escapingbabylon.com

LaTonya Taylor of Urban Faith, while writing a tribute to Walter Hawkins gave some really good insight into Gospel Music that is a really good articulation of things that I’ve never been able to articulate.

There are at least five things I value in traditional, choir-driven gospel music above all else:
1. Clarity of the gospel message.
2. Accessibility to the local church choir and musicians.
3. An aspirational quality — that is, songs a choir can sing next Sunday, and continue to sing better through the years.
4. Singability for the choir, and saaaangability for the lead vocalist.
5. Demanding music that doesn’t scrub out the spontaneity or experiential nature of gospel.

Additionally, I believe strongly that good gospel for the church setting stays on the side of congregational song rather than concert performance. If the congregation can’t sing a song without getting ensnared in a labyrinthine thicket of vamps, key changes, and vocal acrobatics, that song positions the congregation as an audience, rather than as a body of people participating together in worship.

Goin’ Up Yonder – UrbanFaith.com.

She also posts the following video and says

By 3 minutes and 16 seconds in, it’s all over, and it’s just begun. Here you hear the narrative poly-vocality that creates one song out of two, and contextualizes the individual experience within that of a community. As the choir rocks steadily into the repeated “I’m going away,” Hawkins sings over them, giving specificity to that general vision. If you’ve ever sung lead over a song like this, you know that the interchange between your voice and the collective voice of the choir is the difference between having a perfunctory rehearsal and having church. The community girds you from beneath, lifts you up and over a cloud of witnesses, empowers you to speak your piece, as long as you’re willing to speak for everybody.

This last paragraph is amazing for two reasons. Firstly, it’s completely accurate about the experience of singing lead on a song like this. Secondly, it captures a bit of how community is expressed and modeled in the practice of gospel music. In this music, individuality and community are not opposing forces. The lead singer isn’t being asked to simply sing the song but to “saaang”. The song is not complete unless it is processed and expressed through the lead singers own experience, ability, belief and emotion to become something that only that singer can do. But this is not done in opposition to the community of the choir, but in harmony with it. When done well, the choir leaves room for the individual expression of the lead, and the lead leaves room for the community voice of the calendar, and all are in tune with each other and with the director so that the song may be contextualized to the particular emotions, event, and move of the Spirit that’s happening at that particular time.

I thought this was cool. Go check out the blog post. Let me know what you think.

Anthony Daniels, better known as C-3P0

This weekend I saw Star Wars in Concert. It was an absolutely amazing experience, despite only catching the last half of it. It was an incredible show, the sound was great, as was the orchestra. The visuals were fantastic, a mix of excerpts from the films, live shots of the orchestra, artists’ renditions (I think I recognized some of Tommy Lee Edward’s art) and lasers, so many lasers.

One of the highlights for me was Anthony Daniels’ performance as the narrator. The show was organized by character and theme, and Daniels (better known as the droid C-3PO) was given the task of putting each of the performances and accompanying visuals in context. In other words, he told the stories of the Star Wars universe.

But this post is not about what he did, but about how he did it. It would have been easy, and satisfactory, for Daniels to tell the story in a way that was suspenseful, or scary, that got us caught up in the story of the moment, and wondering what would happen next. He did not do that. Instead he gave a celebratory, or one might even say patriotic, telling of the story.

The room was filled with people who had seen the Star Wars story multiple times. These were people who were coming, not to experience the story for the first time, but to celebrate it, and to share it with their kids. Daniels’ reading celebrated a story complete. He told the story as if it were our own, and in his telling helped to make it ours.

So how does it connect to scripture? If you’ve gone to a church, so many times we’ll hear portentous readings of scripture, that are independent of authorial intent. The reader rarely stops to consider what role this particular reading plays in the larger work. Is this retelling of dire straits a part of a larger passage celebrating God? Is this story a warning, wisdom shared (apparently) to a beloved son, a persuasive argument in the face of accusations or a celebration of identity, and the journey to it. I believe that if we, like Daniels, kept in mind what a particular passage is supposed to be doing, and imbue our reading with this purpose, the use of Scripture in our worship services will be a lot more powerful.

So The Last Airbender comes out this summer. Here’s a good summary of my thoughts on the upcoming movie.

The Blog of Gene Luen Yang – The Last Airbender Movie.

Eugene Cho had a post about the Arizona law asking for comments. I’ve been thinking about the law and haven’t yet been able to put into words how it makes me feel. Here’s the comment that I posted that comes closest to my personal reaction to the law

As a foreign national who has been in this country for years, the Arizona law feels like the most unwelcoming thing I’ve experienced thus far.

Between the fingerprinting and the ever-changing immigration laws and the punditry, since september 12, 2001 there’s been a fair amount of things that has made me feel uncomfortable. Somehow this feels different. This feels like the closest thing to “You are second class and so you should know your place,” that I’ve felt.

Even assuming that there will be no racial profiling, or that they will not mistakenly arrest American citizens. It means that if I’m ever in Arizona, as a foreign national, I pretty much have to justify my right to be in this country whenever I interact with the law. Which says to me that I’m not wanted here, and it would really be more pleasant for everyone if I left.

At some point I might get into the social, theological, justice-oriented response. But right now this is my emotional response.

Culture Making has been one of the best books I’ve read in the past year. It takes a look at cultural goods in society, theology in terms of culture and makes the assertion that the best way, and in some ways the only way, to change culture is to create more, better culture. In the video below, Andy Crouch, the author, responds to the question “How can we devote time/energy/resources to creating art and culture, when there are so many who, because of poverty, are stripped of  the power to be culture makers?”

Check it out.

via: Culture Making and Poverty (Best Question #2) | Culture Making.

Best Question 2 – Culture Making and Poverty from Culture Making on Vimeo.

The LXD: In the Internet age, dance evolves … | Video on TED.com.

Imaginary Foundation: Make a difference. via BoingBoing.

Download the PDF. Print it. Stick it up somewhere.

Why?

Because, to be honest, there are too many voices that say that we are powerless, and that the machine goes on whether we want it to or not.

Those voices are wrong.

But first we need to decide that we will.

xkcd: Desert Island.

xkcd: Desert Island.

How often do we live our lives for this. Here’s the challenge for today: Try to look for and identify the amazing things going on beneath the surface of your day today. Look for the things that aren’t obvious, for the person who does exceptional work so as to produce an experience for you that is seamless, or for the unusual confluence of events that has brought you and another person together.

And, if you want, you can share some of those stories here.

So I’m freaking out a little bit. You all know me, and my recurring cycle of over-commitment. I’m fairly deep into this cycle and right now it’s combined with my almost annual spring restlessness and the fact that I’m at school and producing a fairly massive freakout.

So I figured I should write about it. I’ve found that the major drawback to being over-committed is not that I don’t have time to do everything. The more debilitating loss is that I don’t have time to think about everything as well as to think about nothing. I don’t know if this is the case for others. In essence, it’s that I lose effective use of my subconscious.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m finding for myself that while my conscious mind is quite capable, it’s the subconscious that does the more interesting stuff. That’s the part of my mind that’s creative, that will come up with ingenious solutions, that will connect two unrelated ideas to produce something great. When my days are full, or when I don’t have time to sketch, do music for fun, or other random things like that, my subconscious suffers.

One of the buzz words I’ve been hearing recently is “margin” which, despite my distaste for buzz-words, is a useful word. It talks about the space at the side of the page that is unused (or that you doodle in) that makes the page work. So right now, I may need to work on creating some margins in my life. That’s part of what this post is, writing in the margins.

School Bullying Prevention: Teach Empathy at Young Age – TIME.

But like language, the development of this inherent tendency may be affected by early experience. As evidence, look no further than ancient Greece and the millennia-old child-rearing practices of Sparta and Athens. Spartans, who were celebrated almost exclusively as warriors, raised their ruling-class boys in an environment of uncompromising brutality — enlisting them in boot camp at age 7 and starving them to encourage enough deviousness and cunning to steal food, which skillfully bred yet more generations of ruthless killers.

In Athens, future leaders were brought up in a more nurturing and peaceful way, at home with their mothers and nurses, starting education in music and poetry at age 6. They became pioneers of democracy, art, theater and culture. “Just like we can train people to kill, the same is true with empathy. You can be taught to be a Spartan or an Athenian — and you can taught to be both,” says Teny Gross, executive director of the outreach group Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence in Providence, R.I., and a former sergeant in the Israeli army.

One of the reasons that I think Youth and Children’s Ministry is important is that I suspect that this idea can be expanded beyond empathy. We can choose whether we want to teach our kids to be selfish, to treat each other as sex objects, to be racist, etc. We choose what the world, into which our children are born, looks like, and what that world looks like, affects what the next generation will grow to become.

This is also why college ministry is important, because it is during this time where people make the decisions about what they want their world, and thus the world, to look like in the next ten years. It’s why the work of organizations like the Children at Risk Foundation, Jose Abreu’s El Sistema, Bolder Options, Frontier Youth Trust and Union Gospel Mission are important, because they are helping to teach values to kids, many of whom live in environments that are significantly more “Spartan” than “Athenian”.

Anyway, I thought the article was interesting, and it intersected with some things I care about. Take a look at it, tell me what you think (particularly if you see some interesting implications of the article, I’d love to hear and discuss them).