Life before a watching world: other voices

Even before I’m able to get my act together writing the entries in this series, I find myself reading online friends who are writing more interesting things on this subject than I probably will, and a few good things that I wouldn’t have written at all. So, as a preliminary, let’s look at those. Cindy [...]

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Music of Coal: the rest of the story

As promised, the other two Music of Coal videos. The performance of “Miner’s Prayer” is not representative (way too fast), but “Which Side Are You On?” is very much the way we do it every time; it’s Ron’s arrangement, and I think it’s pretty good.

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Children of Light, by Robert Lowell

I don’t read much poetry, but I stand in awe of this one, which I stumbled across this morning: Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones And fenced their gardens with the Redmen’s bones; Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland, Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva’s night, They planted here the Serpent’s seeds of [...]

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Music of Coal performance

A week ago Friday Chris and I played as part of the Music of Coal band, in Jonesborough, Tenn. A local cable TV channel recorded the show, and sent us copies of the recording. Here are two songs from the performance. I have two other videos to upload, when I get around to it.

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Life before a watching world: introduction

You might think, given the title of this post, that I am about to write something about Christians living a visibly upright life. And that idea will come into play at various points along the line. But what leads me to write this post is a more general thought, namely that in this modern age [...]

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Dave Black’s upcoming book

I don’t think I’ve been as eager to see a book released as I am for Dave Black’s The Downward Path of Jesus: From Cultural Conformity to Radical Discipleship. Dave tells us on his blog (which doesn’t have permalinks, so look for it at 9:50am on Monday, March 23) that it will be published soon: [...]

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Eyes and ears wide open

I’ve linked to news about the economic crisis pretty steadily, but I haven’t expressed much of an opinion about where things are headed, how we ought to respond to it, or even why we ended up here in the first place. (At least I think I haven’t, and I’m too lazy to review postings from [...]

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Stage presence

As Chris and I have been learning to perform music there are myriad things competing for our attention, most of which we can’t afford to focus on at a given time without driving ourselves crazy. So the past six years have been a continual process of deciding what would be the next best thing to [...]

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Tech notes

For those who are interested in such things … For web browsing I’ve mostly switched to using Google Chrome, primarily because it is fast and uncluttered and not prone to freezing up or eating all my system memory, as Firefox has become prone to do. It also has some interface innovations that I have learned [...]

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Free riding

Patrick Deneen writes bluntly yet beautifully about a tough issue facing anyone who is trying to pursue a traditionalism that is in opposition to modern industrialism (or, really, any alternative to mainstream culture), what he calls “free riding,” the fact that it is the benefits of the mainstream that make it possible for us to [...]

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