Seattle, my old hometown, has a loooooooooooooong way to go before it reaches the “Real Cities Have Trains” standard, but I gotta say, this is at least a baby step in the right direction. For Bloomington to have a streetcar system wouldn’t hurt my feelings—to say nothing of a waterfront…
Archive Page 60
Things I wish Bloomington had
Published 10 December 2007 General Leave a CommentTags: bloomington, bloomington vs. seattle, real cities have trains, seattle, transit
Who’s your religion service provider?
Published 10 December 2007 General 2 CommentsTags: Commercialized Faith, Essays
A couple of years there were some pieces in the news which prompted an essay from me which I shopped around a bit to various publications. It was entitled “Who’s your religion service provider: resisting the commoditization of the Christian faith.” I got some interest, but ultimately not a sale, and so it’s been sitting on my hard drive gathering dust. However, Terry Mattingly’s current column tells me the topic is even more relevant than it was when I wrote it. The “service provider” mentality is now assumed by the larger churches, for all intents and purposes; it’s just a question of which features and options you want to have come with the package.
So, without further ado—
* * *
Consider the following:
• A front-page, above-the-fold article in the 20 March 2005 Indianapolis Star called “Daunting mission: finding a church”, which asked the question: “Christians can find a church on almost every street. How to pick the right one?” Amidst photos of gift bags being given to visitors, talk of what’s “effective”, the importance of “the warmth factor”, having “welcome centers” and making sure people have a “growing experience”, there’s a modicum of column inch space devoted to what a given church actually teaches. “[S]ome issues might be non-negotiable for a churchgoer,” the article thoughtfully posits, “such as the authority of the Scriptures… [therefore] people should should think about where they stand on matters up for debate [before visiting a church].” A helpful sidebar called “Advice on finding a place to worship” lists the important factors to keep in mind—and what are the top four? In order—geography, child safety, youth programs, and music. And where do faith and teaching fall on the list? Actually, they don’t. Worship is number five and preaching is number six, but these are both referenced in terms of style.
• A piece in the 21 March 2005 issue of Newsweek, “The battle for Latino souls”, which speaks of the “marketing savvy… often associated with corporate America” with which Chicago-area Hispanic Catholics are being recruited by Pentecostals. One such congregation is described as having “an inviting sanctuary with amenities for all, like a new youth center stocked with games and computers.” A founder of the community is quoted as saying, “People are looking for service… it’s like a business.” The writer asserts that “Catholicism will never match the aggressive evangelism of rival churches”, and quotes Richard Simon, “Cardinal Francis [sic] George’s liaison for charismatic renewal”, as saying, “We keep trying to imitate the Protestants, but it doesn’t work.”
• The 4 June 2005 issue of The Spectator, referring to Pope Benedict XVI as believing that “a smaller Church could be a better Church, offering the world a superior product and therefore eventually increasing its market share”, noting that “Benedict himself does not employ this commercial analogy, but it works surprisingly well—not just for Roman Catholicism, but also for religion in general.”
• The description, from the website of Overlake Christian Church in Redmond, Washington, of a brand-new worship service ILLUMINATE: “ILLUMINATE is a dynamic, PASSION-filled, awe-inspiring, movement of God. We’ve combined the elements necessary to create an inviting, exciting, and life-changing atmosphere in our Sunday Morning service. ILLUMINATE values ENCOUNTER, where you will meet the God that loves you through music that moves you, a relevant message that inspires you, and the company of others that touches you. ILLUMINATE welcomes all life stages and ages, and those along every point of their spiritual journey. Illuminate [sic] is light for the road. […] Being a BEACON to the culture with an incarnate message of God’s love, FUSING into loving relationships, ENLIGHTENING the practice of faith, IGNITING the use of gifts for serving others and God, and living on FIRE for Jesus in all areas of life.”
• And finally, economist Laurence Iannaccone’s paper “Why strict churches are strong”, from the March 1994 issue of The American Journal of Sociology, in which he argues that “[i]n the austere but precise language of economics, religion is a ‘commodity’ that people produce collectively… The pleasure and edification that I derive from a Sunday service does not depend solely on what I bring to the service […]; it also depends on how many others attend, how warmly they greet me, how well they sing or recite […], how enthusiastically they read and pray, and how deep their commitments are.”
Assuming that the previous examples represent a pattern of thought and behavior throughout congregations in the United States and even worldwide, it is time to remove Iannaccone’s quotes from the word “commodity” and acknowledge that, in fact, our faith has become one more profitable good to be bought and sold in the popular marketplace. The above items suggest that the churches in question might just as well have Internet access as their “product”, because following this mentality, what is a church but a “religion service provider”?
In all fairness, a very real and concerning question faces Christendom these days, to wit: how does one engage and challenge the prevailing culture in a language they understand without obscuring Christian truth? To put it another way, how do we be “in the world but not of it”? Surely that’s what places like Overlake are trying to do, but they miss the mark by making a false idol out of “relevance”, obscuring the countercultural distinctives of historical Christianity rather than standing fast on them. As such, people come and go from the churches for the wrong reasons. When even the Roman Catholic Church tries to operate like a secular business, like it’s just another “service provider”, the faithful clearly know something’s amiss: “We keep trying to imitate the Protestants, but it doesn’t work.” You don’t say.
In truth, this is a problem that has faced us–that is, all Christians–as far back as the Council of Jerusalem, when the Apostles had to decide if the Law of Moses was a burden that needed to be borne by the Gentile Christians. Nonetheless, it is especially acute in a world where many of us have five hundred cable channels, the Internet, talk radio, and omnipresent advertising competing for our attention and their money, bombarding us and our children with more images and messages than any other society has ever produced. They purport to provide “pleasure and edification” in plenty, and they’re readily available with next to no effort–so is it any wonder that Christian bodies feel compelled to compete for our time and attention on the same level? In order to solve the problem, however, we must first honestly name the source of this fierce, underhanded battle for our souls and tell him to get behind us.
This year, on the first Sunday of Lent according to the Orthodox calendar, Fr. Ambrose (formerly known as Fr. Alexei Young) of the St. Gregory Palamas Greek Orthodox Monastery in Ohio, told the Indianapolis congregation of St. George Orthodox Church that “[s]ecularism…takes over when people start to think that the Church is just one more agency or social organization with some ‘more or less’ good ideas.” Dr. Gerald Bray, Anglican Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama, echoes this sentiment, writing in the winter 2004 issue of the journal Sobornost that “if the Church is no more than a social welfare agency, it has no particular reason to exist, and its functions might be better performed by others.” The message is clear: churches need to stop thinking and acting like secular businesses and start acting like churches again. If that means smaller buildings with smaller mortgages, less flashy audio-visual equipment, and (dare I say it) less money and a smaller, more local community, so be it. The early Christians, as well as many Russian Christians of the last century, met in catacombs and focused on Christ, not rear-projection screens or “the warmth factor”; how can we with our 16,000-seat (like Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas), air-conditioned buildings and “welcome kits” do any less? If we have to, we should be able to come together in the catacombs again and be overjoyed about it.
Even moreso, we the laypeople must recognize our own contribution to this commoditization of Christianity. “[T]he Church has life itself; indeed, the true life,” Fr. Ambrose also said, “which is man’s communion with and transformation by God through His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who is ‘the Way, the Truth, and the Life.’ Most of us act as though we never heard this.” It is possible to eschew Christ’s transcendent Truth either internally or externally; in either case, we’re placing our own personal preferences ahead of the Gospel, saying that we prefer our own interpretations to those of the Church, or saying that we prefer our own “prayer style”, our own “taste”, to that of the Church–then telling the local and national organizations to compete for our “business”. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Some would argue that it is the job of the Church to meet people at their level, and that particularly today, we need to at least appear to be “keeping with the times” in order to keep people in the pews. However, Christianity teaches that God already met us at our level when He became human, died and was resurrected. Especially in our media-saturated society, we must resist the urge to “keep with the times”, that is to secularize, and now allow God to raise us up to His level.
Christianity is becoming a secular business because we have made an idol out of our own personal, subjective experience, rather than submitting to the communal, sublime union with God that is the Church. In doing so, by seeking “relevance” rather than transcendence, temporal thrill instead of Heaven’s eternal spiritual joy, “service” rather than opportunities to serve, by going where we will be “built up” rather than where we will be crucified to ourselves, by asking for affirmation in who we already are rather than submitting to transforming power of our Lord, we’re really looking for a god made in our own image rather than acknowledging that we were made in God’s image. As a result, we have stunted our own growth in Christ, and reduced our local churches to a set of neighborhood social programs.
Worst of all, we claim (at least on some level) that we do this to reach those in the world, but that’s exactly what we have failed to do, because in doing all of this, we do not challenge them. We present them with a safe, unobtrusive Church that demands nothing outside of their comfort zone, nothing that looks any different from their normal existence, rather than a Church that demands their entire life. “If the early Christians had been just like everyone else,” Fr. Ambrose said, “there would have been no persecutions, no martyrs, and, in the end, no Church, either.” Dr. Bray concurs: “[O]nly by recovering and emphasizing the spiritual dimension have we any hope of making a lasting impression on an unbelieving world.”
The Church is not a faith-based utility, one corporation among many with whom we choose to do business in our everyday lives. Rather, She is the Bride and Body of Christ, the “pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15). As Christians, we need to return to treating Her as such if we truly wish to “make disciples of all nations” and be disciples ourselves.
The Gospel of Judas and the need for languages
Published 10 December 2007 Beginnings , College , General Leave a CommentTags: Greek, Journalism, Latin, Obvious Slip-Ups, People Who Know What They're Doing, Syriac, Things I Won't Talk About For Now, Well-Intentioned Academic Mistakes, Welsh
I’m late to this party, but Prof. April DeConick of Rice University has gotten a decent amount of attention lately with her critique of last year’s National Geographic story on the Gospel of Judas. Mollie over at GetReligion has some interesting things to say about the warning journalists should take from this:
When going for a scoop, reporters risk sacrificing the quality of their work. This revelation about the allegedly shoddy work of National Geographic couldn’t get a fraction of the publicity of the original story, which is why we should be careful the first time around.
It seems to me that there are a couple of important things underscored here for academic wannabes like me, too. First off, it strikes me that the popular media is a questionable initial venue for scholarship, and the central reason is that the aims are different. The goal of an academic book or journal is to disseminate research; the goal of a popular publication is to make money. Along the same lines, exclusivity, a hallmark of commercial publishing, appears to work at cross-purposes to peer review, a necessity of academic publishing. To this end, signing non-disclosure agreements preventing peer review and publishing photos of a manuscript just large enough to prove you have it but not large enough to be useful for other scholars in verifying claims is, to put it charitably, not exactly best-practice scholarship.
Something else this communicates to somebody like me—and doubtless this will be a point so obvious to somebody who’s been in grad school for any length of time, me saying it is going to be like a three year old proudly shouting, “I’ve discovered one and one make two!”—is the importance of knowing the languages for your primary sources. If you don’t know know the language well enough to not only translate a text but to be able to discern where colleagues may have made errors, you’ve got work to do, and the published translations of other people are no substitute for putting in the work yourself. As Dr. DeConick says here, acknowledging that Coptic is not as accessible a language to New Testament scholars as Hebrew: “Okay. But so what. Learn Coptic.”
An object lesson from my own past brings both of these points together. A couple of years ago, when I was first coming to the conclusion that I’d make a better scholar than an opera singer, I saw a call for papers for a graduate student conference which was going to be relatively nearby. The theme looked interesting; I brainstormed some ideas, did some preliminary research, wrote an abstract, and submitted it. Lo! and behold, they accepted it, and now I had to actually write the paper.
First of all, I’ll point out the obvious mistake: I submitted an abstract for a paper which I had not yet written. I’ve since been counseled that, in practice, this is a horrible way to go. It’s not that it doesn’t happen, I’m told, but it’s a bad idea.
The two real problems, however, were that I had to rely exclusively on translations from Welsh, Latin, Greek, and God only knows what else, rather than being able to look at those texts for myself, and that one of my main sources was a popular book rather than an academic work. I didn’t realize the importance of the former, and I had no idea at the time that there was any real distinction regarding the latter. In other words, what I did would probably have been okay for an undergraduate, at least in some classes, but it was not acceptable by any means for somebody trying to present what they do as graduate-level research, and I have no doubt it made me look bad to people too kind to tell me so. I still have a hunch that some of the things I noticed in that paper might be valid, but until I’m able to read Welsh (since now I can at least muddle through Greek and Latin), I don’t feel qualified to talk about the texts. Not only that, but until I can independently verify the claims made in the popular work I used through my own examination of the sources involved, I’m not going to use those arguments (which is part of why I’m not talking at all about the topic of the paper itself).
By contrast, I wrote a paper a few months ago that deals with sources in Greek and Syriac. I was able to successfully avoid using popular books as sources, but I had to deal with the Syriac text in translation, which the professor said was all right, but having learned my lesson with the other paper, I agreed that the paper wasn’t going to be used for anything outside of the classroom until such time as I could at least verify that textual arguments I made based on the translation weren’t rendered specious by the actual Syriac text. Spot-checks like that are within my reach at this point (as long as I have Jessie Payne-Smith by my side), so I’m going to submit the paper to a conference.
The moral: Learn Coptic. And Greek. And Latin. And Syriac. Maybe Ge’ez, too, and Arabic and Armenian and Welsh and Anglo-Saxon and Gothic. Is it a lot of work? Sheesh. Um, yeah. On the other hand, as my dad used to say, the cheapest way to do anything is to do it right the first time. The overhead you think you’re saving by going with a translation won’t actually be a benefit if you’re relying on the efforts of people who have signed non-disclosure agreements and who are rushing to meet a deadline.
Getting a late start
Published 10 December 2007 Beginnings , General 5 CommentsTags: being in my 30s, College, Greek, Indiana University, Latin, music, my brilliant wife, my wild and wacky family, Syriac, Western Washington University
What does it mean that I “got a late start?”
I ‘m told that I was bright as a child, but nothing I did well lent itself to any particular discipline. I read a lot about everything, I liked music, I liked to draw. I dabbled in computers a little bit. In general, I read everything I could get my hands on, which often led into other interests, but mostly just led to more reading.
This presented something of a vocational dilemma. Both of my parents, while intelligent, are very practical and they didn’t quite see how any of what I did was going to ever make me any money unless I got on a game show. They nonetheless more or less stayed out of my way, while encouraging me to go after sports, since athletes were always the ones you heard about getting big scholarships when college rolled around.
Well, instead of going into sports, when high school came, I got into theatre and the school paper. Again, not-totally-unjustified visions of financial ruin danced through my parents’ heads.
I applied to one college, Western Washington University, and got in. It was a not-particularly-well-funded state liberal arts university, but I had enough of a scholarship that, with in-state tuition, it would be workable, in theory. I applied figuring I’d go for a theatre degree; by the time the first day of classes rolled around, I had been convinced I wanted to be an opera singer, and declared myself a music major.
Midway through my junior year, I dropped out. I won’t go into the whole torturous story here; suffice it to say that various pressures—familial, financial, vocational, educational, and so on—combined to make it clear that this was not the right time for me to be beating my head against a brick wall and taking on massive debt for the privilege.
I continued to study voice privately, however, and I took a job in the software industry (far easier to do in those days for somebody with no formal experience and no degree than it would be today, I assure you) which guaranteed I wouldn’t have to wait tables. Life went on for few years; I became a good enough young tenor to do some interesting gigs around the Seattle area, I got married, and so on. For awhile I took a class a quarter at a local community college, figuring I’d eventually go back to school full-time, but I didn’t have the foggiest idea what the circumstances would be. I thought I’d perhaps enter an opera company’s young artist program before going back to school.
At age 26, it became clear that in order to get to the next step of an operatic career, I needed to go back to school, and I needed to go someplace where I would the kind of performing opportunities I wouldn’t have elsewhere—someplace like Indiana University. Well, as my wife and I discussed, instead of someplace like Indiana University, how about Indiana University? So, we packed up, left our safe little life in the Pacific Northwest and headed off for an adventure in the Midwest (well aware that to many, that expression is internally contradictory). I was sitting in undergraduate theory classes again before I was 27, and I graduated shortly after turning 29, it having taken me eleven years to finish a four year degree.
Again, without going into clinical detail, I’ll simply say that my experience finishing my Vocal Performance degree made it clear to me that opera was the very last field in the world in which I wanted a career, whatever I had thought over the previous eleven years notwithstanding. The problem was simple: I wasn’t good enough to have the kind of career that would allow me to have the kind of life I wanted, and I wasn’t ever going to be good enough, despite my teachers’ best efforts—the truth was, I didn’t want it badly enough. I had too many other interests which I found stimulating to be able to focus every effort on becoming a better operatic performer. I still compulsively read everything that crossed my path, and I really was perfectly happy doing that in a way I never was performing. As it worked out, the successes I had as an undergraduate were more as a scholar and a publisher than a performer.
The other factor at play was that my wife had started grad school in her own field at IU, and we had several years left before that would be done.
So what to do? Given my other interests, I had discussions with faculty members in the School of Music about musicology and choral conducting, but the bottom line was the same—love to have you, they told me, but we don’t have any funding at the Masters level, and if you come in as a Masters-level student, it’ll harm your chances of getting funding as a PhD student. Not being willing to go into an indefinite amount of debt for an indefinite amount of time, that canned those ideas. Seminary was considered, strongly so, but ultimately dismissed, for a variety of reasons.
Medieval history came up as an option; a faculty member from whom I was taking a class told me she thought I’d be a good fit, that surely funding could be worked out, and encouraged me to apply. However, as my application worked its way up the ranks, a dealbreaker emerged: I had no documentable background in the field, whatever my recommendations might say about me, and I had no experience in the languages which were vital to a medievalist—Greek and Latin, at least. I had had a year apiece of college-level French, German, and Italian, but that meant nothing to anybody. As a result, that door was closed. The practical piece of advice I was given was, plain and simple, if this was what I wanted to do, I needed to get these languages under my belt and more importantly, on my transcript.
The following fall I started life as a part-time, non-matriculated student venturing into Attic Greek for the first time, shortly before turning 30. At 31, I’m now in my second year of Greek, I’ve had a year of Latin and will start my second next semester, and I’m also in my first year of Syriac. I’ve also taken some seminars, gotten some good papers out of the deal, as well as some good relationships with faculty members, and where I am presently headed is the Masters degree in Religious Studies here at IU. My application is complete—with any luck, I will hear something concrete in January or February.
All of this is to say, it would appear that all the reading I did as a child did in fact point to a way I could support myself. As a first-generation college graduate, however, there was really no way for my parents to know that or have any idea how to cultivate it. I have to say, I feel sometimes that at 31 I’m where I should have been at 21. Certainly it would have been nice if I could have started Latin and/or Greek fifteen years ago, but the truth of the matter is that I have no idea how I would have done that in the schools available to me in the suburbs of Seattle. I’ve really had to stumble along and find my own way, and it’s taken me down some paths on which I stayed perhaps longer than I should have, but at least nothing has been wasted, I don’t think. I’m getting a late start, no question about it, but hopefully, better late than never.
With any luck, I may actually be able to get my first job before I’m 40, God willing.
The Conception of the Virgin Mary
Published 9 December 2007 The Orthodox Faith 2 CommentsTags: differences, Feast days, similarities
Today is the Feast of St. Anne’s Conception of the Virgin Mary. Fr. Stephen Freeman has presented the summary of the feast from the OCA’s website as well as answered the question what “Most Holy Theotokos, save us” means, and Michael Liccione has an extended meditation on the Roman Catholic expansion of the understanding of this feast.
Regarding Rome’s dogmatization of the Immaculate Conception, Mr. Liccione writes:
Many Orthodox object that, even if such “developments” are acceptable as theological opinions, dogmatizing them imposes more of a confessional burden than the common deposit warrants. But such objections do not address the substance of the Catholic Church’s ongoing meditation on the Virgin; they merely question her authority to draw forth from the deposit of faith the treasures she claims to find there. It seems to me that the beauty radiating through the [Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception] is itself a reason to question the questioners.
As an Orthodox Christian, I suggest in all charity one possible problem—that the deposit of faith may be thought of as a Rorschach blot, in which one sees and retrieves that which one might be inclined to see. It also strikes me that Mr. Liccione appears to be saying that it’s all right to add to the faith, so long as we’re not taking anything away, and that what we’re adding is radiantly beautiful. I am, to be certain, all for maximalism, but this appears to be a point worth discussing.
Regardless, surely Fr. Stephen, Mr. Liccione, and myself may all entreat St. Anne to pray for us!
EDIT: The above should read “Dr. Liccione,” of course. Apologies.
Choir schools
Published 9 December 2007 music , The Orthodox Faith 5 CommentsTags: education, music, Orthodox choir schools
This is a repost from the .Mac blog. It was one of the postings which was published as a graphic rather than text, hence the reposting.
* * *
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m interested in the ability of the traditional, historical Christian faith to engage and transform the culture in which it finds itself, and looking at ways to do this. I have a concrete suggestion which relates to both music and education, and I would like to start a conversation about it with whomever will listen. I’ve tried to discuss this with people involved in PSALM, I’ve tried to discuss it with people who run some of the existing Orthodox parish schools, and either nobody gets it or nobody takes it seriously; I can’t tell which it is.
The following article was written two months ago, inspired by an article in The Word which seemed to perhaps open the door to talk about something like this. I submitted it to The Word but I don’t know if they’ll run it; wanting to do something, I present it here for the consideration of anybody who might be interested.
* * *
They say things come in threes, and Bryan Smith’s article in the April 2007 issue of The Word, “Education in Christ: The Growth of Orthodox School,” was the third time in a week I had heard about the classical Trivium model of education being promoted within Christian circles. A traditionalist Roman Catholic friend of mine told me about a conference he had attended in Cincinnati, OH where the Trivium was being advocated for homeschoolers; I discovered that the planned Orthodox Christian Preparatory Academy in Seattle (my old stomping grounds) is forming its curriculum around this model; and finally, Mr. Smith’s excellent piece showed that this idea is gradually coming to the point of critical mass. As people who will eventually be raising children in the Orthodox Christian faith, it is heartening to my wife and me that there might very well be educational options that will be edifying to mind and soul. I encourage those involved with Orthodox schools, however, to give serious thought to a necessary segment of the curriculum which is largely absent from Mr. Smith’s discussion: music. More specifically, I exhort these people to consider the possibility of in fact establishing Orthodox choir schools.
The general benefits of music as part of a child’s education have been exhaustively covered in many other venues, so I will limit myself here towards talking about the particular characteristics of a choir school. First off—what exactly is a choir school? For many, the images conjured up by the term are of rood screens and stone chapels and malnourished-seeming boy sopranos vested in cassocks and ruffs lining up in stalls. If we are talking about eighteenth century England, this is not necessarily wrong, but neither is it exactly what I mean. Rather, in its ideal form, a choir school combines the concepts of Christian education, community and worship, and further enhances them by training students to sing the music of the Church. Music becomes an educational cornerstone; in addition to the rest of the curriculum (in the case, the Trivium), the boys and girls are taught to read music, to sing, perhaps as well to play an instrument, and then this is applied in the context of worship by having them sing services on a regular schedule. By singing services, this becomes something beyond mere musical education; it is also liturgical catechesis. In other words, not only is their education improved, but so is their liturgical life—as well as that of the parish community housing the school!
While it is true that the most well-known inheritors of this tradition are Anglicans in England, such schools exist today in the United States, such as the Choir School of the Madeleine (Roman Catholic) in Salt Lake City, UT or St. Thomas Choir School (Episcopal) in New York. Even in England, the Roman Catholic Choir School of Westminster Cathedral has been a wonderful example of such an institution. As well, the school of the Moscow Synodal Choir of the late nineteenth century provides a relatively recent Orthodox precedent. Looking at these examples, of course, it is clear that not every aspect is necessarily desirable or practical. Certainly an all-boys boarding school is not likely to be an option many are going to want to pursue; on the other hand, the Choir School of the Madeleine provides a useful model of a co-educational day school.
This is not born of any kind of desire to keep up with the ecclesiastical Joneses; rather, to refer back to Mr. Smith’s article, it is in keeping with the desire to create for Orthodox Christian students an educational environment “of Orthodox spirituality and piety to all that is true, good, and beautiful.” What better way to do this, and have the entire community benefit, than as a fundamental part of their education for them to sing daily services?
There is also the practical matter of tomorrow’s choir directors, singers and psaltoi being not likely to simply appear out of thin air. I am fortunate enough at my parish to have a good number of teenagers who are interested in singing and chanting, making it possible to have a youth choir singing a Liturgy by themselves once a month—but in general, we need to be making sure we are teaching our children how to sing the music of the Church, and developing an Orthodox choir school curriculum would be a wonderful step to take towards this goal.
Are our children capable of learning this kind of material? Of course they are! Our young people are going to have a far easier time receiving this kind of musical instruction at their current age than they will when they are older. In January of this year, John Boyer, protopsaltis of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of San Francisco and member of Cappella Romana, participated in a pilot residency at the Agia Sophia Academy in Portland, OR, teaching three classes of children from grades one through six to sing music written in Byzantine notation. Music teacher Kathleen Powell, who invited Boyer to Agia Sophia, said that his interdisciplinary approach stretched the students in a number of directions. “The children enthusiastically responded to [his] techniques,” she said, “which required them to use not only their musical skills, but also their Greek language, mathematical skills, and scientific reasoning.” (Source: Cappella Romana website) If elementary school students are able to do this after three classes, how much more will they be able to do with sustained exposure throughout their education?
Are there challenges involved in developing this as part of the curriculum for an Orthodox Christian school? Absolutely there are, and I am by no means suggesting that this is something easy to pull off. However, many of the pieces required are already described in Mr. Smith’s article—chapel services, learning the Hours, and so on. Good planning and the devotion of some resources can go a long way towards expanding that framework.
I do not pretend to have a comprehensive, detailed plan about how to accomplish this, nor is this intended to be an exhaustive treatment of the topic—although, as a topic near and dear to my own heart, I could most certainly go on for volumes if given the opportunity. Mr. Smith’s article makes clear that Orthodox Christian schools are an idea whose time has come, or at least draws nigh; I only suggest a direction some of these schools could take. Consider this an attempt to start a conversation, nothing more.
Sometimes tags are surprisingly useful
Published 9 December 2007 General Leave a CommentTags: Syriac, The usefulnes of tags, Tolkien encomia
So, I’ve tagged a couple of posts with “Syriac.”
Just to see what came up, I clicked on the tag itself after the last post.
And you know what? This is just danged cool. If that’s the only thing I ever get out of using tags, that’ll be enough justification.
Still searching for the perfect blogging platform…
Published 9 December 2007 Beginnings , General Leave a CommentTags: C. S. Lewis, German, Greek, I hate Dell with a white hot passion, I love my Mac and happily smoke the ApplePipe, Latin, my friends, namedays, Pretentious Blog Titles, St. Athanasius, Syriac, the past
OK, here’s a brief rundown of what’s come before:
richardbarrett.blogspot.com continues to exist, alas unloved and unupdated as it is and will remain.
The Dell blog existed for a specific purpose; I still get the occasional e-mail and phone call, so it will stay up so that people have some kind of a road map of how somebody once managed to penetrate Dell’s corporate hierarchy, but I don’t plan on updating it regularly by any means, since I no longer spend any money with Dell at all.
The .Mac blog was fun, and everything that was posted there will stay posted there. Thing of it is, for much of what I was doing, iWeb is just plain unwieldy, and you just can’t do stuff with it that Blogger and WordPress can without a lot of extra work. Plus, text often winds up getting published as a graphic, so search engines won’t find things. There’s at least one posting from the .Mac blog where that’s a major problem (and it will probably find its way here in hopes that it solves that problem). I will probably still use it as a photo album–someday I’ll get the Oxford pictures up, I promise.
So, on the advice of a friend (hat tip to Anna Pougas on her patronal feast! Many years!), I’m giving WordPress a shot. I’m adding three words to the .Mac blog’s title so that I’ve got Latin, Greek, German AND Syriac all represented–why not, really? (And please don’t leave a bunch of comments explaining why not–it’s a lark. Deal with it.)
To explain:
Leitourgeia—Greek, noun, meaning “public work” (“work of the people” being another common understanding), as in “liturgy.”
kai—Greek, conjunction, meaning “and.”
Qurbana—Syriac, noun, meaning “offering” or “Eucharist.”
Contra—Latin, preposition, meaning “against,” as in Athanasius contra mundum, St. Athanasius of Alexandria having stood fast for the Orthodox Christian faith in the face of the Arian heresy.
den Zeitgeist—German, accusative singular, meaning “Spirit of the Age,” as in the chapter “Through Darkest Zeitgeistheim” in C. S. Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress, where the protagonist John faces the most horrible monster Lewis has ever depicted, the Spirit of the Age.
Also, Lewis wrote an introduction for an English-language edition of St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.
So, we’ll try this for awhile, see what happens.
Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist 