A Christmas custom at this blog is for me to give you, my esteemed readers, presents to show my appreciation. I feel special gratitude to you this year, since in 2022 we moved to the subscription model and you have continued to read me anyway.
What giving you presents amounts to is simply putting you on to free or nearly-free stuff available on or through the internet that I think you will enjoy. So unwrap these. . . .
The Gift of Lutheran Public Radio
My first gift is Lutheran Public Radio: Sacred Music for the World. Go to that link to stream magnificent sacred music–classic hymns, moving chorales, world-class choirs–24 hours per day, 7 days a week.
LPR is the brainchild of Rev. Todd Wilken and producer Jeff Schwarz, whose Issues, Etc. talk radio program is one of the best of the breed. You can listen to that program live, from 3:00-5:00 Mondays through Fridays, on LPR. In fact, you can listen to archives of Issues, Etc.,24 hours per day, 7 days a week.
The sacred music follows the church year and is particularly sublime. On a recent road trip, my wife and I, despairing at the state of Christmas music on the radio–little but sentimentality, shopping songs, and sexy-Santa come-ons–learned how to hook our phones into our car radio, whereupon we could listen to LPR advent music in all of its glory. That is to say, glorifying God.
At the site above, you can access it all. You can also download apps for your phones. And if you have an Amazon Echo device, you can simply say, “Alexa, play Lutheran Public Radio.” And she will.
This is a translation from 1915, but it’s quite readable. It’s no substitute for the 30 volume American edition–all those red volumes on your pastor’s shelf–published by Concordia Publishing Company, but this is something good to have on your Kindle.
Actually, I now see that you can actually get a good number of Luther’s works on Kindle for free. Go here. I recommend especially the free or 99 cent editions of Luther’s sermons. Here we see Luther at his best, not just as a theologian or as a polemicist, but as a pastor, who proclaims and applies the Word of God with insight, humor, and empathy for his flock. These sermons on your Kindle make for excellent devotional readings.
The Cranach Digital Archive
Lucas Cranach is the patron saint of this blog, if Lutherans believed in patron saints. The artist, printer of Luther’s translation of the Bible, councilman of Wittenberg, and personal friend of Luther (who arranged his marriage), exemplifies the doctrine of vocation and the various themes we explore here.
So the Cranach blog is happy to gift you with The Cranach Digital Archive. Here you can find 2,360 paintings that have been digitalized, giving not only extremely vivid reproductions but also the ability to zero in on closeup views of the paintings so that you can see the artist’s actual brushstrokes.
And this is only the beginning of the resources available at this site, which also chronicles high-tech X-ray studies of the paintings, which allow us to reconstruct the underlying figures, earlier versions, and techniques of composition as the final painting emerged.
The site is in German, but in my Chrome browser a Google Translate box pops up. Hit “English” and the site gets translated accordingly.
Here is a “trailer” to give you a taste of the research behind this site. It’s in German too, but the visuals will give you the idea:
Also, you can still get the gifts from Christmases past: 2019 and 2021. (Sorry I didn’t give you anything in 2020. I’m sure it wasn’t because you were bad. I must have run out of shopping days.)
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