Posted in reseña on July 26, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.
It’s a big world and artistry represents a big world within that world. There’s room in all of this, thank the Creator, for Sarah Brightman and her multiple musical personae. You can’t fit Brightman into a single genre and you’ll only become bitter if you try.
Just enjoy the music. (more…)
Posted in reseña on July 26, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.
From one important angle, this is the Amy Grant album we were waiting for and knew she could make. The depth, the knowing pathos, and the quality of expression raised Amy’s game to a new level. (more…)
Posted in reseña on July 26, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.
Like a mountain range that spreads peaks out as far as the eye can see, Gloria peaked early, then went on to add album after album to the view. Cuts Both Ways is definitely her early peak, a CD that showed her at the top of her game as a singer in both Spanish and English. (more…)
Posted in reseña on July 26, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.
Delirious? sprang on the scene as a new-born Great Band. They were a breath of fresh air for Christian listeners, not least because they seemed as surprised by their fame as we did. (more…)
Posted in reseña on July 26, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.
This wildly eclectic anthology of well-known pieces, performed by an accomplished musical company to modest instrumental accompaniment, is a sampler of what grouped voices can accomplish under masterful directorship in the sparest of styles. (more…)
Posted in textures on July 25, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Order is not a given. It is rather an achievement.
Revolutions fail because they do not understand that the removal of an oppressive status quo does not by itself achieve a more agreeable order. Chaos too often ensues. (more…)
Posted in textures on July 24, 2007| Leave a Comment »
The psalmist spars with God like friend to old friend over a beer at table in their pub. It is an unsettling frankness that speaks the truth about one’s circumstance without endangering the long association that is the cement that joins such friends.
Psalms 42 and 43 are held together by this verbal link:
Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. (Psalms 42:11 and 43:5 NIV) (more…)
Posted in textures on July 20, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Contrary to what Paul might have expected upon his return to the mother city Jerusalem, the Jewish leaders of the Jesus movement greeted his report of God’s work among the gentiles with jubilation and prudence. Capable of welcoming the complexity of a generous redemption that included the unwashed and impious in its broad embrace, they nonetheless advised Paul to take precautions against the arousal of zealous violence by Jerusalemite Jews of a less ecumenical spirit.
Arguably, such generosity of spirit and tactical posturing kept the Jesus movement intact as it was buffeted by the early crosswinds of ethnic complications. The reader is well advised to linger over it, to palpate the absence of rigidity that it implies, to sense the shrewd care of it all in the face of multiple threats to the movement’s integrity. (more…)
Posted in textures on July 19, 2007| Leave a Comment »
The reader of Job must be prepared for complex turns and important nuance.
For example, Job’s bitter complaint against a God who does not watch over the poor as their lives are dismantled by the unjust rich suddenly turns at 24.22 into an assurance that God will in the end give the unjust their due. This is the very judgment whose absence Job has decried in 24.1. He is not, it would seem, quite the pure antagonist of conventional wisdom that he is so often made out to be.
(more…)
Posted in textures on July 19, 2007| Leave a Comment »
The graceless beauty of Elihu’s words should unsettle all readers of religious vocation or temperament. There is beauty in such crystal. Cold glass and steel, skillfully wrought, erect buildings and monuments that are breathtaking in scope and brilliance.
Elihu may be a fool. He is not a dullard.
His verbal artistry erects a theodicy that is intimidating in its self-confidence. Anyone who can speak like this, it seems for a moment, must know what he is talking about.
Yet Elihu does not.
Paul’s edifying words, delivered at the invitation of a synagogue leader in Pisidian Antioch, take up the theme of sophisticated error by rehearsing the enmity that the custodians of Israel’s legacy displayed towards Jesus. (more…)
Canter Bridge 