April 2014
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I did listen to this over the weekend, as I had hoped to do. I loved it. Most of the first side is great, and it does have a kind of unity, though maybe that's an illusion created by the Sergeant-Pepper-style intro. "The Fool On the Hill" is as beautiful a tune as McCartney ever…
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I always feel a little embarrassed about admitting this, but the official cult of the saints is one aspect of Catholicism that I've never really taken to. I don't have any argument with the theology involved in the honoring of saints, and the practice of seeking their intercession; it's strictly a matter of temperament and culture,…
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Richard Thompson When I decided to do this series I immediately started a list of people I wanted to include, and I got up to about thirty or so entries about as fast as I could type. Richard Thompson's name was among them. But I've actually been sort of dreading the post on him–not because…
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I was going to say, about "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground," that it's a sound that's sort of stereotypical for the blues in a movie or TV way. I know, it's not a blues at all, either musically or thematically–it's religious. But sonically it's the kind of thing a movie or TV…
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Well, it looks like TypePad's crisis may really be over this time. Let's hope so. This was reportedly an extortion attempt: pay us and we'll leave you alone, but there's no word on who or where it came from. Pretty despicable. Makes me think of stocks and flogging.
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I did a bit more for Lent this year than I usually do–not a great deal by any means, but a bit more. And I found it almost too easy, and over more quickly than I expected. I do not love Lent, and agree with the priest I heard on Ash Wednesday, that it really…
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I had something partly written that I was going to post, but TypePad has been down much of the day. Apparently they've been the object of a denial-of-service attack, which renders a web site inoperable by flooding it with computer-generated traffic. So, later, but I do want to wish everyone a happy Easter. Or, since…
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Blind Willie Johnson "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" (I'll have a bit more to say about this and about the artist in a day or two, but since today is Holy Saturday I want it to stand alone for now.)
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For Holy Thursday, a very well-known setting of Psalm 51: I'm probably not going to post anything except, on Saturday. a guitar piece, between now and Sunday.
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The arrogance that would make God an object and impose our laboratory conditions upon him is incapable of finding him. For it already implies that we deny God as God by placing ourselves above him, by discarding the whole dimension of love, of interior listening; by no longer acknowledging as real anything but what we…
Light On Dark Water 