Culture, culture, culture....

Here are some interesting ideas from Peggy Nonnan's recent column in The Wall Street Journal...

America is good at making practical compromises, and one of the compromises we've made in the area of arts and entertainment is captured in the words, "We don't care what you do in New York." That was said to me years ago by a social conservative who was explaining that he and his friends don't wish to impose their cultural sensibilities on a city that is uninterested in them, and that the city, in turn, shouldn't impose its cultural sensibilities on them. He was speaking metaphorically; "New York" meant "wherever the cultural left happily lives."

....This was behind the resentment at the Adam Lambert incident on ABC in November. The compromise was breached. It was a broadcast network, it was prime time, it was the American Music Awards featuring singers your 11-year-old wants to see, and your 8-year-old. And Mr. Lambert came on and—again, in front of your children, in the living room, in the middle of your peaceful evening—uncorked an act in which he, in the words of various news reports the next day, performed "faux oral sex" featuring "S&M play," "bondage gear," "same-sex makeouts" and "walking a man and woman around the stage on a leash."

....I don't mean to make too much of it. In the great scheme of things a creepy musical act doesn't matter much. But increasingly people feel at the mercy of the Adam Lamberts, who of course view themselves, when criticized, as victims of prudery and closed-mindedness. America is not prudish or closed-minded, it is exhausted. It cannot be exaggerated, how much Americans feel besieged by the culture of their own country, and to what lengths they have to go to protect their children from it....

Read the entire article here...

A favorite of the Season

Just enjoy it. Take a moment, close your eyes and imagine the press of life to disappear.

Must Read Alert...

Here is a recent column in the Anglican Journal, the national newspaper for the Anglican Church in Canada.

Read this...its worth the time. Here is a just a piece...

If the makers of Coca-Cola can sell a billion cans of sugar water every 48 hours, surely the Anglican Church of Canada can add value to people’s lives, insists Nicolosi. After all, he says, index finger stabbing the air above his head, “We’ve got Jesus!”

Read it here.

A good read of the holidays...

Here's a review of a new book about church music...just in time for the Christmas.

When Samuel Sebastian Wesley was appointed organist of Hereford cathedral in 1832, he found that the eight adult members of the choir were all clergymen aged between 49 and 78. Five were in poor health, two were deemed to be sub-standard and the 78‑year-old was exempt from attending services.

This was the crisis in which cathedral music found itself, at a time of clamour to take away revenues from the Established Church. That music survived at all in the Church of England at the Reformation had been touch and go.

Cathedrals had precentors, responsible for choral services. But at St Paul's in the 1830s, the Precentor (a canon, on a fat £2,000 a year) appeared so infrequently that when he did once turn up for a service, the dean's verger did not recognise him, and refused him entry to his stall. The wit Sydney Smith, a fellow canon, referred to this precentor as the "Absenter".

How this sorry state of affairs was transformed by the end of the 19th century, when cathedrals enjoyed a weekly round of well-attended choral services, is a theme of "In Tuneful Accord," (Canterbury Press, £19.99), a study of church musicians of the past two centuries by Trevor Beeson.

You can read the entire review here...