Category: Music

Roundup: Yom Kippur tune, DITA concert, Lilias Trotter, and more

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: September 2023 (Art & Theology): Another monthly gathering of good, true, and beautiful music of a spiritual bent from a variety of sources, ranging from a Victorian lullaby to a hymn revamp by Ike and Tina Turner to a traditional Yom Kippur melodic motif reimagined to a bluesy saxophone prayer to an old-time song about Noah from the southern US to a Christian praise song sung by a Miskito church community in their native tongue. Two selections from the playlist are below.

>> “Abodah” by Ernest Bloch, performed by Sheku Kanneh-Mason: Ernest Bloch was a Swiss-born American composer who drew heavily on his Jewish heritage in his work. Abodah (עֲבוֹדָה) (more commonly transliterated avodah) is Hebrew for “service,” “work,” or “worship,” a word often used in relation to the ritual service that used to be performed by the Jewish high priest in Jerusalem each year on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), before the temple was destroyed; described in Leviticus 16, it involved confession of sin and animal sacrifices.

“May the offering of our lips be accepted as a replacement for the sacrifice of bulls,” the rabbis now say—and thus present-day Yom Kippur liturgies feature poetic recitations from Leviticus 16 and related Mishnah texts, “an expression of the Jewish people’s yearning both for spiritual liberation and redemption,” writes Neil W. Levin. More conservative congregations will vocalize prayers for a rebuilding of the temple and the restoration of sacrificial worship. But for an example of a seder avodah from the Reform tradition, see here. Yom Kippur is celebrated on September 24–25 this year.

Bloch’s Abodah composition is based on a tune, part of a canon of tunes known as the missinai (lit. “from Sinai”), that originated in the Ashkenazi communities of medieval Germany and that is still used today in Ashkenazi synagogues on Yom Kippur. Bloch composed the piece for piano and violin, but it’s arranged here for solo cello and performed by the internationally acclaimed Sheku Kanneh-Mason [previously].

For Christians, the atonement rituals from Leviticus find their fulfillment in the once-for-all self-sacrifice of Jesus, and though this solemn tune has its roots in the Jewish faith tradition, its meditation on human sin and divine forgiveness can cross religious boundaries.  

>> “I’ll Fly Away” (Yo volaré) from We the Animals: This spare, a cappella performance of a 1929 southern gospel song by Albert E. Brumley plays during the opening credits of the film We the Animals (2018), sung by Josiah Gabriel, one of the three main child actors. I’m interested in how and why religious songs are employed in nonreligious films, and this one was really effective in establishing not only the tone of the movie but also its theme of freedom.

Based on a semiautobiographical novel of the same name by Justin Torres, We the Animals follows three Puerto Rican brothers ages seven and up navigating a volatile family life in rural upstate New York. There’s violence and tenderness, depression and joy, and I appreciate its exploration of complicated masculinity, and how nuanced the character of the father is. (Torres has said that the process of writing the book was partly about finding empathy for his father who was abusive, and that the story is really about love and grace in a family.) In the film, flying is used as a visual metaphor for the youngest son’s, the narrator’s, rising above captivity (mainly psychological) and coming to a place of existential flourishing. The film is excellent, as is the book, though beware the R rating. Streaming on Netflix and Hulu.

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UPCOMING CONCERT: “Beyond Measure: An Evening of Music in Celebration of Abundantly More,” dir. Jeremy Begbie, September 8, 2023, Duke Divinity School, Durham, NC: To celebrate the release of Dr. Jeremy Begbie’s book Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World, Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts is presenting a special concert with the New Caritas Orchestra, conducted by Begbie. It will take place next Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Goodson Chapel on the campus of Duke Divinity School, and no tickets or registration are required. The program will explore the power of music—along with words and images—to expand our theological imagination, and it will be followed by a reception and book signing.

I suspect it will be similar in format to Begbie’s “Home, Away, and Home Again: The Rhythm of the Gospel in Music” event, which I attended in 2017 and was wonderful. (View the video recording below.) In his lecture-concerts, Begbie interweaves composer biography, musical analysis, theological commentary, storytelling, and performance to help audiences truly hear and appreciate the music. In “Home, Away, and Home Again,” he discusses the technical term “tonic” (the note upon which all other notes of a piece of music are hierarchically referenced, the one that gives the piece its sense of stability), demonstrating with various examples how 90 percent of Western music starts at home, goes places, then arrives back home but changed. Along the way he discusses themes of war, despotism, (up)rootedness, loss, hope, the resurrection, and new creation. Featured composers include Béla Bartók, Antonín Dvořák, Aaron Copland, Ennio Morricone, Leonard Cohen, and Benny Goodman.

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UPCOMING CONFERENCE: “Poets of Presence: Faith, Form, and Forging Community,” October 27–28, 2023, Loyola University, Chicago: Sponsored by Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry and The Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University, this poetry conference will feature the keynotes “The Art of Faith and the Faith of Art” by Christian Wiman and “The Forge and the Fire: God in the Blacksmith Shop” by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. There will be workshops on writing formal poetry, translating poetry, and an editor’s secrets for successful submissions, among others, and poetry readings. I was excited to see Paul J. Pastor [previously] on the list of presenters! Cost: $60.

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DOCUMENTARY: Many Beautiful Things: The Life and Vision of Lilias Trotter, dir. Laura Waters Hinson (2015): Available for free on YouTube, this seventy-minute documentary shines a light on Lilias Trotter (1853–1928), an English painter and protégé of the leading Victorian tastemaker John Ruskin who, instead of pursuing an art career as Ruskin had urged her to do, became a Christian missionary in Algiers for forty years—as a single woman, self-funded (all the missions agencies rejected her because she had a heart condition that made her physically vulnerable). Her ministry centered on the women in the kasbah—teaching them to read, helping them attain economic independence. She also befriended a Sufi brotherhood whose members were eager to hear her talk about God. In Many Beautiful Things, Michelle Dockery of Downton Abbey voices words from Trotter’s books, journals, and correspondence, and art director Austin Daniel Blasingame has deliciously animated her art! (See behind the scenes of that process.) Sleeping at Last supplied the original soundtrack.

While in North Africa, Trotter continued making sketches and watercolors, documenting the everyday life that surrounded her—people, bees, flowers, sunsets. These are minor works/studies, not intended for the art market, but they were for Trotter a major way of delighting in God’s creation. I don’t like how the marketing of the film leans heavily into the narrative of “Oh, look at Lilias, so selfless and heroic, sacrificing artistic fame for service, she really could have been tops if she hadn’t given it up,” as it wrongly suggests that evangelistic or nonprofit work is more God-honoring than art making, or that recognition in one’s field is not something a Christian should desire. The film itself mostly avoids that way of looking at it, focusing instead on Trotter’s faithfulness in responding to a call that was particular to her and then finding ways to integrate art, as an avocation, into her new life in Algiers. “Her art . . . wasn’t lost in Algeria. If anything, it was fed,” says biographer Miriam Rockness. As viewers, we’re asked to reexamine our conception of success.

Trotter, Lilias_Desultory bee
Watercolor by Lilias Trotter, July 9, 1907

I had never heard of Lilias Trotter before watching this documentary (thanks for the recommendation, Sarah!), but now I’m glad to know about her. Learn more at https://liliastrotter.com/, and follow the Lilias Trotter Legacy on Instagram, Facebook, and/or Twitter. Also, the current issue of Christian History magazine (no. 148) is devoted entirely to Trotter; you can download a free copy (or purchase a physical one) here.

Roundup: Sermons by Nadia Bolz-Weber, Jewish graffiti, four-word poem by Giuseppe Ungaretti, and more

Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

SERMONS by Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber: Nadia Bolz-Weber [previously] is an ordained Lutheran pastor who founded the House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver and now guest-preaches around the city. Here are two of her sermons from the past year or so that I’ve come across and appreciate, just twelve minutes each.

>> “Sinking,” Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, Denver, August 13, 2023: Preaching on Matthew 14:22–33, Bolz-Weber critiques the idea that our ability to do great things relies on the quality of our faith instead of on the power of God: “I’ve often heard this walking-on-water story from Matthew preached as like The Little Disciple Who Almost Could. Like Peter could have kept walking on water if he just thought ‘I think I can, I think I can’ enough. The message being that with enough faith, you too can walk on water all the way to Jesus. Which, on the surface, sounds inspiring. But taken to its logical conclusion, it also means that if you are not God-like in your ability to overcome all your fears and failings as a human, if you are not God-like in your ability to defy the forces of nature, then the problem isn’t the limits of human potential, the problem is the limits of your faith, and you should probably muster up some more . . .” [Read the transcript]

>> “The Lord Is My Shepherd, (but) I Shall Not Want (a Shepherd, Thank You Very Much),” Saint John’s Cathedral, Denver, May 8, 2022: No matter how much we fancy ourselves “anti-shepherdarian,” wanting to make our own choices and go our own way, we are all shepherded by someone or something, says Bolz-Weber in this sermon on Psalm 23. Perhaps it’s by the “wellness” industry, or by the angriest voices on Twitter. And the thing is, “not one single shepherd-shaped wolf that I have followed has ever actually fulfilled my wants and desires,” she confesses; “they have only ever increased them. They have only ever led me to waters with a high salt content, only ever led me to waters that create thirst and never ever quench it. They leave me feeling insecure and insufficient.” She contrasts the shepherds of this world to the one true Good Shepherd. The preaching starts at 23:20. [Read the transcript]

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BOOK REVIEW: The Beauty of the Hebrew Letter: From Sacred Scrolls to Graffiti by Izzy Pludwinski, reviewed by Sarah Rose Sharp: In this new book from Brandeis University Press, certified Jewish scribe and calligrapher Izzy Pludwinski looks at the evolution of Hebrew calligraphy from sacred scrolls through modern art and graffiti. “Font enthusiasts, lovers of Judaica, and those passionate about the minutiae and range of the written form” will find much to appreciate here, writes Sarah Rose Sharp, whose review includes a handful of images from the book. For example, below is a mural painted by Hillel Smith on the alley-side exterior of a kosher bakery in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles, which reads in bright yellow letters, “בָּרוּך אַתָּה אַדָנָי אֱלהֵינוּ מֶלֶך הָעוֹלָם הָמוֹציא לֶחם מן הַארץ” (Hamotzi lechem min ha-aretz) (Who brings forth bread from the earth), part of the traditional Hebrew blessing over bread before a meal: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who brings forth bread from the earth.” [purchase on Amazon]

Smith, Hillel_Hamotzi Mural
Hillel Smith (American, 1984–), Hamotzi Mural, Bibi’s Bakery and Café, Los Angeles, 2016. Photo courtesy of the artist.

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SONGS:

>> “Be Alright” by God’s Children: Having amassed over four million collective views, this video was posted August 1 by Shirika “ReRe” Flowers across multiple social media platforms, showing four of her six kids singing a gospel song she wrote for them, “Be Alright,” at her home in Memphis. It’s led by Demeriauna “Sugar Mama” Harper, with the other three parts sung by Thedrick “Preacher” Webb (in orange Crocs), Dedric “Chunky” Trice (seated at left), and Cornbread.

The family performs and records together under the name God’s Children, and this song can be heard on their 2018 album It’s So Amazing.

>> “Aakhaima Rakhchhu Mero Yeshu” (आँखैमा राख्छु मेरो येशू) (Keep My Eyes on Jesus): In this 2016 video, a group of teens from New Life Church in Nepal sing a popular Nepali Christian worship song. I haven’t been able to find who the songwriter is, but from a search on YouTube, I can see that it’s a very popular song to dance to in Nepal! There are dozens of videos, mainly of children or youth, dancing to it with hand motions and a bounce, often in church.

From what I can tell through Google Translate, the lyrics translate roughly to “I keep my eyes on Jesus. I keep him in my heart. He shadows me with his love.”

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POEMS:

>> “Mattina” (Morning) by Giuseppe Ungaretti: This week reading the book Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry by Kevin Hart, I came across this beautiful four-word poem in Italian from 1917 that stopped me in my tracks: “M’illumino / d’immenso.” (Those euphonic m’s!) Hart didn’t translate it, and though I could recognize the two keywords (they’re English cognates), I wasn’t sure of the words connecting them or the verb tense. In googling the poem, I was sent to the blog Parallel Texts: Words Reflected, run by Canadian literary translator Matilda Colarossi, who lives in Florence. It’s fascinating to hear her describe the complicated process of translating these two spare lines. Click on the link to read her translation and to learn what considerations informed her.

Part of the poem’s brilliance is its openness to various readings. For me, it’s about being known warmly and intimately by an immensity I call God.

>> “What He Did in Solitary” by Amit Majmudar: A second book I read this week was the poetry collection What He Did in Solitary by Amit Majmudar, Ohio’s first poet laureate. The titular poem, the first in a suite of three that conclude the book, made me cry. You can read all three on the website of Shenandoah journal, where they were originally published in 2019.

Other favorites: “Altarpiece,” “Ode to a Jellyfish,” “Elegy with van Gogh’s Ear.”

Roundup: Sing Me High Music Festival, visual LP shot on Mayne Island, and more

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: August 2023 (Art & Theology): Here’s this month’s!

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MUSIC FESTIVAL: “Sing Me High,” August 11–12, 2023: Celebrating music and faith in the Shenandoah Valley. Next Friday evening and all day Saturday at the Brethren & Mennonite Heritage Center in Harrisonburg, Virginia, various folk, bluegrass, and acoustic musicians from the region will be performing: the Walking Roots Band [previously], Chatham Rabbits, Maya de Vitry, Spectator Bird, Honeytown, Juniper Tree, Tide Spring, Good Company, Ebony Nicole, Ears to the Ground Family (read my review of their debut album), Shekinah, Ryan Scarberry, Clymer & Kurtz, and the Rain Pickers. Buy your tickets ahead or at the gate. I’ll be there! (In the audience, that is.)

Below are songs by three different bands/artists who will be playing at the festival: “Praise to God (Whirlwinds),” a new setting by the Walking Roots Band of an eighteenth-century hymn by Anna Barbauld (recorded on The Soil and The Seed Project, vol. 4 and appearing on the Art & Theology Thanksgiving Playlist); “Again, Amen” by Spectator Bird (sisters Rachel and Lindsey FitzGerald); and “Grieve and Rejoice” by Ryan Scarberry, director of music at Incarnation Anglican Church in Williamsburg, Virginia.

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ONLINE EVENT: “In Memoriam: An Evening Celebrating Frederick Buechner’s Literary Contributions,” August 15, 2023: “Celebrated as one of the foremost spiritual writers of his generation, Frederick Buechner’s witty, vivid, and rich writing has inspired readers’ minds and stirred hearts through his more than 30 published books for six decades. One year after his passing, Frederick Buechner (July 11, 1926–August 15, 2022) remains an influential voice for writers across genres, from novelists and memoirists to homileticians and theologians alike. For those writers who feel not religious enough for religious readers, or too religious for non-religious readers, Buechner’s voice has been a welcome, guiding light.

“On the one-year-anniversary of Frederick Buechner’s passing, Image is hosting space for community members to gather and share their appreciation for Buechner’s literary contributions. From themes of paying attention to one’s life and stewarding one’s grief, to the unexpected influences on one’s vocation and the ordinary miraculous moments of everyday life, Buechner’s words offer a variety of invitations through which one might come to see the world and one’s place within it more deeply. Image community members are invited to bring a favorite selection of Buechner’s writing to read aloud and to briefly reflect on the difference his words have made for their life.” Register for this free, moderated, open-mic-style time of sharing and reflections at the link above.

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DOCUMENTARY: The Sea in Between (2013) by Mason Jar Music: Blayne Johnson and his family, who reside in Mayne Island, British Columbia, are big fans of Portland, Oregon-based indie singer-songwriter Josh Garrels. In 2012 Johnson reached out to Garrels and some of the folks at Mason Jar Music, the Brooklyn-based creative collective Garrels has worked with, to invite them up to his home for a relaxing getaway, and to play for his family and neighbors. Mason Jar specializes in live performance videos, so they sent a small crew and a handful of musicians with the intention of shooting a few of those at various locations around the island—along the bay, on a farm, in a church. Then they decided to extend the footage from the week into a feature-length documentary, directed by Matt Porter, which you can watch for free on YouTube (embedded directly below). The song recordings were released afterward on an album of the same name, along with others that didn’t make the final cut of the film.

The Sea in Between, the film, is about vocation, the creative process, patronage, faith, family, community, and the beauty of place, and it centers on the joy of making and experiencing music together. Besides Garrels, the musicians are Dan Knobler (slide guitar, mandolin), Jay Kirkpatrick (banjo, accordion), Russell Durham (violin), Charlaine Prescott (cello), Jason Burger (drums), Chad Lefkowitz-Brown (clarinet, flute, saxophone), and Gabriel Gall (miscellaneous), who served as music director and wrote the orchestrations. Michelle Garrels and Matt Porter play the aquarion (glass marimba), and everyone contributes vocals. Perhaps my favorite song from the film is “Pilot Me” (not to be confused with the Edward Hopper hymn “Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me”; this is a Garrels original):

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SONG: “O nata lux” by Thomas Tallis, performed by VOCES8: “O nata lux de lumine” (O Light Born of Light) is the office hymn at Lauds of the Feast of the Transfiguration, celebrated August 6. Here VOCES8 performs a setting from the English High Renaissance by Thomas Tallis, inside St. Bartholomäus-Kirche in Pegnitz, Germany.

O nata lux de lumine,
Jesu redemptor saeculi,
Dignare clemens supplicum
Laudes precesque sumere.

Qui carne quondam contegi
Dignatus es pro perditis,
Nos membra confer effici
Tui beati corporis.

O Light born of Light,
Jesus, redeemer of the world,
with loving-kindness deign to receive
suppliant praise and prayer.

Thou who once deigned to be clothed in flesh
for the sake of the lost,
grant us to be members
of thy blessed body.

Online highlights from the 2023 Calvin Symposium on Worship

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

On February 8–10, 2023, I had the pleasure of attending in person my first Calvin Symposium on Worship, an annual ecumenical gathering of Christian worship leaders from throughout North America (and some from overseas) organized by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin University and the Center for Excellence in Preaching at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The half-week is full of diverse worship services, lectures, breakout sessions, and opportunities to meet and mingle with folks who serve the church as pastors, liturgists, musicians, publishers, scholars, etc. It was an invigorating time!

The CICW is generous in providing recordings of much of its symposium content for free on their YouTube channel several months after the event, and they’ve just released a big batch. Below are some of my highlights that are shareable.  

Though music is not the exclusive focus of the symposium, it is a major component, and my ministry background is in that area, so I want to share with you some of the new songs I learned.

The worship service on February 9, titled “Rooted in Christ,” was excellent and worth watching in full (the sermon, on Colossians 2:6–15, was preached by Rev. Dr. Marshall E. Hatch, pastor of New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago), but here are three standout songs. The first two are led by the Calvin University Gospel Choir, directed by Nate Glasper Jr., and feature guest soloist Eric Lige.

“On Christ the Solid Rock,” adapt. and arr. Gerald Perry, 2022:

This song is a new gospel adaptation and arrangement by Gerald Perry of the classic Edward Mote–William Bradbury hymn “The Solid Rock.” It appears on the 2022 album Legacy by the James Family Singers (which is on Spotify), a West Michigan gospel group founded by Oscar and Erma James in 1981 and to which Perry belongs, along with more than two dozen members of his extended family.

“God Is Good” by Morris Chapman, 1992:

A call-and-response song written by Lige’s late mentor, Morris Chapman (1938–2020), a Grammy- and Dove Award–nominated composer and recording artist. The song appears on the 2010 compilation album Incredible Gospel, vol. 2.

“If God” by Casey Hobbs, John Webb Jr., and Natalie Sims, 2019:

This song of lament was sung by Samantha Caasi Tica, then a senior in Calvin’s speech-language pathology department, and Calvin alum Emma Gordon as the “Prayer of Intercession” portion of the service. The congregation (is that what you’d call the group of worshippers at a symposium?) was asked to come in on the chorus and the “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus” bridge. For the official live video of the song as performed by its writer, Casey J, see here.

And now from other worship services at the symposium:

“Los que sembraron con lágrimas” (Those Who with Tears Went Out Sowing) (Psalm 126) by Carlos Colón, 2019:

The Bifrost Arts setting of Psalm 126 by Isaac Wardell is one of my favorite congregational songs—it leans into the “weeping” aspect of the psalm. But this new setting by Carlos Colón leans into the psalm’s “joy” aspect, which gives it a different tone that works equally well, I think. It was led by Colón at the piano, with the help of Calvin University students and guest Wendell Kimbrough. (Watch full worship service.) It is #333 in the bilingual hymnal Santo, Santo, Santo: Cantos para el pueblo de Dios (Holy, Holy, Holy: Songs for the People of God).

“His Love Is My Resting Place (Psalm 23)” by Wendell Kimbrough, 2020:

There’s no standalone video for this song from the symposium, but I cued up the service video to where the song starts at 13:42; you can also listen to the solo recording released by songwriter Wendell Kimbrough in 2020. Director of music and songwriter at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas, Kimbrough is one of today’s foremost composers of biblical psalm settings for contemporary worship. Despite the dozens of settings that already exist of this most famous psalm, which begins “The Lord is my shepherd . . . ,” Kimbrough’s take is not a redundancy but rather a vibrant new and easily singable addition to this catalog of options. I brought it back with me to the local congregation I’m a member of, and the people took to it really well.

“Anta Atheemon” (You Are a Great God) by Ziad Samuel Srouji, 1990:

“Anta Atheemon” is sung by Christians throughout the Middle East and the Arabic-speaking world. It was written by Ziad Samuel Srouji, who was born in Haifa, Israel, and raised in Lebanon but then displaced by civil war to the United States. He is pastor of the Gate International Church in San Mateo, California.

“Soul, Adorn Yourself with Gladness / Vengo a ti, Jesús amado” (cued to 59:00):

What a wonderful song for the celebration of the Eucharist! “Bless the one whose grace unbounded this amazing banquet founded! The high and exalted and holy deigns to dwell with you most lowly. Be thankful! Soul, adorn yourself with gladness and rejoice!” I love the exuberant Puerto Rican melody.

The source of this hymn is the German communion chorale “Schmücke dich, O liebe seele” by Johann Franck (1618–1677). After being translated into Spanish by Albert Lehenbauer (1891–1955) for Lutherans in South America, the chorale traveled up to Puerto Rico, where it was reset to the tune CANTO AL BORINQUEN by Evy Lucío Cordova (b. 1934), now with an added refrain by Esther Eugenia Bertieaux (b. 1944). The English in the bilingual version here, published in Evangelical Lutheran Worship‎ #489, is a composite translation, borrowing from Catherine Winkworth (1827–1878) and others.

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The worship services, several a day, are only one component of the Calvin Symposium on Worship. There are also wonderful talks, panel discussions, and workshops—such as “Hardwired to Sing: Entrainment, Interactional Synchrony, and the Spirit-ed Magic of Corporate Song” by Dr. W. David O. Taylor. In this talk Taylor, a liturgical theologian teaching at Fuller Theological Seminary, expands on what I think is the most fascinating chapter of his latest book, A Body of Praise: Understanding the Role of Our Physical Bodies in Worship, which is “The Nature of the Body: Scientific Perspectives on the Body in Worship.”

“First, I wish to suggest that it is the Holy Spirit’s pleasure to work in and through our physical bodies, not just in our heads and hearts, in order to form us wholly into Christ’s body,” Taylor says. “And second, I would like to show how the sciences offer empirical insights into the metaphysical work of the Spirit to form our embodied communal singing.”

Citing Hebbian theory—namely, that “neurons that fire together wire together”—he says that singing together in corporate worship bonds us in ways that nothing else can, strengthening our kinship with one another through our bodies. “People who sing together experience a wiring together of their neural networks. They become tethered to one another in neurological and physiological ways, not just affective or relational ways.” He demonstrates this principle with the help of some audience volunteers.

The last twenty-five minutes of the video are Q&A. Unfortunately, the questioners aren’t miked, and not all the questions are repeated for the recording, so that part is a little hard to follow.

My favorite session that I attended was “The Practice of Lament,” a panel discussion with Drs. Wilson de Angelo Cunha, Cory B. Willson, and Danjuma Gibson, moderated by David Rylaarsdam—all Calvin faculty. “What are the different faces of lament? What is the goal of lament? How can pastoral leaders facilitate lament? What does lament reveal about the nature of God and what it means to be human?” It’s an excellent introduction to this important Christian discipline.

“Lament is a central part of our mission as God’s people, and I will say, we have largely failed,” says Willson. And later: “You cannot be a hopeful people or community if you don’t lament. And we need each other to hold out hope for us when we can’t find the strength to swing our feet from the bed to take another step toward a future.”

Asked to define lament, Gibson, a professor of pastoral care and a practicing psychotherapist, said, “Lamentation, or griefwork, is the process you engage in to come to terms with what has been lost, the rupture, the unattaching to what you have loved—that may be a way of life, that may be a person, that may be an image of how you thought things should have been—when there is a tragedy.”

Later in the discussion, in response to a question about how lament coheres with the apostle Paul’s call to rejoice always, Gibson clarifies: “Lamentation is not the opposite of joy. Lamentation is a particular manifestation of joy. And how I understand joy in my own work is this: joy is the inner assurance that you cultivate over time that you belong to God no matter what. . . . Lamentation is a declaration of that joy.”

Again, the questions from the audience are inaudible. But from memory, I can tell you that one was about divine impassibility (Greek apatheia), an attribute ascribed to God in classical theology that means that God does not feel pain or have emotions. This is an ascription that has always puzzled me and that I reject (it makes a virtue out of Stoicism), and indeed many Christian theologians have problems with it as well, because the picture of God that we have in both Testaments is of a God who is passionate, who grieves and gets angry and exults, and who is responsive to his people, empathetic.

Another question mentions the beating to death of Tyre Nichols by police officers in Memphis. Another asks how we know when we’re done lamenting a particular tragedy.

There’s so much that’s helpful and illuminating in this conversation; please give it a listen.

Another great panel discussion at the symposium was “Worship Music from Africa and the African Diaspora,” between Drs. James Abbington, Stephanie Boddie, Brandon A. Boyd, Pauline Muir, and Jean Kidula:

“What treasures and insights from the rich history of Christian worship music on the continent of Africa as well as from African diaspora communities in the United States and England should be more celebrated and cherished? What misunderstandings should be corrected? How can we learn from this rich history without misappropriating it? What signature examples of congregational song should we all learn more about and from? How can we all continue to learn more and explore more deeply connections across continents and Christian traditions?”

At 57:35, Abbington asks each panelist if they could teach the church one congregational song, one that’s important for the church to know, what would it be?

At the symposium, I also really enjoyed the lecture “More Than We Can Ask or Imagine: Music and the Uncontainability of Hope” by Dr. Jeremy Begbie, a theologian and pianist—but it is not and will not be available online. However, it draws on the themes of his new book from Baker Academic, Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World, which just released this week.

There were lots of other sessions offered as well—on creating a sense of belonging with youth in worship, intergenerational worship in global contexts, worshipping God with our public witness, sacred architecture and space design, cultural intelligence, singing the Psalms, wisdom from Indigenous Christians in Australia, how to shape a compelling sermon, lessons for leading congregational singing, refugia faith, and more. Several of these were recorded and are now hosted online in the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Resource Library, which has content going back more than a decade (see also their YouTube channel @worshiprenewal).

Registration for next year’s Calvin Symposium on Worship has not yet opened, but the dates have been announced: February 7–9, 2024. The theme is Ezekiel. Find out more at https://worship.calvin.edu/symposium/index.html.

Roundup: Call for art, Nepali worship song, Magdalene triptych, and more

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

CALL FOR ART: Light in the Dark, Sojourn Arts: Sojourn Arts, a ministry of Sojourn Midtown church in Louisville, Kentucky, is accepting entries for wall-hung visual artworks on the theme “Light in the Dark” for its juried art show this Advent and Christmas. It is free to enter (see email submission instructions at link), but selected artists will be responsible for shipping costs to the venue. Three cash prizes will be awarded. Deadline: October 8, 2023. Open to continental US artists only.

Light in the Dark
background image by Steven Homestead

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SONGS:

>> “O My Hope (A Prayer of Saint Isaac the Syrian)” by Symon Hajjar: Symon Hajjar is a singer-songwriter from Tulsa, Oklahoma. I love, love, love his setting of this passage (lightly adapted from an English translation by Sebastian Brock) from the writings of Isaac the Syrian, a seventh-century theologian from Mesopotamia. Because the song would work well for Epiphany, Hajjar released it as the final track on his album Finally Christmas (2015), although it’s not available on Bandcamp as all the other tracks are.

O my Hope, pour into my heart the inebriation that consists in the hope of you. O Jesus Christ, the resurrection and light of all worlds, place upon my soul’s head the crown of the knowledge of you, and open before me suddenly the door of mercies; cause the rays of your grace to shine out in my heart. . . . I give praise to your holy nature, Lord, for you have made my nature a sanctuary for your hiddenness, a tabernacle for your mystery, a place where you can dwell, a holy temple for yourself.

[see Isaac of Nineveh (Isaac the Syrian): ‘The Second Part’, Chapters IV-XLI, pp. 14–15, 8]

Currently, Hajjar writes and performs kids’ songs under the name Hot Toast Music.

>> “Mahima Mariyeko Thumalaai” (महिमा मारिएको थुमालाई) (Glory to the Lamb Who Was Slain), arranged and performed by Psalms Unplugged: This song is #505 from Nepali Khristiya Bhajan, the definitive Nepali-language hymnal; the words are by Rev. Solon Karthak, and the music is by the late Kiran Kumar Pradhan, the most influential writer of Nepali hymns, who was particularly active in the 1990s. Inspired by Revelation 5:12, its refrain translates to “Glory to the Lamb who was slain / Praise to the Lord of lords / Shouts to the King of kings.” Read the original Nepali lyrics here.

The musicians who form the Nepali worship collective Psalms Unplugged are extraordinary. In this video are Subheksha Rai Koirala (vocals), John Rashin Singh (flute), Ayub Bhandari (keys), Sagar Pakhrin (guitar), and Enosh Thapa Magar (drums). The group’s mission is to see the transformation of lives through the preservation, cultivation, and spread of Nepali Christian music.

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LECTURE: “Janet McKenzie’s Women: Mothers, Midwives, and Missionaries” by Sister Barbara E. Reid, OP, September 27, 2015, Catholic Theological Union, Chicago: In this lecture, New Testament scholar Barbara Reid, OP, discusses three painted artworks by Janet McKenzie featuring women of the Bible, all in the collection of Catholic Theological Union: The Succession of Mary Magdalene, a triptych that shows Mary Magdalene deaconing with Susanna and Joanna (Luke 8:1–3), seated with Jesus Christ, her commissioning teacher (John 20:17), and preaching the Resurrection to Peter and John (John 20:2–9, 18); Mary with the Midwives, showing the Mother of God in the early stages of labor; and one of McKenzie’s most reproduced images, Epiphany, which replaces the traditional three wise men with wise women!

Mary Magdalene triptych (Janet McKenzie)
Janet McKenzie, The Succession of Mary Magdalene (triptych), 2008. Left to right: Companion; The One Sent; Apostle of the Apostles. Collection of Catholic Theological Union, Chicago.

Professor Reid’s talk starts at 13:55. Before that, there is an introduction by Barbara Marian from Harvard, Illinois, who commissioned the paintings and donated them to CTU (“The giftedness of women and our call to minister in the church must be made visible, no longer hidden or ignored and devalued,” she says), and by CTU President Mark Francis, CSV. Because the feast day of Mary Magdalene is coming up on July 22, it’s a particularly apt time of the liturgical year to share this!

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VIDEO: “12 Ways to Be a Christian” by SALT Project: The nonprofit production company SALT Project creates beautiful short films for churches and other clients. In sixty seconds, this one lists (and visualizes) twelve practical ways of living Christianly. The video is fully customizable to include your church’s name, logo, worship times, and website; click here for prices.

Roundup: Kristin Asbjørnsen interprets the spirituals, photos from Skid Row, and more

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: July 2023 (Art & Theology): This month’s Spotify mix that I put together for you all includes a Shona worship song from Zimbabwe; “Adonai Is for Me,” a song in Hebrew by Shai Sol; a Black gospel rendition of the children’s classic “Jesus Loves Me”; a new setting of the Lord’s Prayer by Jon Guerra; a composition for clarinet and piano by Jessie Montgomery, written in April 2020 to try to make peace with the sadness brought about by the pandemic-prompted quarantine orders; a country-style setting of Psalm 121 by Julie Lee; and a benediction by Bob Dylan that I heard Leslie Odom Jr. sing in concert recently—its refrain, “May you stay forever young,” is not an anti-aging wish but rather a call to childlike faith, wonder, and curiosity in perpetuity.

The playlist also includes the following two songs.

>> “Come Go with Me”: A lesser-known African American spiritual performed by the Norwegian jazz singer-songwriter Kristin Asbjørnsen, from her excellent album Wayfaring Stranger: A Spiritual Songbook. She describes the spirituals as “existential expressions of life: songs of longing, mourning, struggling, loneliness, hopefulness and joyful travelling.” This particular one is about walking that pilgrim path to heaven, a path on which Satan lays stones to obstruct our progress but which Jesus, our “bosom friend,” clears away.

>> “Love, More Love”: A short Shaker hymn that opens with a common Shaker greeting: “More love!” “Our parents above” refers, I believe, to the elders of the faith who have passed on. The hymn uses horticultural imagery to describe the qualities of communal love—something planted and grown, becoming stronger and fuller and more beautiful as it is nurtured.

Love, more love
A spirit of blessing I would be possessing
For this is the call of our parents above

We will plant it and sow it
And every day grow it
And thus we will build up an arbor of love

The Shakers are a Christian sect founded in 1747, but because celibacy is one of their tenets (and thus they cannot rely on procreation for the community’s continuation), there are only two Shakers left: Sister June and Brother Arnold, who live in Dwellinghouse, Maine. But there has long been a historical interest in Shaker religious culture and aesthetics—which is why, for example, the Enfield Shaker Singers was formed, to preserve the hymnody.

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INTERVIEW + PHOTOS: “Photographer Shows the Raw, Unflinching Reality of Life on Skid Row”: For the past decade, anonymous street photographer Suitcase Joe has been spending time on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, a neighborhood inhabited by the largest unhoused community in America. He slowly developed trust and built relationships with the people in that community, learning more about their stories, and they granted him unprecedented access to their daily lives, allowing him to capture them on camera. Hear him talk about the experience, and about misconceptions people tend to have about those experiencing homelessness, in this interview, which also includes a sampling of photos. Even though the headline hawks “Raw!” and “Unflinching!,” I was more struck by how the photographs show experiences of joy and friendship.  

Photo by Suitcase Joe
Photograph by Suitcase Joe, Skid Row, Los Angeles

To find out ways to help meet the needs of those living on Skid Row, visit https://suitcasejoefoundation.org/.

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POEM WITH COMMENTARY: “The Rungs” by Benjamin Gucciardi, commentary by Pádraig Ó Tuama: Each week on the Poetry Unbound podcast, Ó Tuama reads and reflects on a different contemporary poem. In this episode’s featured poem, “a social worker holds a group for teenagers at a school. They only half pay attention to him. Then something happens, and they pay attention to each other.” The poem is from Gucciardi’s latest collection, West Portal.

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ARTICLE: “Dool-Hoff: A Dutch Maze with New Jerusalem at its Centre (1705)”: The Public Domain Review is always uncovering unique, amusing prints and other artistic and literary curiosities from centuries past. Here they look at an early eighteenth-century religious maze published in Haarlem, Netherlands, whose pathways are filled with didactic verse, some leading to dead ends but others leading to heaven at the center.

Dool-Hoff (Dutch maze)
Dool-hoff (maze), signed by the Dutch Catholic printer Claes Braau, 1705. Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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SONG: “Home Inside” by Valerie June, performed by the Good Shepherd Collective: This Valerie June cover is sung so gorgeously by Sowmya Somanath with Kate Gungor, Bea Gungor, Jayne Sugg, Liz Vice, and Diana Gameros, and John Arndt accompanies on piano. It premiered in Good Shepherd New York’s March 12 digital service. The song is a prayer for belonging more fully to ourselves, to God, and to this earth; its speaker asks that she might be sensitive to the divine breath in all living things, and be soothed and refreshed by that great stream of water that flows from God’s heart. (Reminds me a bit of Universal Jones’s “River”!)

Here is the original recording by Valerie June.

Roundup: Artists convene at Vatican, “crucified with Christ” artworks, and more

Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

SPEECH: “Address of His Holiness Pope Francis to Artists for the 50th Anniversary of the Inauguration of the Vatican Museums’ Collection of Modern Art”: On June 23, at the invitation of Pope Francis, some two hundred select visual artists, filmmakers, composers, poets, and other creatives gathered at the Sistine Chapel to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Vatican Museums’ Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art, inaugurated in 1973 by Pope John Paul VI. “One of the things that draws art closer to faith is the fact that both tend to be troubling,” Pope Francis said last Friday. “Neither art nor faith can leave things simply as they are: they change, transform, move and convert them.” He applauded how “artists take seriously the richness of human existence, of our lives and the life of the world, including its contradictions and its tragic aspects. . . . Artists remind us that the dimension in which we move, even unconsciously, is always that of the Spirit. Your art . . . propel[s] us forward.” For reporting on this event by the New York Times, see here.

Pope Francis meeting artists
Pope Francis addresses a group of artists, June 23, 2023. Photo: Vatican Media, via Reuters.

This papal address came less than a month after the pope addressed another gathering of artists at the Vatican for the conference The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination, sponsored by La Civiltà Cattolica with Georgetown University (read that address here).

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VISUAL COMMENTARY ON SCRIPTURE: “I Live by Faith (Galatians 2:15–21)” by Victoria Emily Jones: My latest set of commentaries for the VCS went live this month! It centers on one of Paul’s famous sayings: “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” I was bummed that one of the three commentaries I originally wrote had to be scrapped because the image permission was ultimately denied; I thus had to reconfigure and replace, and I ended up with two artworks in the three-piece exhibition that aren’t as diverse from each other as I had hoped. But still, each artwork brings a unique and compelling lens through which to examine this passage. (Note: If you’re viewing the exhibition on your phone, after you “Enter Exhibition,” you’ll need to expand the “Exhibition Menu” to access the “Show Commentary” button.)

Crucified with Christ (VCS)

The VCS was covered by The Art Newspaper in a recent article by Anna Somers Cocks. “Theology is making a comeback as an important tool for interpreting art,” reads the URL.

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VIDEO: “Abraham: An Interfaith Discussion at the Bode-Museum, Berlin”: Besides publishing written commentaries on works of art in dialogue with Bible passages, the Visual Commentary on Scripture also produces videos. This one brings together an Anglican Christian priest (who directs the VCS), a Jewish rabbi, and a Muslim theologian around a fifth-century ivory pyxis depicting Abraham, a figure held in common by all three faith traditions.

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POEM: “Gate A-4” by Naomi Shihab Nye: I’ve always loved this heartwarming poem about an unexpected moment of communion shared with strangers at an airport, made possible through kindness and the letting down of one’s guard. Listen to commentary by Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen on the Poetry for All podcast, episode 19; they answer the question “Why is this a poem?” Here’s a video of Nye reading it herself:

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NEW ALBUMS:

>> April 21: Worship for Workers by the Porter’s Gate: “In 2022 a group of songwriters, pastors, and professionals gathered in Nashville, Tennessee to write a series of worship songs for workers. Over three days they discussed the spiritual, emotional, and material struggles facing workers around the world today. Soon enough, they began to compose a series of songs specifically designed to help Christians carry their daily work before the Lord.” Here’s one of the thirteen songs on the album, “You Hold It All”:

The Worship for Workers album is part of a larger project, sponsored by the Brehm Center and a number of other institutions, to provide music, prayers, art, liturgies, and training to the church around the topic of work. It grew out of the book Work and Worship: Reconnecting Our Labor and Liturgy by Matthew Kaemingk and Cory Willson.

>> May 5: Glory Hour by Victory: Victory Boyd [previously] is a Grammy-winning soul and gospel artist who got her start singing with her siblings in the group Infinity Song but whose career really kicked into high gear when she worked as a songwriter for Kanye West’s Jesus Is King (2019). Glory Hour is her second full-length album as a solo artist; its title refers to the time of the morning when the sun rises. Most of the tracks are original songs or spoken word, but there are also three classic hymns/gospel songs: “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” and “I Know It Was the Blood.” Here’s the music video for “Just like in Heaven,” based on the Lord’s Prayer:

>> May 19: Seven Psalms by Paul Simon: Paul Simon released this original seven-movement composition about doubt and belief as a single thirty-three-minute track, as it is meant to be listened to in one sitting. I’m a Simon fan; one of my early blog posts is a review of his and Garfunkel’s debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. But if I’m honest, I was underwhelmed by this much-anticipated release. I’m in the minority there, so I think I’ll need to give it another listen. What do you think of it? Here’s the trailer:

>> June 2: Byrd: Mass for Five Voices by the Gesualdo Six: One of my favorite vocal ensembles has just come out with an album of songs by William Byrd—his setting of the Mass along with a handful of motets. A Catholic composer in Protestant England in the late Renaissance, Byrd wove together musical “notes as a garland to adorn certain holy and delightful phrases of the Christian rite,” as he wrote in the preface to his second book of Gradualia (1607). Here’s the Gesualdo Six’s performance of his “Afflicti pro peccatis nostris,” a Latin prayer, a desperate plea for sanctification, that translates to “Afflicted by our sins, each day with tears we look forward to our end: the sorrow in our hearts rises to thee, O Lord, that you may deliver us from those evils that originate within us”:

“Fisk Jubilee Proclamation” by Tyehimba Jess (poem)

Victoria Emily Jones3 Comments
Jessica Lynne Brown

mother emanuel ame church, charleston, sc, 1822: cross-ankle church, palmetto, ga, 1899: green leaf presbyterian church, keeling, tn, 1900: red top church, hopkinsville, ky, 1915: first baptist church, carteret, nj, 1926

Fisk Jubilee Proclamation

(choral)

  O sing unto the Lord a new song . . . (Psalm 96)

O, sing . . . undo the world with blued song
born from newly freed throats. Sprung loose from lungs
once bound within bonded skin. Scored from dawn
to dusk with coffle and lash. Every tongue
unfurled as the body’s flag. Every breath
conjured despite loss we’ve had. Bear witness
to the birthing of our hymn from storied depths
of America’s sin. Soul-worn psalms, blessed
in our blood through dark lessons of the past
struggling to be heard. Behold—the bold sound
we’ve found in ourselves that was hidden, cast
out of the garden of freedom. It’s loud
and unbeaten, then soft as a newborn’s face—
each note bursting loose from human bondage.

Fulton Street M.E. Church, Chicago, IL, 1927: Second Baptist Church, Detroit, MI, 1930: Macedonia Baptist Church, Egg Harbor City, NJ, 1935: Mount Methodist Church, Henderson, NC, 1940: Negro Methodist Church, Loganville, GA, 1947

Source: Olio by Tyehimba Jess (Seattle and New York: Wave Books, 2016). Illustration by Jessica Lynne Brown, from Olio, p. 5. Used with permission. View the book page.

Hear Tyehimba Jess introduce and read his poem at the New York State Writers Institute in this video from 2017:

“Fisk Jubilee Proclamation” by Tyehimba Jess is the first in a heroic crown of sonnets from Jess’s second poetry collection, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Olio. A crown of sonnets is a circular sequence in which the last line of the first sonnet becomes the first line of the second sonnet, the last line of the second sonnet becomes the first line of the third sonnet, and so forth, until eventually the last line of the last sonnet becomes the first line of the first sonnet. What makes Jess’s crown “heroic” (part of the form’s technical name) is that it comprises fifteen sonnets, and the final one is made up of all the first or last lines of the preceding fourteen, in order. Quite the feat!

With this heroic crown, Jess honors the Fisk Jubilee Singers from the historically Black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, a choral ensemble established in 1871 and still active today. Fisk was founded after the Civil War to educate freed men and women and other young African Americans. To raise money for the new school, music professor and treasurer George L. White formed a small choir of nine students to tour the United States. Their repertoire was the spirituals they and their parents sang on the plantations, songs that were rarely known at the time among northern white audiences—such as “Go Down, Moses,” “Steal Away to Jesus,” “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel,” “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” to name a few. The Fisk Jubilee Singers are credited with spreading and popularizing this uniquely Black American art form over the country and world.

Fisk Jubilee Singers (original)
The nine original Jubilee Singers, Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, ca. 1871. From left to right: Minnie Tate, Greene Evans, Isaac Dickerson, Jennie Jackson, Maggie Porter, Ella Sheppard, Thomas Rutling, Benjamin Holmes, Eliza Walker.

Their first eighteen-month stint took them to Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Washington, DC. Then in 1873, they toured Great Britain and continental Europe, performing for Queen Victoria and other prominent figures.

The name of the group comes from Leviticus 25, where God mandates that every fifty years, the enslaved are to be set free: “And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family” (v. 10).

The Fisk Jubilee Singers took up God’s call to proclaim liberty far and wide, and they did so through their song. Written in the singers’ collective voice (hence the “choral” headnote), “Fisk Jubilee Proclamation” opens with an epigraph taken from Psalm 96:1: “O sing unto the Lord a new song . . .” (emphasis mine). The first line plays upon this biblical line by substituting three words that rhyme with the ones displaced: “O, sing . . . undo the world with blued song.”

Their song is blued because it was born out of deep suffering. And with it they undo the world—they open up those who were formerly closed off against them. They unravel racist stereotypes, asserting their sacred humanity.

They sing as an act of defiance. Whereas their enslavers had demanded them and their parents to be quiet and would often beat them into submission, now they are unapologetically loud, unbeaten—their words, like them, set free. They own their voices, which embody a range of nuance, from strong, vigorous, and sharp to soft and smooth. Tongue-tied no more, they burst loose from bondage with their new song of freedom. An unfurling of their body’s flag.

Fisk Memorial Chapel tympanum
“Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee” (Isa. 60:1). Tympanum, Fisk Memorial Chapel (built 1892), Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. This chapel is the home performance site for the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

The poem is full of b alliteration: blued, born, bound, bonded, body’s, breath, bear, birthing, blessed, blood, behold, bold, (un)beaten, bursting, bondage. This letter is what’s known as a plosive consonant, because it makes a small explosive sound as you say it. Such an effect reinforces the idea of eruption.

Jess describes the choir’s singing as an act of childbirth, the hymn that has lain within them finally emerging, through painful labor, for all to hear. That hymn is “scored”—in the sense of its music being written on the page, but also bearing the marks of the slaver’s lash, that trauma, that story of violence and oppression, passed down to new generations. The “worn” in “soul-worn psalms” also has a double meaning, in that the singers wear their souls on the sleeves of their songs (or, the songs are dressed in soul) but also they are soul-weary.

Concurrent with the rise and ongoing performances of the Fisk Jubilee Singers were frequent attacks on Black places of worship. As the singers were spreading beauty and hope through the spirituals, white terrorists were spreading ugliness and hate. To remind readers of this context, Jess provides a litany of church names and dates across the top and bottom of the page of each Fisk Jubilee sonnet, indicating Black churches that were burned down, bombed, or sites of other kinds of racially motivated violence. In the back of the book Jess includes this note “On the Fisk Jubilee Choir testifying through fire . . .”:

The names of our burned and bombed black churches enfold the spirituals sung by our Jubilee choir. Inside each flame burns hum, prayer, and holy book. Each hymn inhabits heat and smolder; each biblical spark is kindled with story. There is no complete record of all such attacks upon the black congregational body, no complete accounting of all the pulpits, pews, and psalm books rendered into fire—these 148 stand in testimony to all the unnamed churches lost to arson and TNT, the slats and nails and sweat that doubled as schoolhouse and underground passageway, the pyres of pine and oak and cedar steeples that sheltered baptisms and home-goings, the silent crucifixions curled into ash. The AMEs and the Graces, the Tabernacles and all the many Firsts; the hand fans, tambourines, mourner’s benches, and collection plates; they rise in smoke like the songs that soaked through them and up to heaven’s blued, eternal door. (221)

The litany traces an unbroken line of violence from 1822 to 2015 and, true to the sonnet corona form, highlights a tragic circularity: Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, is the earliest African American church to suffer arson that Jess found record of in his research, and that same church was the target of a mass shooting on June 17, 2015, which claimed nine victims. (Tomorrow is the eighth anniversary.) This murder occurred while Olio was in production with the publisher, and Jess knew he had to add it to the end of the poem sequence.

Despite such assaults on their dignity and personhood, the Fisk Jubilee Singers have always continued to praise, and that is their glorious legacy. They’ve carried forward the joys, sorrows, and faith of their community in song. The final, extraordinary poem in Jess’s Fisk Jubilee sequence is titled “We’ve sung each free day like it’s salvation.” It ends like this: “We’ve smuggled faith from slave shack to palace, / boiling the air with hallelujah’s balm— / each note bursting loose from bondage / to sing unto the world a new song.”

I wholly commend Olio to you, which is the most inventive volume of poetry I’ve ever read. It took Jess nearly eight years to write, and given its irregular nature, I imagine it also took a while for the designer and production team at Wave Books to work out! An olio is a miscellaneous mixture of heterogenous elements, a hodgepodge, but also, as an early page of the book notes, “the second part of a minstrel show which featured a variety of performance acts and later evolved into vaudeville.”

Part fact, part fiction, the book examines the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I, in “an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them,” as the publisher writes. It includes, for example, transcripts of interviews conducted by the fictitious Julius Monroe Trotter with an array of people who knew the ragtime composer Scott Joplin. It also includes syncopated sonnets (a form of contrapuntal poetry), which can be read up, down, diagonally, or interstitially—listen to Jess read and explain, for example, the sequence he wrote on the conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy, where the form stands in for the corpus of the sisters to represent their interconnected but independent narratives. But even for just the fifteen Fisk Jubilee sonnets alone, ten of which are in the voice of each of the original nine singers and their (white) conductor, the book is worth the price.

[Purchase Olio on Amazon] [Purchase Olio from Wave Books]

To learn more about what went into writing the Fisk Jubilee sonnets, read Jess’s blog post for the Poetry Foundation, “Flames of History / Rhythms of Song.” Also check out the interview with Jess published in the Interlochen Review, “Music, Literature, and the Struggle of Consciousness.” One thing that particularly stood out to me from the interview was, when asked about how he intertwines language and music in Olio, he said,

You have to remember in African American literature that we were deprived of the right of reading and writing for most of our history in this country. So, the song and the music became the literature. So, after emancipation, it’s impossible to really completely extract one from the other, because one was so instrumentally carrying so many stories for so long, for so many generations.

Tyehimba Jess (b. 1965) is a major poet whose work bridges slam and academic poetry and is imbued with deep archival research, often fusing music, history, and fiction. His first collection, leadbelly (2005), an exploration of the blues musician Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s life, was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. His second collection, Olio (2016), which celebrates the mostly unrecorded Black musicians, orators, and other performers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. He teaches English at the College of Staten Island.

Juneteenth Playlist: Songs of Black joy, liberation, and faith

Victoria Emily Jones6 Comments

Juneteenth (June 19) is a federal holiday in the United States celebrating the liberation of enslaved African Americans in Texas in 1865. Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, but it was not implemented in places still under Confederate control, and because Texas, being on the westernmost edge of the Confederacy, was farthest from the military action of the Civil War, Texans could conveniently continue to enslave, as there were no soldiers there to enforce the executive decree. But when Union troops, both white and Black, arrived in Galveston Bay on June 19, 1865, two months after the official end of the war, they saw to it by threat of force that the 250,000-plus enslaved Black people in the state were freed.

Also known as Emancipation Day or Jubilee Day (after the year of release mandated by ancient Israelite law), Juneteenth has been celebrated by African American communities in Texas ever since the first anniversary of the freeing event. Historically, the church has been at the center of these celebrations, as the formerly enslaved attributed their liberation to God, to whom they gave effusive thanks and praise. In the twentieth century, Juneteenth expanded into other states but still remained very niche, until 2021, when, after decades of lobbying by Black activists, President Joe Biden signed into law the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, moving the holiday into the mainstream.

Juneteenth marks not only that one historic day but also, more broadly, freedom as an ongoing struggle. It’s not as if the illegalizing of chattel slavery, or even the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ended racial oppression or prejudices, which manifest today in, for example, the racial wealth gap, voter suppression, and disparities in policing. We have made important progress as a country, for sure, but there’s still a ways to go until everyone breathes free.

Bishop T. D. Jakes of The Potter’s House in Dallas says that Juneteenth must involve a reckoning with our nation’s sordid past and a commitment to identifying and rooting out whatever sordidness persists. “It’s vital we all must remember when liberty and justice is delayed or denied, it causes traumatic ripples throughout future generations. . . . As we collectively stop to acknowledge and learn from the delayed liberties of our nation’s ancestors, we must not allow those same systems to repeat injustices.”

In recognition of Juneteenth, I’ve compiled on Spotify 118 songs of Black joy, liberation, and faith. From Beyoncé to Duke Ellington, Adolphus Hailstork to Rhiannon Giddens, Mary Lou Williams to Richard Smallwood, these artists jubilate, extol, lament, protest, revel, testify, and hope.

I acknowledge the complications of me, a white person, offering this playlist. I have grappled with how to appropriately celebrate Juneteenth and how to balance its predominant tone of joy (am I allowed to feel joy?) with an honest accounting of past and present evils that mark the Black experience in America, especially slavery and its legacy. One basic piece of advice I’ve heard is to center Black voices. Listen to and lift up Black historians, Black theologians, Black novelists, Black songwriters, etc.  

The Art & Theology Juneteenth Playlist combines sacred and so-called secular music written and/or performed by Black artists and exhibiting a spirit of defiant joy. It emphasizes the beauty, power, creativity, and divine belovedness of Black people.

Honoring the religious roots of Juneteenth and the faithful ongoing witness of the Black church, I have incorporated many Christian songs, especially those that speak to the imago Dei and to God’s faithfulness, guidance, and deliverance. The Bible is full of divine deliverance tales: the Israelites from slavery in Egypt; Daniel from the lions’ den; the three Hebrew boys from the fiery furnace; Jonah from the belly of the whale; Paul and Silas from prison. “Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? Then why not every man?” sings one spiritual. Another, “Go Down, Moses,” confronts Pharaoh, a stand-in for white Southern enslavers, with the demand “Let my people go,” while yet another exults in the toppling of Pharaoh’s power—“Pharaoh’s army got drownded.” The spiritual “Satan, We’re Gonna Tear Your Kingdom Down” addresses the Enemy directly, expressing resolve to overthrow demonic systems and ideologies, such as white supremacy.

There are also plenty of feel-good vibes on the playlist, lighter songs like Lee Dorsey’s “Occapella,” Count Basie’s “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” and Jon Batiste’s “Freedom” (with its stylish, smile-inducing music video that I can’t get enough of!):

There’s also the gospel song “This Joy” by Shirley Caesar, sung by the Resistance Revival Chorus:

Its first verse is: “This joy that I have—the world didn’t give it to me. . . . The world didn’t give it, and the world can’t take it away.” “This strength,” “this love,” and “this peace” follow in subsequent verses—otherworldly qualities given to us by God, as Caesar makes explicit in the original, and which no one can ever steal from us. No matter what harm people may do to us, we still possess these inner gifts, which help us face whatever comes.

Composed in the antebellum South, “No More Slavery Chains for Me” (aka “Many Thousands Gone” or “No More Auction Block”) holds together proclamation and grief. The speaker boldly asserts her freedom: “No more slavery chains,” “no more auction block,” “no more peck of corn,” “no more driver’s lash,” “no more mistress’ call,” “no more children stole from me.” It could be spoken by someone who is still enslaved but who refuses to tolerate that condition any longer, or it could be spoken by someone recently freed, rejoicing in what she has escaped. But the solemn refrain, “Many thousands gone,” remembers the multitudes whom slavery has killed. Here’s a performance by mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett, an international opera star active from the late 1950s through 1990s:

Often words fail to capture the emotional intensity one might feel. “Triptych: Prayer / Protest / Peace” by Max Roach, from his 1960 avant-garde jazz album We Insist!: Freedom Now Suite, featuring Abbey Lincoln, consists almost entirely of wordless vocal expressions, screaming, and sighing, along with drumming by Roach. It’s mournful and alarming. The only words are at the beginning of part 3: “I need peace.” Cued up here (starting at 5:50) is Lincoln and Roach’s performance of the first two parts of “Triptych” for a Belgian TV station that aired January 10, 1964. (The earlier song in the video is “Tears for Johannesburg,” from the same suite.)

In the liner notes for We Insist!, Nat Hentoff writes that “Triptych” is a “final, uncontrollable unleashing of rage and anger that have been compressed in fear for so long that the only catharsis can be the extremely painful tearing out of all the accumulating fury.”

From the same era and genre is “They Say I Look Like God” from The Real Ambassadors, a jazz musical by Dave Brubeck and Iola Brubeck that never made it to the stage but that was recorded in the studio in 1961 and released a year later. Sung by Louis Armstrong, the song opens with these humorous lines, which Armstrong delivers with chilling earnestness:

They say I look like God
Could God be black? My God
If all are made in the image of Thee
Could Thou perchance a zebra be?

This is one-half of the first of four verses, all of which are interspersed with lines of scripture from Genesis 1 and 1 John 4 intoned, like a liturgical chant, by the trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, affirming the inherent goodness of Black folks, bearers of the divine breath. Verses 2 and 3 are addressed to God, pleading that he would show “that our creation was meant to be.” The final verse expresses longing for the day

When God tells man he’s really free
Really free
Really free
Really free

The creation narrative of Genesis 1 is also where Sho Baraka’s “Black as Heaven” opens—with beautiful Blackness, sacred humanity. Historically the color white has been used to symbolize goodness, purity, and heaven, but Baraka turns that symbol inside out and declares that he is “black as heaven.” If God created all humans in his image and many of those humans have black skin, then Blackness is a reflection of God. The Creator loves what he created, and we should too.

Heaven is full of Black saints and will continue to fill with such. The song lists many from across the fields of politics, music, history, education, theology and homiletics, agricultural science, and the culinary arts: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., King Ezana of Aksum, King Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty, Mahalia Jackson, Athanasius, Mary McLeod Bethune, George Washington Carver, David Walker, Edna Lewis, Carter G. Woodson, Bishop G. E. Patterson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. These men and women are all “black as gold,” not in the sense that they are commodities or currencies, but rather are holy, luminous; and black as life-giving soil.

This is one of the songs commissioned for the 2022 documentary Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom [previously], and it includes a rap by Mag44 of Zambia. There’s so much richness in it, and I encourage you to follow along and sit with the lyrics, investigating any unfamiliar references and, depending on your background, humbly receiving the critiques or gladly receiving the affirmations.

In addition to hip-hop and jazz, the playlist is full of songs from the civil rights movement, such as “Woke Up This Morning with My Mind.” This old gospel song was recorded by Roosevelt and Uaroy Graves in 1936 and adapted in 1961 by the Rev. Robert Wesby, a Baptist minister from Aurora, Illinois. Wesby first sang it while spending time in jail in Hinds County, Mississippi, as a Freedom Rider, replacing the repeated word “Jesus” with one of Jesus’s key platform goals, “freedom”: “Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.”

This song became an important one in civil rights marches, and is led in the above recording by the famous activist Fannie Lou Hamer. For subsequent verses, she sings “Walkin’ and talkin’ with my mind . . . ,” “Singin’ and prayin’ with my mind . . . ,” “Ain’t no harm to keep your mind . . .” Stayed on freedom.

“Ain’t No Grave” is another traditional gospel song, first recorded by Bozie Sturdivant in 1942 and then by Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1946–47. It’s about the general resurrection, when the saints will be called up out of their graves, but it’s also about indestructibility, the refusal to be or stay buried. I chose a more recent arrangement performed by jazz vocalist Tiffany Austin [previously], from her 2018 album Unbroken:

Hers starts off with the percussive sounds of a ring shout, a style borrowed from the Gullah Geeche of South Carolina’s Sea Bird Islands, and then goes on to incorporate scat singing. It’s full of enthusiastic energy!

One of the most powerful songs on the playlist is “Make It Home” by Tobe Nwigwe, written after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. The song is “for the nappy heads in heaven, with a nappy-head Christ by they side”—for Blacks who have died.

It’s also a prayer and a blessing for Blacks who are living. “I pray you catch a wave that doesn’t subside. . . . May your streets be paved with gold. Hope my whole hood make it home.” He prays that his friends, family, and neighbors are able to make it safely back to their homes each night and are not killed in the streets. But “home” operates on other levels as well. To be at home with yourself, for example, is to feel whole, confident, secure in your body. Home also implies belonging. And of course “home” can also mean heaven, that place of ultimate freedom and rest. Are we creating the necessary conditions for freedom and rest here on earth as it is in heaven?

I learned about this song from Dr. Mary McCampbell (see the February 17, 2022, installment of her newsletter, The Empathetic Imagination), who teaches the music video in her humanities class at a Christian university.

Collectively, the songs on this playlist reflect the multifaceted spirit of Juneteenth, which encapsulates exultation, passion, power, praise, irrepressibility, resistance, sorrow, anger, and hope and trust. Like Juneteenth itself, the playlist is a looking back and a looking forward. We Americans are a people “on our way.” The work of emancipation is unfinished. These Black artists invite us to join the work.

I invite you, as a way of commemorating the holiday, to:

1. Choose one of the songs and pray from it.

2. Choose one of the artists and explore more of their oeuvre.

3. Choose one of the older songs and explore its origin and history, learning more about the context from which it arose and how it has been received over the decades. Listen to other renditions to see the different ways it’s been interpreted.

The image on the playlist cover is cropped from a photo I took a few years ago at Duke University Chapel of the linocut Ain’t No Grave by Steve A. Prince (2019), which shows a dancing winged figure emerging from the head of Carlotta Walls LaNier, the youngest of the Little Rock Nine, as she integrates the city’s high school in 1957. It is an embodiment of LaNier’s mighty spirit, and that of other Black “agents of God,” to use Prince’s term, who pursue freedom for themselves and others.

Trinity Sunday Roundup

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Today, June 4, is Trinity Sunday! Here’s a handful of art and music items on the topic.

VISUAL MEDITATION: “The Wheeling Playfulness of the Trinity” by Victoria Emily Jones: The Rothschild Canticles [previously] from ca. 1300 Flanders contains some of the most inventive and delightful artistic renderings of the Trinity that I’ve ever seen. I key in on four of them in today’s visual meditation for ArtWay. 

Beinecke MS 404, fol. 94r

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MUSICAL COMMENTARY: “Theology in Sound and Motion: Perichoresis, for Brass Quintet” by Delvyn Case: Delvyn Case provides musical and theological commentary on his brass quintet composition “Perichoresis” (2006), inspired by the divine dance of the Trinity. “Its overall mood is joyous, an ecstatic whirling-about in which all three members become lost in the ecstasy of divine fellowship,” he writes. “At the exact moment of the dance when one member moves, the other fills in the spot left vacant.” “Perichoresis” premiered by Boston’s Triton Brass and appears on Case’s 2018 album Strange Energy. About this piece, Bible scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann said, “I . . . have pondered ‘perichoresis’ for a long time. This is the finest exposition of that thick idea that I have encountered.”

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SONGS:

>> “Trinity Song” by Paul Zach: Performed in 2021 by Solomon Dorsey with Liz Vice and Madison Cunningham, this song by Paul Zach evolved into “God of Grace and Mystery” for The Porter’s Gate’s 2022 album Climate Vigil Songs. This earlier iteration has a Trinitarian focus that’s just lovely. “God of all eternity / Father, Spirit, and the Son / Ever-loving Three-in-One / O divine community / . . . / Calling us to join your dance . . .”

>> “One-Two-Three” by the Chosen Gospel Singers: This song was recorded in Los Angeles for Specialty Records and released as a single in 1952, with singers J. B. Randall (bass), E. J. Brumfield (tenor), George Butler (tenor), Fred Sims (tenor), and Oscar Cook (baritone). It opens with a repetition of the lines “One, two, three / One-in-Three and the Trinity.” The refrain is:

One for the Father
Two for the Son
Three for the Holy Ghost
All made of one

The song is largely eschatological. The first verse is about John the Revelator’s vision of the New Jerusalem descending, among other wonders; it ascribes a vision of the Trinity to John, even though that is not explicit as such in either John’s Gospel or the Apocalypse (but see “The Trinity in the Book of Revelation” by Edwin Reynolds). The second verse anticipates our singing and praising the Triune God in heaven, dressed in our brand-new robes. It also mentions David and Goliath, and I’m honestly not sure how that relates. But with gospel songs, floating lyrics are common, taken from one song and spliced into another, some more coherent than others in their new context.

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ESSAY: “The Hospitality of Abraham in the Work of Julia Stankova, Painter of Bulgarian Icons” by François Bœspflug: The first half of this peer-reviewed article introduces readers to the Bulgarian artist Julia Stankova, rehearsing her biography and examining her relationship to the icons tradition. The second half explores twelve of her paintings on the subject of the three angelic visitors to Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18, whom the narrator suggests are a manifestation of God (“The LORD appeared to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre . . .”); because of the number of visitors, many Christians interpret this passage as revealing something of God’s triune nature, and for this reason traditional icons of the story are often titled The Trinity.

Stankova, Julia_The Hospitality of Abraham
Julia Stankova (Bulgarian, 1954–), The Hospitality of Abraham, 2004. Tempera on primed wooden panel and lacquer technique, 46 × 41 cm.

Since the publication of this article in 2019, Stankova has made at least three more paintings on the subject, all of which foreground Sarah and are titled Sarah’s Smile. She has just heard the angels announce that she will conceive a son in her old age.

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POEM: “After Rublev’s Trinity” by Carrie Purcell Kahler: Published in Image no. 99 (Winter 2018), p. 21, this ekphrastic poem by Carrie Purcell Kahler interprets the famous fifteenth-century Trinity icon by Andrei Rublev. Sometimes referred to as “the hospitality of Abraham,” this biblical episode, as the iconographers interpret it, is really about the hospitality of God, who extends a hand to humanity, ever inviting us to sit at his table.

Rublev, Andrei_Trinity
Andrei Rublev (Russian, 1360–ca. 1430), The Trinity, ca. 1411. Tempera on wood, 141.5 × 114 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

A new choral setting of this poem by Garrett John Law is premiering today at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Covina, California, where Law serves as music director and organist. I believe it can be heard on the 10:30 a.m. PT worship service livestream on the church’s YouTube channel, but I’m not sure whether the performance will be archived online for later viewing. (Update, 6/12/23: Here it is! Sung by Holy Trinity’s seven-person choir.)