• I wondered how it came to be that a cover version of a Swedish gay alt-pop anthem became the theme song for the Phillies’ pennant-winning drive. I do know a few rabid Phillies fans who are also big fans of Robyn, but they’re outliers, so “How did ‘Dancing On My Own’ become the Phillies playoff anthem?”
I would not have guessed that the answer would involve journeyman back-up catcher Kevin Plawecki.
The power of music is a wonderful and mysterious thing.
• Speaking of that mysterious power: “We’ve Sung ‘Amazing Grace’ for 250 Years. We’ve Only Just Begun.”
Daniel Johnson’s deep dive into the long history (and evolution) of this classic hymn is a fascinating read. “Amazing Grace” was, initially, not a hit, but it took off here in America due to two things: 1) John Newton’s words getting paired up with the melody “New Britain,” and 2) the way “it became attached, rather unexpectedly, to American abolitionism.”
Or, in other words, “Amazing Grace” only became “Amazing Grace” when it became a Gospel song rather than a British hymn.
Johnson’s piece, happily, doesn’t rehash the usual mythology of “Amazing Grace” as Newton’s tale of repentance for his years as a murderous flesh peddler, but it doesn’t directly challenge that bogus story either. I wrote about this here: “I believe in conversion, but not in ‘conversionism’” and also in a footnote here, which I’ll repeat as a complement to Johnson’s history:
This folklore about Newton’s conversion and his writing of “Amazing Grace” is not true. And it’s not true in a rather important way.
Newton wasn’t the captain of a slave ship when he experienced his born-again conversion to evangelical Christianity. He was, at that time, only the first mate on a slave ship. He only became a captain years later, spending nearly another decade as both a slaver — a kidnapper, torturer, trafficker, thief and murderer — and an evangelical Christian.
Then he got married, left the sea, worked as a customs agent, eventually became an Anglican clergyman, later wrote “Amazing Grace, and then, many years later, became an outspoken abolitionist.
A timeline:
1748: Newton begins his career in the slave trade, has a conversion experience during a fierce storm at sea.
1748-1754: Devout Christian Newton works in the slave trade, advancing to become captain of his own slave ship.
1754: Devout Christian Newton gives up sailing for work as a customs officer/tax collector, continues investing in the slave trade.
1764: Newton is ordained an Anglican priest.
1772: Newton writes the words to “Amazing Grace.”
1788: At the age of 63 — 40 years after he became a born-again Christian and 16 years after writing his most famous hymn — Newton becomes an abolitionist.
The actual history of Newton’s four-decade long conversion is far more interesting, instructive, and inspirational than the folklore of his supposed instantaneous conversion during a storm at sea.
The tune Johnson refers to as “New Britain,” also sometimes called “Harmony Grove,” is an anonymous folk tune. And it’s pure genius — a simple, but almost infinitely pliable melody accessible to those of us who aren’t great singers but also capable of being a showcase tune for those who are. It’s the tune to which almost every Emily Dickinson poem can be sung. And “House of the Rising Sun,” and the theme from Gilligan’s Island, and countless other poems and lyrics.
Write a song that can be sung to this tune and you’ll have a song that people love to sing. Riff off of this tune and you’ll have a hit. Consider, for example, the pop song from which this post takes its title, “Never Ever” by the ’90s British girl group All Saints. The spoken-word intro stumbles with awkwardly forced rhymes, but we keep listening despite that because of the piano in the background welcoming us in with “New Britain”/”Harmony Grove.”
“Never Ever” may not be a good song, but it steals from a great song — one that people will probably still be singing 250 years from now.
(To be fair, in pop music, “steals from” and “pays tribute to” are blurry categories.)
• Paul Campos grumpily objects to the flaccid phrase “people of faith”:
This is what I’ve never understood about the “people of faith” formulation from the standpoint of even the most minimal standards of intellectual honesty. Speaking of people of faith is about as coherent as speaking of people of politics, as if for example fascists and liberal democrats are united at some fundamental level by the fact that they have strong beliefs about politics, with the further fact that those beliefs are almost completely contradictory treated as some sort of not very important detail, given their common faith in politics.
Nobody talks about people of politics, because the idea is inherently stupid. The idea of people of faith is similarly stupid — everybody is a person of faith, in the sense that everybody operates from axiomatic metaphysical priors, except for Richard Dawkins, who is just purely rational and objective all the way down to the last turtle — but of course “people of faith” is not really an idea per se, it’s just some idiotic slogan, meant to make conservative white Christians feel like they’re under some sort of constant massive cultural attack by the godless socialist woke hordes.
Grumpy, but not wrong.
• John Fea shared this “blast from the past” video of old film shot at Dallas Theological Seminary some time in the early 1960s. DTS is the flagship school for premillennial dispensationalism — the 19th-century End Times/Rapture folklore popularized by the Scofield Bible. John Walvoord was president of the school when this video was shot. Hal Lindsey was a student there around this time (or shortly after).
In other words, every single man in this video was 100-percent convinced, at the time it was filmed, that the universe and history would end long before the distant-seeming date of 2022 would ever come to pass. The Rapture of the church was imminent, to be followed by the rise of the Antichrist and the seven-year Great Tribulation. This was, they insisted, all guaranteed to occur within a generation of the founding of the modern political state of Israel — so within 40 years, or 70 at the most, of 1948. The Lord might tarry until 1988, or maybe until 2018 at the very latest, but the idea that the church would still be here, unraptured, on this Late, Great Planet Earth in the year 2022 was something their “theology” could not imagine would be possible.
But it would be unfair to pick on these failed prophets just because the “imminent Rapture” they confidently predicted never came to pass in their lifetimes. After all, cemeteries are filled with “Bible prophecy scholars” who died after spending long lives preaching and teaching this same false prophecy.
• At Atlas Obscura, Paul Span visits the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth, Massachusetts. Both the piece and the place are delightful. I was particularly pleased to read this, from a manager of the trust overseeing Gorey’s estate:
“My inbox is brimming with inquiries” from would-be licensees, said Eric Sherman, co-trustee of the Trust. He nixed a proposal for Gorey-themed underwear (“an easy no”) but has agreed to a movie adaptation of The Doubtful Guest, and a television series based on Neglected Murderesses.
A Gorey movie and a Gorey TV series? Yes, please.
• “Even Nazis Can’t Tell Difference Between Nazis, Mainstream Republicans Anymore.” Robyn Pennacchia:
Truly, who is better able to point this out than an actual White Nationalist? If I were to do it, one could say I was being hyperbolic, that I was being unfair, that I just really hated Republicans and wanted to make it look like they are Nazis even if they are not Nazis. But the actual Nazis have the same weekend plans as the regular Republicans. They’re out here saying that they now feel included in the Republican Party and that more people agree with them than with conservatives who are not out and proud neo-Nazis.
Now, personally, if I were to notice that neo-Nazis or some other obviously terrible group were starting to talk about how much they and I have in common, I might start to rethink some things. I might consider that perhaps I was wrong about such things. …
• “Anyone who’s ever followed this playbook has probably noticed that it doesn’t work.”
Cavan Concannon on why counter-clobber-texting isn’t an effective way to counter clobber-texters. The short answer is that the white evangelical faux-naive “plain reading of scripture” isn’t what it claims to be. Concordance-ism always tells you far less about the meaning or content of the text being strip-mined than it does about the presuppositions, presumptions, and prejudices that determine which search terms the concordance-ist chooses to use to select their trump-card clobber texts.
A somewhat longer version of the short answer would be to read everything Mark Noll wrote about the failed pretense of this “common sense”/”plain reading” anti-hermeneutic in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
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