CPH Music Blog
“Rules, both in life and in music, are good. We need the structure of rules to guide our actions, whether we are serving in our vocations or playing an instrument. In music, though, following the rules or sight-reading perfectly takes us only so far. We still have to make the music. We can follow all the rules we want, but in the end, music is a wild, unpredictable thing that must be communicated from the human experience.
Music itself, the sound waves vibrating through the air, follows rules of physics. That’s how we get beautiful harmonies. A song scientifically dissected is simply a series of pitches caused by creating different lengths of sound waves through the air. These pitches are arranged in a certain order to give us music. But, like all forms of art, the sequence of sounds and the arrangement of notes dictated by the composer mirrors an aspect of life and of human nature and thus cannot always be easily explained. A hauntingly beautiful melody moves us deeply, but we cannot say why. We may identify certain intervals that strike us as pleasing or mysterious or sad, that are universally acknowledged as expressing such emotions, but there is no explanation as to why those certain intervals sound that way to our ears. A student may play a piece perfectly, following every notation of note, rhythm, articulation, and dynamic, but still be missing something. How do we, as music teachers, explain the unexplainable to them?”
The Liberating Power of the Liberal Arts- Jessica Hooten Wilson, The Public Discourse
“The liberal arts free the soul not only from oppression and dominating power structures, but for the good life. Once you are a free soul, you are compelled to liberate others. You desire to pass on this freedom that you have received. What does this look like in education? Socrates defined education as teaching someone to love what is beautiful—not what is useful, practical, or necessary for profiting the most over the course of a life, but what is beautiful.
As a way of structuring my argument that education should be a training to love what is beautiful, let me walk through the relationship between the liberal arts and Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
Listening to the Whole Truth, Not Just Our Own Perspective
Truth is one of those abstracts that is under assault in our current culture. People believe that they all have their own truth, or that there is no truth. You have the famous metaphor of the elephant in which all are holding a different part of it and think they can define an elephant by its tail, or trunk, or side. I believe in Christian revelation, so the whole elephant has been revealed to me, but sometimes I have the habit of just swinging on the tail and thinking that’s the whole elephant. But I want to attain the vision of the whole.
C. S. Lewis says that reading great literature gathers together various perspectives, so that we can see the tail, the ears, the trunk of the thing as one composite. It’s not a matter of relative truths, no truth, or everybody having his or her own part of truth. Rather, when we bring our experiences, reason, and imagination together, we move toward a fuller understanding of what that truth is. A liberal arts education grants us this broader vision: we see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see, as Lewis writes in his Experiment in Criticism.”
Be Re-Enchanted - Jessica Schurz, Breaking Ground
““I’m reading Harry Potter,” I confessed to my friend later that summer, three books in at that point: “pure escapism.” The magic of the wizarding world was undoubtedly a refreshing relief to a year that felt distinctly dis-enchanted. Hogwarts was a more bearable place than my stay-at-home-order living room, and celebrating Harry’s quidditch victories proved a helpful distraction from my new habit of mindlessly checking my work email at 10pm. My friend’s response was immediate: “No, no, no,” she said, “reading fiction is not escapist. It helps us see the world as it truly is.”
She’s right. Of course, fiction gives both a fresh perspective and the room to heal from life’s grievances. It offers far more, however, than just a refreshing relief. Indeed, “literary experience heals the wound,” C.S. Lewis wrote in An Experiment in Criticism. More than simply a palliative, fiction simultaneously brings solace and remedy. But what wounds does literature heal, exactly?
First, reading fights back against that insufferable homogeneity of time. We read a novel sequentially. As such, we become more aware that both the plot and our reading takes place in time. The wizarding world’s rhythms in particular draw the reader’s attention to time passing. Year by year, book by book, Hogwarts opens its doors to students, sorts the first years into houses, and, in the middle of each volume, lines the great hall with Christmas branches and ornaments.
Second, reading fiction heals us from the wound that comes from living in a world sealed off from enchantment – a world that looks at matter, throws up its hands and says “yup, this is all there is.” This wound comes from accepting a flattened space and time that precludes transcendence. If this world is as truly all we have, we are left to ruminate in our own weariness. Literature, at its best, yanks us out of this despairing and ruminating. ”
This holiday season, we can all learn a lesson from Beethoven - Arthur C. Brooks, The Washington Post
“Beethoven was, as we now know, going deaf. Already quite famous as a pianist and composer, he had for several years experienced buzzing and ringing in his ears; by 1800, his hearing was in full decline. The problem thereafter worsened by the year, and it became clear to him and those around him that there was no hope of remission. But what happened as a result changed the world of music, and holds a lesson for us more than two centuries later.
For a long time, Beethoven raged against his decline, insisting on performing, with worse and worse results. To be able to hear his own playing, he banged on pianos so forcefully that he often left them wrecked. “In forte passages the poor deaf man pounded on the keys until the strings jangled,” wrote his friend and fellow composer Ludwig Spohr. “I was deeply saddened at so hard a fate.”
Beethoven confided in friends that without sound, his life would be meaningless. One close to him wrote of his laments: “It is a cry of revolt and of heart-rending pain — one cannot hear it but be shaken with pity. He is ready to end his life; only moral rectitude keeps him back.”
He finally gave up performing as his deafness progressed but found ways to keep composing. His housekeepers noticed that he would try to feel the timbre of notes on the piano by putting a pencil in his mouth and touching it to the soundboard while he played. When his hearing was partial, he apparently avoided using notes with the frequencies he could not hear. A 2011 analysis in the British Medical Journal shows that high notes (above 1568 Hz) made up 80 percent of his string quartets written in his 20s but dropped to less than 20 percent in his 40s.”
Sermon for Christmas Day - Pastor Noah Rogness, Rogness on Tap
“We live in darkness.
Our current lots appear as the darkest period of time in our lives. But, the greatest darkness of our history began infecting humanity from the first man.
The darkness of this world is specific, it is a darkness made known through sin and death. It wasn’t always this way.
In the beginning, God created. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” (John 1:1-2) All that was created was and is good.
Creation was brought into existence through this Word. It was through the Word, life is given. It was through the Word, you were created. You are God’s, you belong to Him.
The darkness is a reality of a broken world. A world led away from the light of the Word made flesh. A world led into temptation and sin through the lies and murdering of the ancient serpent, in whom the truth does not abide. (John 8:44)”
So That Our Joy May Be Complete - Pastor Esget, Esgetology
“What is the effect of this communion? John says it produces joy.
All the stuff we buy ends up eventually discarded. There’s no joy there. Our own bodies return to the dust. The things we think will make us happy are only temporary. But to be joined to the communion of Jesus and His Church – there is life, and light, and joy. Which is why John wants us to join not his church, but Christ’s Church. Being part of that one, holy, catholic and apostolic church is to enter into communion with the One who is Life. That’s our only path to joy. That’s why John, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, writes his Gospel and letters: “And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.”
This path of being fellow disciples with John, this path of communion with Jesus, means turning away from the darkness enshrouding this world. “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” For the third time in this short reading the word fellowship or communion repeats. How can light and darkness be in communion with each other? Being a disciple of Jesus, John is telling us, is not simply a matter of what we say, but how we walk, what we practice.”
What Does it Mean to Be a Person of Culture? - Michael De Sapio, The Imaginative Conservative
“It’s not culture as a scaffold upon nature or culture as heritage that I would like to discuss here, but the second element: culture as achieved or cultivated, lovingly sought after and lived; in short, culture as something personally possessed. What is a cultured life?
To live a life of culture would seem, first, to go beyond the commonplace, the mundane, and the utilitarian. A cultured person is interested in things beyond the daily headlines, the stock market, and the newest technological gadgets, necessary though these things might be for the management of our temporal lives. Culture brings us to a higher plane where we encounter ultimate values of the truth, goodness, and beauty. Culture is thus a habit of life, by which we accustom ourselves to seek and love these transcendentals.
The forms of culture include first and foremost art, music, and literature. Niebuhr also includes “speech, education, tradition, myth, science, philosophy, law, rite, beliefs, inventions, technologies” among the rollcall of cultural items. That seems a bit broad, embracing as it does the bulk of human achievements. For me, culture is more or less identifiable with serious literature and the fine arts and, more broadly, with learning. To be cultured is to seek to know and to appreciate, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, the best that has been thought and said. Things like technology, law, and science seem to belong to a larger entity of which culture is a part, namely civilization; yet we might stretch a point and include scientific inventions and legal codes as products of culture.”
Tolkien, Rowling, and Homer: Something Worth Living For - Annie Crawford, CIRCE
“My husband and I have spent more time walking in our neighborhood together since March of 2020, when much of our city shut down. Rooting ourselves more deeply to home and place has been an unexpected blessing.
The streets in our corner of the neighborhood are named after people and places from The Lord of the Rings. As the pandemic drags on, and day after day I walk down “Silmarillion Trail,” past “Middle Earth” and “Mordor Cove,” I have covered miles of both pavement and thought, trying to figure out what is happening to our community. There are many changes to cope with, but above all I have been grieving how the pandemic has impacted the worship in Christ’s church.
We humans are and always have been afraid of death, but the threat of COVID-19 has newly awakened or intensified that fear for many of us. Yet at the very center of Christian faith is the joy of knowing Christ’s victory over sin and death. That is the very thing we gather on a Sunday morning to remember, embody, and celebrate: death has lost its sting. What are we to do when a pandemic arouses our fear of death, yet also cuts us off from that which gives us victory over it? ”