*Disclaimer: I am not a music guy *
I love hymns. I love the music to them, I love the theology that is contained in them,
I love the verse, chorus, verse, chorus structure (am I easily impressed?) Both of
the churches my family attends (Reality
Carpinteria [Calvary
Chapel] in the morning, Santa
Barbara Community Church in the afternoon) are more into modern praise songs for
worship than hymns. This is disappointing to me.
From the church I grew up in,
and my Dad, I have a lot of hymns rolling around in my head (at least the first verse
and chorus). Often, I will recall snatches of the words or tune, but not be able to
complete the song or will get the words wrong. I try to sing hymns to my kids, so
they will at least be familiar with them. Max knows 5 or 6.
The other night I was trying to keep Weezy awake for an extra hour and a half, so
I was singing to her and throwing her around. I wanted to get more verses to a hymn,
so I Googled the hymn and got the words. I also came across a hymn website with the
words to a ton of hymns. CyberHymnal.com also
has MIDI music and a short history on the hymn / hymn author. One hymn that I had
forgotten about was When
The Roll Is Called Up Yonder. With Weezy and Max (he can’t be away from his sister when she is laughing) each sitting on my knees we bounced up and down in Mom’s desk chair and sang out at the top of our lungs. By the time Mom got home and Weezy could go to sleep for the night, I was a giant sweatball (Max is heavy). It was a great time.
Daily Archives: March 11, 2005
Word of the day
I found a great word the other day. I came across it in a way that is wonderfully indicative of the communal nature of blogging. I was reading my
cousin’s blog and perused his list of frequently read blogs. I clicked on the
link to the 21st
Century Reformation blog and skimmed through the entries there. That blog has
a huge amounts of links. These links are grouped by topic and one topic is ‘aggregators’.
(For those who don’t know, an aggregator is a website or a computer program that subscribes
to various blogs and brings all those blogs’ posts into one central location. I highly
recommend the use of an aggregator for reading blogs, you can make your own at Bloglines.)
Listed as the first aggregator is League
of Reformed Bloggers. One of their entries on that day was titled with the previously
unknown word. I had never heard of this word and so clicked down to the
article at the Parableman
blog. Below is a teaser, I encourage you to read
the whole post.
I’ve been struggling with the idea that we have no
shorthand for the view that homosexuality is abnormal and morally aberrant. Most who
hate such a view call it homophobia, but there’s a clear distinction between those
who have this view and those who truly don’t like people who are gay, are uncomfortable
with gay people being involved in their life in any way, etc. Well, now I’ve seen
a term that sounds to me as if it’s just simply descriptive of the view in question. Someone
who considers heterosexuality normal and/or normative is heteronormative (emphasis
mine).
Heteronormative also got a write up
by Michael Medved in yesterday’s
commentary on Beyond
The News.