mp3s galore
Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights
A couple of useful mp3 finds…
I discovered over the weekend that L’Abri have now put an amazing number of their lectures on-line. Think of a topic and there is probably at least on talk that covers it. Well, maybe. The L’Abri Ideas Library is at www.labri-ideas-library.org.
Also, Redemeer in New York have put out a podcast of Tim Keller sermons. They seem to be adding files faster than anyone could possibly listen to them…
Tags: mp3s, web sights
Keller on Culture
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I (re-)discovered the website of Redeemer’s Center for Faith & Work this week. They have a lot of interesting mp3s on the site on faith and culture, work, etc.
The talk I found particularly useful is Tim Keller’s Changing Culture: The Role of the Entrepreneur. It’s taken from a forum for ‘Christian Entrepreneurs’, but the definition of entrepreneurs seems to be defined very broadly so don’t let that put you off. A good part of the talk is a more general discussion of the call for Christians to be involved in cultural renewal. I found it pulled together a lot of thoughts I’ve been having recently on culture, work, etc. (some of which have made it on to the blog), as well as stimulating some more. (To be honest, as someone who isn’t particularly business-minded, even the title got me thinking in new ways…)
By the way, if you’ve read Andy Crouch’s Culture Making, this talk makes a good companion piece.
Oh, and he references Sufjan Stevens, so, really, what more can you ask for?
Another one worth a listen is Call to Action : Stewarding our Gifts, which is a short talk on practicalities. I particularly liked the musings on profit — Christians should have the space to re-think the purpose of profit in business — and on ‘form and content’ — if we add the content of christianity to an existing form, shouldn’t we expect the form to be altered in the process? This last point starts an interesting conversation with the question of whether borrowing forms will risk us losing the message.
(HT: I probably got to all this from the Reformissionary list of Tim Keller resources.)
Tags: culture, Culture Making (Crouch), mp3s, work
Last night a theologian saved my life…
Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights
Well, not technically last night, but then the cultural reference would be lost along with the point of this post…
Anyway, today wasn’t the greatest of days, but this mp3 by Jeremy Begbie, on musical pictures for newness, certainly improved things.
Tags: mp3s, web sights
Things I found this week
Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights
Had a bit of an mp3 binge this week (train delays and long walks at lunch time). Here are the highlights:
Jonny recommended Spirituality of the Cellphone to me. It’s a talk from (Rob Bell’s) Mars Hill. In it Shane Hipps discusses what the church can learn from Marshall McLuhan. The Medium is the Message applied to everything from burning bushes to mobiles. Very interesting.
On the podcast from (Mark Driscoll’s) Mars Hill, a talk from one of their worship pastors — Tim Smith — called Continuous Worship. Not quite what I was expecting from the title — it takes a look who we interact with culture (in fact, it has a reasonable amount in common with the seminar I blogged earlier in the year). Worth a listen if you want an introduction to that whole area.
Seattle Pacific University have loads of really interesting talks available on iTunes U…
Gregory Wolfe (author of the brilliant Intruding on the Timeless) has a talk there Celebrate God with your Imagination. A short discussion of the importance of the imagination in the Christian life. I’m constantly find myself coming back to this so loved this talk.
They also have Darkness on the Edge of Town: The Gospel of Hope according to Bruce Springsteen. I mean, really, what more could you want on your daily commute than an exposition of Springsteen as ‘sonic mystic’, including the influence of Flannery O’Conner on his song writing? (Also with an object lesson on the medium-is-the-message, by way of a discussion on how Springsteen uses the form of the music to reflect the lyrical content.)
Finally, two from Steven Garber. His book Fabric of Faithfulness is a classic on relating belief to life, especially for students. Who Do You Love? and Weaving Together Belief and Behaviour are two talks based on this. Just listen and you too will want to change the world…
Tags: art, culture, mp3s, web sights, worldview
music, culture, theology, the kitchen sink…
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I was going to resist recommending another mp3 so soon after the last one, but as there is an intersection with my last post I have point out A Sense of an Ending by Jeremy Begbie. This is a great talk that wanders from looking at culture through music to the lessons from music for culture and theology.
Where it interacts with the previous post is the reference to improvisation. In this case, Begbie puts forward the idea of improvisation as a description of identity and self. Where modernism had the lone hero as the ideal and post-modernism has transient identities that change from one day to the next, Begbie suggests something that he terms ‘the musical self’. As a ‘musical self’, we become more who we are supposed to be through improvising the ‘music’ alongside others and playing off others. All the time we know that God has the ending sorted, so there is safety in the improvisation. (Seems like an interesting model for church.)
He says all these things far better than I can explain… And you really need the musical examples to appreciate it all.
He also has an interesting lesson from musical meter. You really have to listen to the talk to get this one, but the gist is that one down-beat/resolution in a piece of music is often an up-beat in a large plan. The lesson/analogy being that, through the small rhythms of our lives, God may well be working with a higher level meter that we can’t quite see as we go along. Or, the example of prophesy in the Bible, where fulfillment often sets up a larger expectation of things to come.
I had some random thoughts based on the last point, but they are a bit specific so you may want to leave before I get started. Here goes: One of Tom Wright’s big themes for NT studies is that Second Temple Jews did not believe the true return from exile had happened, even though they were strictly back in their own land. Somehow not all that was promised had worked out. (Wright’s idea being that Jesus was bringing about the true return from exile.) There is constant disagreement over whether this is true — whether Jews believed the exile had ended or not. I think Begbie’s multiple-layers-of-meter helps here: Yes there was a return from exile on one level and presumably many were happy with that. But that resolution also set up a bigger longing for a more complete release and some felt that more intensely than others. Just a thought…
Anyway, the main message is the 1.5 hrs needed to listen to the mp3 are well worth it…
Tags: art, culture, mp3s, music, theology
Jazz can make you a better Christian … Nice.
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I’ve listened to two excellent mp3s on Jazz recently.
The first is by William Edgar — Heaven in a Nightclub. He gives an whirlwind tour through the history of Jazz pointing out the influence of Christianity. He also gives live examples which, since he is a very good Jazz pianist, are great.
One thing that stuck out from his talk is the comment that much of today’s praise music expresses happiness not joy, because it doesn’t face up to the dark and despair of life. Because of its history jazz (and other African-American music) is in contrast to this.
The title of this post comes from the second mp3 — Learning to Glorify God through the Enjoyment of Jazz by Kevin Twit (of indelible grace). More into the relationship of Jazz and Christianity — how Jazz can correct our theological shortcomings.
An interesting point from this one is the importance of learning to improvise. White middle-class evangelicalism can be very much into rules and doing things the right way (implicitly if not spoken). This is a lot like the performance of Classical music. On the other hand, Jazz is about exploring the limits via improvisation. One low-level example given is apologetics — there is a tendency to approach apologetics with an implicit script ‘if they say this, then you come back with…’; instead it should be more of a real conversation where we truly listen to the other people and respond from what they are saying, knowing that we are building on and interacting with a whole tradition. More risky, but more exciting…
The idea of improvisation is one that Tom Wright considers on a bigger scale in the famous How Can The Bible Be Authoritative? He puts forward an analogy for the Bible of a play for which the penultimate act is lost — we are called to improvise the act, ensuring that our playing is in the consistent with the existing record.
It’s useful to think about how our approach to life/theology might be affected by our cultural need to have everything spelt out with only a small scope for the player’s interpretation, compared with other views where there is room for improvisation (with of course the restriction that we are true to the underlying tune/play). How much do we miss that we should be doing?
Another interesting point from Kevin Twit’s talk is the difficulty of teaching Jazz. In the end you have to learn by example, listening, following previous great players. Which ties in with a previous post and the ever-important theme of disciple verses book-learning.
Oh, and I can’t leave a post on Jazz without a link to Reflections of a Jazz Theologian.
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...