27 April 2010
Chant is a way of musically speaking prose texts—in particular, religious texts. One advantage of chant over other types of singing is that any prose text can be sung. This means, for example, that the Psalms do not need to be paraphrased metrically; they can be sung as-is. […]
3 April 2010
Today is Holy Saturday, which commemorates the Sabbath that Christ rested in the tomb.
Some people have a problem with the established, traditional view of Holy Week, arguing that because Jesus predicted that he would be in the earth ‘three days and three nights’ (Matthew 12:40), he could not have been crucified on a Friday. However, the problem is not with the traditional view but in interpretation and translation of ancient languages.[…]
10 February 2010
How to be a man and How to be a lady are two books by the nineteenth-century pastor and writer Harvey Newcomb. These two books are unfortunately not very well known nowadays, but they are excellent books on character and manners. They are realistic, not sentimentalized; plain, not complicated; direct, not meandering. […]
25 December 2009
I hope that everyone enjoys Christmas today. It’s a time when many people are able to take off from work or school and spend time with their families.
It has been traditional for a long time now to celebrate the birth of Christ on 25 December, so that Christmas is celebrated as a legal holiday in many countries on that day. In the Catholic church the day is celebrated as the second greatest day in the year—second only to Easter.
However, much tradition has crept up around the biblical account, as it has with Easter. […]
11 April 2009
Easter Sunday is an ecclesiastical holiday that commemorates the resurrection of Christ. The English word ‘Easter’ is derived from a Germanic word for ‘east’; according to Bede, the name comes from a Germanic goddess Eostre. He writes: Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘Paschal month’, and which was once called after a goddess [...]
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