"Persevere" is streaming.

After having the discography residing strickly on CDs all this time, I am finally loading things onto streaming services. "Persevere" is the first one up. Here it is. Please spread the word and share widely.

Updating the Discography (again): "Short Set on the Deck" (EP)

Here is another archival record of "EP" length, recorded at dusk on November 9, 2020, with a special guest appearance by several V's of geese flying low overhead. Captured on a Tascam DR-5 in one take with no overdubs, it is what it says it is, just a "Short Set on the Deck."

So, I'm not the only one who's been recording during the lockdown

 Look at what the great Stevie Winwood has been up to. A song of hope in the resurrection. Sounds like worship to me!

 

The Word in the Wind (2001)

UPDATE: Here is an excerpt from an older post I thought I would rerun, since the songs on this CD are based on the lectionary texts and themes of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. Some additional info that may be of interest: I am not the first to set Thomas Hardy's poem, The Oxen, to music. Ralph Vaughan Williams did so before me, but my guitar-based arrangement (DADGAD) is obviously quite different from his choral anthem. Other tuning info, for anyone so inclined: Your Desert Snow (DADGAD), Strange Bedfellows and Living Bread (both standard tuning, Capo 2), Grace Upon Grace (standard, Capo 4).

EXCERPT: The Word in the Wind consists of mostly guitar-based songs and a few instrumental tracks (fourteen tracks in all), written in seminary and during my first pastorate, and recorded about ten years ago (2001). Several of the poems recently published in The Just, Quiet Wind are set to music here (see, e.g., Psalm 1, Living Bread, There is a Reason); the songs are inspired by texts from the Advent/Christmas/Epiphany cycle of the liturgical year, while their sequence reflects the progress from prophetic (Isaianic) expectation (Your Desert Snow, Strange Bedfellows) through the nativity (Grace Upon Grace, The Oxen, Christmas Joy, Innocents' Day) to the call to discipleship (Baptism at Nuweiba, The Response, There is a Reason, Deep Blue Heart, Believers Leap). Like its precursor, A Soundtrack for the Close of the Age (1991), The Word in the Wind may be only loosely described as a concept album, but here the concept, if it is discernible at all, will be most apparent to those who are accustomed to reading, telling, living, and rejoicing in the gospel of salvation according to the Christian year; in the case of instrumental tracks, however, even listeners who have this leg up will have little more than a title, a mode, and a mood, to go on. ...

Updating the Discography: "Cutting Ruts: Live Tracks and Demos" released

After two albums in twenty-nine years, that is now three in four months. But who's counting? (OK, I am.)

 A Soundtrack for the Close of the Age (1991)

The Word in the Wind (2001) 

 The Great Western Road (July 2020) 

 Persevere  (September 2020) 

Cutting Ruts (October 2020) 

Persevere (CD)

 Just released last month, the second album this year, called Persevere.

As a foretaste, here are the short lyrics from the title track, a long, mostly instrumental closer:

"Now do you see?
Now do you see?
The Fall was never a fall from grace.
It was only ever a fall from faith.
Now do you see?"

That's my dog on the cover (front and back).  

Return to God: Historical and Modern Confessional Sources for the Renewal and Regathering of the Church

My latest book gathers a number of sources together that (1) are previously unpublished or are translated here into English for the first time, (2) have struck me as important both in their original  time and context and (potentially) for our time and place, (3) share a common confessional conviction (in both the "penitential" and the "professional" sense), and (4) may be of particular value as the Church shakes off it Covid shackles and regathers to pray, sing (!), worship, celebrate the sacraments, and breath in the Holy Spirit together.

Two sermons from the American Awakenings are here: one by Gilbert Tennent (First GA) on how we should listen to sermons, and another by Samuel Miller (Second GA) on the glory of the Gospel. 

Several first-ever English translations are also included (which I mention here in reverse chronological order): 

• the long prayer from the London journal of the brilliant critic of the Enlightenment, Johann Georg Hamann; 
• a prayer of confession "for more difficult times" from Oswald Myconius (the successor to Oecolampadius in Basel)
• three pieces from the Oecolampadius corpus: 
• A Litany to God the Father (a clear attempt to reform the rosary in a more orthodox direction, this is a wonderful tool for commiting the life, work, and ministry of Jesus to memory)
• Questions and Answers for the Examination of Children (a child's catechism)
• Discourse at the Synod of Basel (1531), delivered not long before the Reformer's death and culminating in his own Profession of Faith.
• the opening and closing prayers of confession from the 1520 edition of Jodocus Windsheim's Confession of a Repenting Christian, to which Oecolampadius provided the preface. Earlier editions of this piece have roots going back to at least early 1517. It made a big impression on Oecolamapadius, who later wrote his own attempt to reform the penitential rite. 

These pieces by Windsheim—offered here only in partial translation for its 500th anniversary—surround his nine prayers of confession in response to the Ten Commandments (he responds to the ninth and tenth commandment with a single prayer), and this form in turn inspired my own eleven prayers of confession, offered here in the modern section of the book, in response to the Decalogue (one for the prologue and one each for the commandments) and with the current state of the church and the world in view. 

The modern section also includes four "scripture messages" or postils, if you will, consisting purely of biblical verses arranged in logical sequence and which may prove useful for either outreach or in lieu of a sermon where the services of a preacher are not available. With no pretensions of adding to the authoriatively confessional literature of the church, I have also included my own Twenty-four Theses as a personal confession of faith offered at such a time as this, in view of the social unrest of the age.

"and the moon to blood"

 Well, this is interesting. So too is the click-through link. But neither mentions Joel 2 or Acts 2. That connection is for the biblically literate to make. Don't expect it of the media.