Pod people: Hark the Gutenberg press?

December 24, 2010 By

GetReligion was launched around the idea of ghosts — religious aspects to stories that went unexplained or ignored. Sometimes those ghosts are very straightforward. Sometimes they’re more about subtext and nuance. In this week’s Crossroads podcast, we discuss some of the lingering ghosts surrounding that provocative New York Times celebration of a marriage built on the failure of two previous marriages.

That this caused such outrage among readers indicates that the marital norms of fidelity and monogamy still mean something in this culture. That’s not necessarily religious, but religious institutions, values and cultures certainly are part of the story — the larger story about marriage, at least. I propose that the reaction to this story suggests that the way marriage has typically been covered — as the ultimate expression of personal happiness — might have caught the New York Times off guard.

I still have no idea why it was this story — and not the countless other stories that embrace the “personal happiness” motif — bothered people so much.

We also discuss that wonderful NPR story about the history and evolution of Christmas carols. It’s a great example of how a particular media — the radio broadcast — can bring a story to life with the perfect balance of editing, audio clips and expert sourcing. My favorite anecdote was about how “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” was originally written to mark the 400th anniversary of the Gutenberg press. In fact, “Hark the Herald” was originally where you’d sing “Gutenberg” and composer Felix Mendelssohn thought it would never work as a sacred tune. I love it.

Enjoy the podcast and have a wonderful Christmas!

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Filed Under: Godbeat, Journalism, Marriage & family, Music, Podcasts, Pop Culture, Worship

Here We Come A-wassailing

December 21, 2010 By

In a sea of silly stories during the Advent march to Christmas, I was pleasantly surprised to hear (via the Rev. Dr. R. Albert Mohler) a great piece on NPR. It’s a perfect radio piece — snippets from songs with an expert teaching you things you never knew. In this case, the topic is Christmas carols. Here’s the transcript, here’s the web version of the story, and here’s the link so you can listen. I definitely recommend you choose the last option.

Liane Hansen broadcast the story on Weekend Edition Sunday. She spoke with Philip Brunelle, founder and artistic director of a choral music organization, about how some traditional tunes of the holiday season had nothing to do with Christmas. Right off the top, it got into religion:

HANSEN: Here’s a basic question, Philip, what’s the difference between a hymn and a carol?

Mr. BRUNELLE: A carol is really something that was originally thought of as kind of a circle dance that was often accompanied by singing. Whereas a hymn is something that’s going to have more theological implications and it’s more likely to be in a kind of straightforward four-four movement, not something you’re going to dance to.

Then she asks about the history of Christmas hymns and when they started to be included in worship services. You can thank the Lutherans. They then discuss how some English hymns were incorporated into ritual. “Adeste Fidelis” was originally in Latin but translated into O Come All Ye Faithful by a number of translators. Nobody knows who wrote the melody.

My favorite bit was about “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” I was a bit skeptical about the claim that a Felix Mendellssohn hit wasn’t originally for worship, being that he was another Lutheran, but here’s the story:

Mr. BRUNELLE: One of the great hymns that, of course, originally had zero to do with Christmas. The music by Felix Mendelssohn was composed for a male chorus in 1840 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Gutenberg’s printing press. And after the ceremony was done, people said, oh, that’s just a wonderful, wonderful tune and it can be something else sacred. And he said it will -Mendelssohn said it will never work with a sacred text.

Well, how wrong he was because 20 years later, the combination of Wesley’s words and his music came together and we got “Hark, the Herald.”

(Soundbite of song, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”)

CHORUS: (Singing) Veiled in flesh the godhead see, hail the incarnate deity.

Mr. BRUNELLE: Every time you hear that, that spot (humming), those three notes right there are Gutenberg in the original. So, you can either sing “Hark the Herald” words or sing Gutenberg.

I am one of those people who love stories about hymnody — such anecdotes regularly make it into my writing — and I’d never known this about “Hark the Herald.”

Anyway, listen to the whole thing for more stories — the boar’s head one is also a hoot — and some exquisite clips of carols old and new. It would be difficult to ignore the religious dimensions of this story and while it could have been more substantive doctrinally, it did do a good job of explaining the how melodies help people remember and love their carols. (And why “The Fruitcake That Ate New Jersey” didn’t last through the ages.)

And here’s a special treat a reporter friend sent along — snippets from the latest Sufjan Stevens Christmas tracks.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Godbeat, Journalism, Music, Worship

Organist jobs die in worship wars

November 29, 2010 By

Of all the subjects that I write about for the Scripps Howard News Service, columns about trends in worship consistently generate some of the most intense responses from readers.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to say when a few anecdotes about changes in a few major churches constitute an actual news trend. If the Catholic Church revises the missal, that’s news. Change the Book of Common Prayer and that’s news. But how does one cover the diverse, sprawling world of megachurch Protestantism? How many high-def video screens and rock-show lighting systems does one need to create a national news story?

But CNN.com recently served up a legitimate story about a major worship trend, a story linked to the “worship wars” debates that have been growing for several decades.

There are all kinds of issues to debate about this story — which only shows that the subject is quite complex. But let’s not miss the fact that the story needed to be written in the first place. Here’s the top of the report:

No one has touched the organ at First United Methodist Church in Oakland, Neb., since last January. That’s when 80-year-old Pat Anderson played her last note as the small-town church’s volunteer organist, a post she held for 18 years.

“It was time for me to retire,” she said. When she did, there was nobody to step in. Two young women have taken over the musical duties for the 190-member congregation, but they play a digital piano — not the organ.

“There are some people who wish we had the organ still, but they face the reality that it just isn’t going to happen,” said the Rev. Richard Karohl.

First United’s struggle is indicative of a nationwide plight: There aren’t enough organists to fill all of the open church positions. Many of the stay-at-home moms who once volunteered as organists are working now, and fewer young people are studying the organ. Those who are training to be professionals aren’t interested in playing for small churches where the music program is limited to Sunday services and the pay is minimal — if there’s pay at all.

Once you’ve read the story, note that this issue is framed as a problem within the nation’s more liberal mainline Protestant churches. This is a story with roots. About two decades ago, there were stories about how many urban churches were losing their skilled organists and musicians because of the AIDS crisis.

Now, other factors are at play — including money. Many small mainline churches are getting even smaller, for a number of reasons. The people in the pews are also aging, which means that the audience for traditional church music is declining with the membership decline. The World War II era faithful are passing from the scene.

There are skilled musicians out there. But who can afford them?

“There’s a great supply [of organists] for the right kind of jobs,” said James Thomashower, executive director of the 18,000-member American Guild of Organists. Compared to 30 years ago, there are fewer trained organists — but they’re chasing fewer attractive positions. It’s a buyers’ market for churches with ambitious music programs.

“There are many, many highly qualified organists who would like to have a fine job on a fine instrument that pays a good wage,” Thomashower said.

That wage, according to the Guild, should be between $63,000 and $83,000 a year, including benefits, for a full-time organist with a bachelor’s degree in organ performance or sacred music.

This, in an era in which many mainline churches are struggling to even pay a decent salary-and-benefits package for a pastor. Is it easier and cheaper to use a piano, a volunteer “praise and worship” band or some other compromise? But pop/folk service music in aging mainline churches? That’s a recipe for, yes, worship wars.

So this story represents a good start in covering a major story. What’s next? For starters, CNN needs to fill the gaping hole caused by the lack of information about finances and membership issues in mainline churches. In other words, where did the jobs go?

Meanwhile, note that this report does not address what is happening in the new American mainline, which is the world of independent evangelical and Pentecostal churches. That’s where the numbers are, today. And, trust me, there are worship wars stories in those flocks, as well. Go for it.

Photo: From GovernmentAuctions.org

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Filed Under: Evangelicals, Godbeat, Mainline, Music, Pentecostalism, Worship

Rapper: prison to Promised Land

November 15, 2010 By

It seems like every few months I read about another celebrity who has suddenly discovered they’re Jewish or that they at least might like to be.

Britney Spears. Lindsay Lohan. Amar’e Stoudemire.

These stories typically end up being a lot of hype and no substance; the religion element is often just a fleeting hook to again talk about the unspectacular lives of famous people. (No, I’m not a regular reader of Us.)

But this story feels different.

It’s about the rapper Shyne — you know, “That’s Gangsta” and other songs about guns and drugs and, um, women that I can’t embed here — who was released from prison last year after serving eight for his role in a 1999 night club shooting.

Thanks to prison, Shyne is a changed name. In fact, his name isn’t even Shyne anymore. It’s Moses Levi.

Turns out that the rapper’s maternal grandmother may have been Jewish and that Shyne’s stint in a cell led him back to his Hebrew roots.

Granted, Amar’e Stoudemire, though not in prison, said the same thing this past summer before traveling to Israel. But it turned out he wasn’t actually Jewish. Shyne, of the Ethiopian variety, is, and during the High Holidays he moved to Jerusalem where he is living now as a Hasid.

The above video has a nice discussion of what led Shyne/Levi back to his roots, and back to Judaism’s roots (both physically and theologically). As does this article from the Jerusalem Post. And same for The New York Times’s arts section.

Let’s take a quick look at the NYT’s approach:

Mr. Levi speaks in the style of the urban streets but combines his slang with Yiddish-accented Hebrew words and references to the “Chumash” (the bound version of the Torah, pronounced khoo-MASH) and “Halacha” (Jewish law, pronounced ha-la-KHAH).

As in: “There’s nothing in the Chumash that says I can’t drive a Lamborghini,” and “nothing in the Halacha about driving the cars I like, about the lifestyle I live.” As a teenager he started reading the Bible, relating to the stories of King David and Moses that he had first heard from his grandmother. At 13 (bar mitzvah age, he notes) he began to identify himself as “an Israelite,” a sensibility reinforced after finding out his great-grandmother was Ethiopian; he likes to wonder aloud whether she might have been Jewish.

He was already praying daily and engaged in his own study of Judaism at the time of his arrest but only became a practicing Jew, celebrating the holidays, keeping kosher and observing the Sabbath under the tutelage of prison rabbis. In Israel, he said, he had undergone a type of pro forma conversion known as “giyur lechumra” (pronounced ghee-YUR le-kchoom-RAH).

Great stuff. Many readers are going to know those Hebrew phrases, but many more aren’t — and even those who do may not be able to pronounce them. More importantly, this passage sheds a lot of light on Levi’s sense of Judaism.

What follows goes more to how this new worldview has changed Levi’s life and even shaped his forthcoming music. His two new albums, on Death Row Records, are titled “Gangland” and “Messiah” and hint at his spiritual evolution:

What Mr. Levi has moved on to since being released from prison last year is a life in which he is often up at daybreak, wrapping his arms with the leather straps of tefillin, the ritual boxes containing Torah verses worn by observant Jews for morning prayers. Throughout the day he studies with various strictly Orthodox rabbis.

“What are the laws?” he said, explaining his decision to adhere to the Orthodox level of observance. “I want to know the laws. I don’t want to know the leniencies. I never look for the leniencies because of all of the terrible things I’ve done in my life, all of the mistakes I’ve made.”

Overall, a great story from the NYT and one of those rare stories from a celebrity who really seems to have had a life-changing religious transformation.

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Filed Under: Judaism, Music, People, Pop Culture

Something borrowed, something Hindu?

October 25, 2010 By
Photo by: KGC49/starmaxinc.com 2010 6/25/10 Katy Perry and Russell Brand out and about. (London, England) Photo via Newscom

Pop singer Katy Perry and comedian Russell Brand married this weekend in India. Katy Perry began her career as a singer in the Contemporary Christian Music market so I was a bit surprised to read that it was a traditional Hindu ceremony. Maybe. I read that in the Washington Post, the Boston Herald, Entertainment Weekly, ABC News, Telegraph, Daily Mail, New York Daily News, MTV, and so on and so forth (this is a story of international importance). Here’s a snippet from a typical news report:

Pop princess Katy Perry married the bizarre British comedian yesterday in a Hindu ceremony. The nuptials featured an over-the-top procession of 21 camels, elephants and horses, plus dancers and musicians, according to Indian press.

A Hindu priest officiated the celebrity wedding in front of family and close friends at the Aman-e-Khas resort near a wild tiger preserve in northwestern India, a hotel official told The Associated Press.

It was just in August that Rolling Stone interviewed Ms. Perry and she said she’s still a Christian. So what happened? Did she become Hindu in the intervening months? Was it just a Hindu ceremony with at least one Christian participant?

But wait, there are other news reports. Was this rite even Hindu at all? Note that the sources for the above stories are all anonymous. But check out this bit from US Magazine:

Hours after saying, “I do!” a rep for Katy Perry and Russell Brand has released the following statement to UsMagazine.com:

“Russell Brand and Katy Perry are overjoyed to confirm that they were pronounced Mr. and Mrs. Brand on Saturday, October 23. The very private and spiritual ceremony, attended by the couples’ closest family and friends was performed by a Christian minister and longtime friend of the Hudson Family. The backdrop was the inspirational and majestic countryside of Northern India.”

Hudson is Perry’s actual last name. OK, so the representatives for the actual people say that their ceremony was performed by a Christian minister. Maybe the superstar’s parents remain relatively traditional believers of some kind?

I know that people don’t have a very high standard for celebrity news, but this seems like an important detail to get right. Perhaps before thousands of incorrect stories are spread for days, even celeb journalists could work to get the basics right.

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Filed Under: Journalism, Music, Pop Culture, World, World Religions

Belle and Sebastian … and God

October 9, 2010 By

Last night we had some friends over for dinner and they raved about the new Belle and Sebastian album “Write About Love.” One of their new songs came on over the transom XM Radio and our guests stopped the conversation to listen and tell us about how fantastic it is. I’ve just listened to the full album — courtesy of NPRMusic.org — and it is really good.

A reader sent us the link to an NPR “Morning Edition” interview by Steve Inskeep of Stuart Murdoch, the Scottish musician and the lead singer and songwriter for the band. It begins with Inskeep noting that the lyrics of Belle and Sebastian are deeper than the typical pop music fare, that the band’s music explores religion.

Even though I’ve listened to Belle and Sebastian for years, I had never realized that the group’s music explored religious themes. The broadcast includes soundbites from “Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John,” “If You’re Feeling Sinister,” and other songs. The “Sinister” song is a not-too-flattering portrayal of the Catholic Church. Inskeep asks about that:

Mr. STUART MURDOCH (Singer-Songwriter, Belle and Sebastian): Yes, a startling lack of faith. When I wrote that song, I was writing from the perspective of somebody who was trying to work things out. Put it this way, I was like a young, fairly hip, 19 or 20-year-old punk who was knocking about Glasgow. But I went to church.

I didn’t see any other hipsters or punks at church, so I was maybe kind of writing about the folks that I knew, and my friends. And perhaps, sort of rightly so, I could see why there might be this wall, this divide between them and the church.

But, we’re told, his religious themes have continued and become more optimistic over time:

Mr. MURDOCH: I slipped quite easily into it and it’s a thing that’s never left me. And if you have a thing in your life, which is quiet obviously the biggest thing thats happening, you can’t stop thinking about it. And you really shouldn’t stop talking about it. Else, you know, we’re not in Communist Russia in the ’70s, you know.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. MURDOCH: You know, I want to talk about the things that I’m feeling. And if I have a force working inside me and something I think about on an hourly basis, then that’s what I’m going to write about.

The reader who submitted this story made the rather obvious point that there’s a serious lack of information about what, exactly, Mr. Murdoch is feeling. Clearly he’s religious. He talks about regularly attending church, about his religious views being a force working inside of him, about singing the church choir, having a deep desire to compose Victorian-style hymns and so on and so forth. But the interviewer never follows up on Murdoch’s rather fascinating and atypical (for a rock star, at least) comments by drilling down. In fact, the follow-up to the line above is “Well, let’s listen to a little bit of a song from your new recording.” So they play a bit from “The Ghost of Rock School” and Murdoch responds:

Mr. MURDOCH: It’s always tricky, that line between the sort of pop music and so-called Christian rock, for instance. And I’m not a fan of Christian rock. And…

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. MURDOCH: …I hope that that song doesn’t sound too much like that kind of mawkish Christian rock song.

INSKEEP: You’re afraid that you might have crossed a line with that song.

Mr. MURDOCH: Well, Im not afraid. Im not scared of anything. But I think a lot of people automatically, they do turn off. And some people start talking about, like God and religion, especially in a kind of straightforward way. But I think it’s maybe a way of turning up the volume on life, rather than just going into church and mumbling in cold buildings, as somebody said once.

Again, I feel like we’re really getting somewhere but the follow-up question is “Do you edit your lyrics?”

But really my frustration wouldn’t even exist if Inskeep didn’t brilliantly pick up on the fact that Murdoch’s writing is so heavily religious. He and his producers should get major kudos for taking that direction with the interview. I just wish we learned a bit more about Murdoch’s religious views and how they influence his art.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Godbeat, Interviews, Journalism, Music, Pop Culture, Radio & TV, World

Wait a minute, who wrote the icons?

September 19, 2010 By

Time for a dip into my GetReligion folder of guilt, that file into which I put stories that I really want to write about when I finally get a few minutes, somehow, to read them carefully and then write a post.

OK, all of you non-Orthodox readers, this is a strange one. Please hang in there with me.

On one level, this is a perfectly normal mainstream story about life in the convert-friendly era of Eastern Orthodoxy here in North America. I was particularly interested in this story because of the years that I spent covering religion in Colorado. So a beautiful new Orthodox sanctuary near the People’s Republic of Boulder caught my attention. Here’s the start of the report in The Daily Camera:

The building is brand-new, the land never before scraped, but the site in Erie where St. Luke Orthodox Christian Church now sits has roots going back nearly two millennia.

A vivid, larger than life-size image of the Virgin Mary, accompanied by a young Jesus, stretches her arms out above the altar. The Messiah — surrounded by painted prophets — gazes down from the dome inside the church’s temple, which is adorned with Byzantine arches and columns.

There’s no organ here — all music is chanted or sung a cappella. There are no statues — warm-hued iconography is the rule. Standing inside St. Luke evokes a different time, a different era.

If there is anything wrong with the start of this story, it’s the assumption that this parish is somehow strange or unique. The Camera team does not seem to realize that the growth of Father David Mustian’s flock is part of a larger phenomenon that has been going on in North America for several decades.

Yes, Orthodoxy is an old faith with roots to the birth of Christianity. So what is the news?

At first, I thought the story was going to skip the obvious question: How many of these people are converts and how many are part of a stream of ethnic believers? But, no, we are told:

Christi Ghiz, 40, has been an Orthodox Christian for 15 years. The Lafayette woman started off as a Baptist, but saw in her new faith a rich history that seemed to be fading from the Protestant services she attended. …

Ghiz said that sense of tradition is “comforting.” More than half of St. Luke’s 250 members are converts from other faiths. That includes Mustian, who converted to Orthodox Christianity from the Episcopal Church nearly 20 years ago.

“I was looking for a church that would stay the same in terms of its doctrinal beliefs, which go back to the early centuries,” said the 56-year-old Yale Divinity School graduate. “The problem with always trying to appeal to the right now means you’re quickly out of date.”

So, we are rolling along in pretty ordinary territory and suddenly things get really strange.

You see, readers never find out if St. Luke’s is part of one of the major jurisdictions of Eastern Orthodoxy — Greek, Ukrainian, Russian, Serbian, Romanian or whatever. Now, I thought this parish was part of the Antiochian Orthodox archdiocese here in North America and, sure enough, it’s easy to find that out with a few clicks of a mouse (look right here). This is a pretty standard fact to include in this kind of story.

That being the case, I was genuinely surprised when I hit this reference a few paragraphs later, in a discussion of the sanctuary’s iconography.

“Iconography is a holy tradition,” said Archbishop Gregory, an Orthodox monk from the Dormition Skete monastery outside Buena Vista. “When a person looks at an icon, their eyes want to stay on it.”

Archbishop Gregory and three of his colleagues created all of the icons for St. Luke, painting the images on canvas and then gluing them to the walls and ceiling of the temple. He said it took about six months to do the work.

Say what? There is an Orthodox archbishop residing at a monastery in Buena Vista? That had to be a mistake, thought I. Perhaps this monk had a unique title that the reporter simply misunderstood.

No, the facts are a bit stranger than that. As it turns out, this Archbishop Gregory is part of a body called the Genuine Orthodox Church of America, an old-calendar splinter church which Orthodox Wiki rather bluntly notes is “not in communion with any Orthodox body.”

So let me see if I have this straight. The iconography inside this large and lovely new Antiochian Orthodox sanctuary was written by monks from a tiny, non-canonical jurisdiction? I would love to know the story behind that transaction, although that is probably a rather inside baseball issue that would only interest the Orthodox. Maybe.

Still, it is genuinely strange that a report of this length does not include any information about the national and international roots of this large and growing parish. Strange, indeed.

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Filed Under: Godbeat, Music, Orthodoxy, World Religions, Worship

The Gospel of Katy Perry

August 21, 2010 By
June 15, 2010 - New York, New York, U.S. - KATY PERRY performing at the launch of Volkswagen's 2011 New Compact Sedan in Times Square in New York City on 06-15-2010. 2010...K65180HMc. © Red Carpet Pictures

Yes, Christian rockstars are real. But Katy Perry isn’t one. She years ago gave up on Christian music, and her image is anything but.

Last week Perry appeared on a cliched cover of Rolling Stone under the headline: “Sex, God & Katy Perry: The Hard Road & Hot Times of a Fallen Angel.” Perry told the magazine that she is still a Christian.

Christianity Today’s entertainment blog excerpts one of the more choice quotes while revisiting a review the evangelical magazines sister’s publication wrote eight years about Perry’s Christian music:

“God is very much still a part of my life. But the way the details are told in the Bible — that’s very fuzzy for me. And I want to throw up when I saw that. But that’s the truth. … I still believe that Jesus is the son of God. But I also believe in extraterrestrials, and that there are people sent from God to be messengers, and all sorts of crazy stuff.

“I look up into the sky and I’m just mindf—ed — all those stars and planets, the neverendingness of the universe. I just can’t believe that we’re the only polluting population. Every time I look up, I know that I’m nothing and there’s something way beyond me. I don’t think it’s as simple as heaven and hell.”

There are a lot of theological issues to unlock in that quote — it’s like Paul’s letter to Rome for the uber-universalist. And I’m not sure how the Rolling Stone writer followed up on it because viewing the story online requires a subscription, and I can’t even handle the six magazines I already get.

But I was able to access this story from The New York Times. It gives a nice window into Perry’s life and a decent arc to her pop culture transformation. Still, the religious details are in want.

After mentioning early that Perry was raised an evangelical Christian but is now one of pop music’s dirty girls, the reporter actually gives us a quick window into Perry’s upbringing. The meat is only contained in this paragraph:

Ms. Perry was born Katy Hudson in California, the middle daughter of itinerant preachers who set up storefront churches and gave sermons around the country. (She uses her mother’s maiden name to avoid confusion with the actress Kate Hudson.) Eventually they settled in Santa Barbara, Calif., where Ms. Perry attended a Christian school that, to her retrospective dismay, did not have “cute or sexy” uniforms, just plain old khaki ones. Her family spoke in tongues at home, and she sang in the church, picking up guitar and writing her own songs at 13, around the time she realized she was “an interesting little oddball,” she said. She was kept away from mainstream pop culture but had some traditional Southern California pleasures’ she went to a Christian surf camp where the kids prayed for big waves. “I was sheltered in a weird way,” she said. “It was very, like, pick-and-choose.”

Yes, Katy, I too wish that people reserved prayers for more meaningful needs — or at least issues that He would expect us to take to him. I don’t, however, think this should inspire a crisis of faith. I’m interested in details about her parents’ ministry, though it’s vague and raises more questions than it answers. And that’s a funny line about the school uniforms.

But what was that about speaking tongues at home? Would they do this when filled with the Holy Spirit or just when sitting around the dinner table, much like a child who was very into Star Trek might talk Vulcan to his parents?

That question isn’t answered. Instead that detail is left hanging, adding to the others and giving the impression that Katy Perry lived a very sheltered existence and that it’s no wonder she “Kissed A Girl” and has become the creator of exactly the type of pop music her parents tried keeping her from.

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Filed Under: Evangelicals, Music, People, Pop Culture