Hopson's service of Tenebrae follows a tradition of the early church dating back to the eighth century, and commemorates the final hours of Christ's life on earth as He prepared for and suffered death on the cross. Tenebrae: A Service of Darkness may be performed as a service in its entirety, or portions of the work may be extracted and performed separately throughout Holy Week. This exceptionally moving work is destined to become a staple in Holy Week repertoire for decades to come.
Tempest Skeigh The horrors I've seen and the torture I've survived has left me with a burning hatred. I can't move on and it only grows with time. I have been planning my revenge by day and stripping my feelings away by night. No matter how hot the loathing burns, there's still a part of me that wants Raiden James. I want him at my mercy while I carve into his flesh, claiming his blood as my own. Raiden James Her body and her screams are forever etched in my mind. The torture I inflicted and the horror I draped her in was only a prelude. I have been biding my time and waiting for the perfect moment to bring her home. No matter where we are in the world, my soul belongs to Tempest Skeigh. I want her at my mercy while my blade makes her blood sing once more.
Among Christian devotional works, My Utmost for His Highest stands head and shoulders above the rest, with more than 13 million copies sold. But most readers have no idea that Oswald Chambers's most famous work was not published until ten years after his death. The remarkable person behind its compilation and publication was his wife, Biddy. And her story of living her utmost for God's highest is one without parallel. Bestselling novelist Michelle Ule brings Biddy's story to life as she traces her upbringing in Victorian England to her experiences in a WWI YMCA camp in Egypt. Readers will marvel at this young woman's strength as she returns to post-war Britain a destitute widow with a toddler in tow. Refusing personal payment, Biddy proceeds to publish not just My Utmost for His Highest, but also 29 other books with her husband's name on the covers. All the while she raises a child alone, provides hospitality to a never-ending stream of visitors and missionaries, and nearly loses everything in the London Blitz during WWII. The inspiring story of a devoted woman ahead of her times will quickly become a favorite of those who love true stories of overcoming incredible odds, making a life out of nothing, and serving God's kingdom.
Harrison Birtwistle has become the most eminent and acclaimed of contemporary British composers. This book provides a comprehensive view of his large and varied output. It contains descriptions of every published work, and also of a number of withdrawn and unpublished pieces. Revealing light is often cast on the more familiar pieces by considering these lesser-known areas of Birtwistle's oeuvre. The book is structured around a number of broad themes - themes of significance to Birtwistle, but also to much other music. These include theatre, song, time and texture. This approach emphasizes the music's multifarious ways of meaning; now that even the academic world no longer takes the merits of 'difficult' contemporary music for granted, it is all the more important to assess what it represents beyond mere technical innovation. Adlington thus avoids in-depth technical analysis, focusing instead upon the music's wider cultural significance.
This unique volume brings together wide-ranging research that could only be written by someone singularly expert in the full range of Christian worship and music from ancient to modern. These essays by Wendy Porter span eras and areas of study from the New Testament to the present and encompass an expansive view of worship, music, and liturgy. Some focus on what is known (or not) about early Christian worship, including the early creeds and hymns in the New Testament and whether music originated in Jewish or Greco-Roman contexts. Some introduce firsthand work on ancient liturgical manuscripts, such as a sixth-century manuscript by hymnwriter and preacher Romanos Melodus or a tenth-century ekphonetic liturgical manuscript. Extending her research on sixteenth-century English composers as musical interpreters, Porter includes several papers on how musicians have functioned as theological interpreters in worship and music. One chapter engages theological comparisons between well-known compositions by Bach, Beethoven, and Stravinsky, another creatively explores what contemporary worship leaders can learn from sixteenth-century songwriter and worship leader William Byrd, while others invite thoughtful reflection on what we can all learn if we stop to consider how Christians have functioned and fared in their worship through the centuries.
This essay collection celebrates the richness of Christian musical tradition across its two thousand year history and across the globe. Opening with a consideration of the fourth-century lamp-lighting hymn Phos hilaron and closing with reflections on contemporary efforts of Ghanaian composers to create Christian worship music in African idioms, the ten contributors engage with a broad ecumenical array of sacred music. Topics encompass Roman Catholic sacred music in medieval and Renaissance Europe, German Lutheran song in the eighteenth century, English hymnody in colonial America, Methodist hymnody adopted by Southern Baptists in the nineteenth century, and Genevan psalmody adapted to respond to the post-war tribulations of the Hungarian Reformed Church. The scope of the volume is further diversified by the inclusion of contemporary Christian topics that address the evangelical methods of a unique Orthodox Christian composer’s language, the shared aims and methods of African-American preaching and gospel music, and the affective didactic power of American evangelical “praise and worship” music. New material on several key composers, including Jacob Obrecht, J.S. Bach, George Philipp Telemann, C.P.E. Bach, Zoltan Kodály, and Arvo Pärt, appears within the book. Taken together, these essays embrace a stimulating variety of interdisciplinary analytical and methodological approaches, drawing on cultural, literary critical, theological, ritual, ethnographical, and media studies. The collection contributes to discussions of spirituality in music and, in particular, to the unifying aspects of Christian sacred music across time, space, and faith traditions. This collection celebrates the fifteenth anniversary of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music.
"Smith's sage advice will aid Christians in recognizing the simple joys of practicing their faith."--Publishers Weekly Western culture is in a tailspin, and Christian faith is entangled in it: we do kingdom things in empire ways. Western approaches to faith leave us feeling depressed, doubting, anxious, and burned out. We know something is wrong with the way we do faith and church in the West, but we're so steeped in it that we don't know where to begin to break old habits. Popular pastor and speaker Mandy Smith invites us to be unfettered from the deeply ingrained habits of Western culture so we can do kingdom things in kingdom ways again. She explores how we can be transformed by new postures and habits that help us see God already at work in and around us. The way forward isn't more ideas, programs, and problem-solving but in Jesus's surprising invitation to the kingdom through childlikeness. Ultimately, rediscovering childlike habits is a way for us to remember how to be human. Unfettered helps us reimagine how to follow God with our whole selves again and join with God's mission in the world. Foreword by Walter Brueggemann.
In Black and Gold indicates that opposed styles of poetry reveal subterranean correspondences that occasionally meet and run together. Austerity or tomfoolery are two of the many valid responses to the human condition that create the contiguous traditions that cannot help touching and reacting to each other. The poetry discussed in this book deals with the relation of individuals to strange or to familiar landscapes, and what this means to their own sense of displacement or rootedness; with the use of history as an escape from or as a challenge to an apparently failing present; and with the role of nationalism either as a refuge for angry frustration, or as a weapon against the affronting world, or as an ambivalent loyalty that needs to be scoured, or as all three. Here we find poetry as a means of discovering true or false allegiances and valid or invalid public and private identities; poetry as a medium for exploring the uses of the demotic in confronting the breakdowns and injustices of modern democracy; poetry as play in the midst of private and public woe; poetry as a spiritual quest, as a spiritual scourging, as a wrestling with spiritual absences; and poetry as an intermittent and sporadic commemoration of the triumphs and delights of epiphanic encounters with the physical world.
