Tag: Jon Guerra

New albums: “Confessions” by the Anachronists, “Though It Be a Cross” by Weston Skaggs, and more

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

Here’s my new Spotify playlist for July:

Every month I curate a mix of old and new Christian (or Christian-resonant) song releases. For this coming month, some of the new songs come from the following five albums that were released this spring or early summer, which I’ve really been enjoying. I list them here chronologically and encourage you to listen to them each in full!

New albums 2025

1. Jesus by Jon Guerra, released April 4, 2025: An album of original songs in conversation with the words of Christ. Guerra says that a few years ago, to reacquaint himself with Jesus, he began reading cyclically through the Gospels, and as he did, “little song fragments started coming. I was trying to really hear the words, to feel the stories again, and so I’d write little tunes around certain phrases—‘do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth,’ ‘if anyone would come after me,’ ‘give to everyone who asks of you,’ ‘take this cup from me,’” etc. He then developed those into the twelve fully fledged songs that made it onto the album.

Favorite tracks: “Reckoner (An Axe Laid to the Root),” “Where Your Treasure Is” (above), “Love Your Enemies”

2. Sermon on the Mount: Bible Memory Collection by The Soil and The Seed Project, released May 16, 2025: The Soil and The Seed Project is a ministry that provides intergenerational resources for people as they follow Jesus, read scripture, and talk about their faith together. One of those resources is new music, written and recorded by an expanding collective of folks. All twenty-five songs on this new double album of theirs are based on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5–7, which contains the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, warnings against hypocrisy, the call to be salt and light, the command to love one’s enemies, the parable of the wise and foolish builders, assurances of God’s care, and the promise that those who seek will find. For the first disc, the Project set 48 of the 111 sermon verses to music, and for the second, they invited a handful of singer-songwriters to write songs in response to what they encountered as they dwelt in the text.

The album is accompanied by a “Little Liturgies” booklet of litanies, reflection prompts, and line drawings covering eleven weeks. Both the music and the booklet (digital or physical, while supplies last) are FREE from their website!

Favorite tracks: “Come and Eat” (above), “Mountains of Treasure,” “God of Mercy, God of Peace,” “Take What You’ve Given”

3. Though It Be a Cross by Weston Skaggs, released June 20, 2025: An EP of six hymns, freshly arranged and performed by Weston Skaggs of Ohio. The album title comes from a line from “Nearer, My God, to Thee” (video below). “Sarah Fuller Flower Adams wrote the lyrics from the perspective of Jacob and his received revelation of God’s nearness. A nearness that only occurred when he felt most hopeless and alone,” Skaggs explains. “In meditating on that narrative, she determined to be like Saint Peter: who became the most like Christ his master when he was raised on his own cross.” This song and others feature backing vocals by Katy Martin.

The most stylistically daring is “For the Beauty of the Earth,” whose verses Skaggs transposed to a minor key—to allude to the beauty and brokenness of creation and relationships, Skaggs said, “invit[ing] listeners to hold both gratitude and longing in the same breath.”

Favorite tracks: “No, Not One,” “Nearer, My God, to Thee” (above)

4. Confessions by the Anachronists, released June 26, 2025: The Anachronists are Andrés Pérez González, Corey Janz, and Jonathan Lipps, three musician friends who met while studying theology at Regent College in Vancouver and who have formed a group to give renewed voice, through modern indie music, to theologians and mystics from ages past. Confessions is their debut EP, with six songs rooted in Augustine’s spiritual autobiography from the late fourth century. The songs address grief over the death of a dear friend, and God’s merciful pursuit of those who wander; a preconversion sense of dissatisfaction but as yet unwillingness to make any changes; God as the One who is fully at rest in his own self, and how we might share in that rest; struggles with distraction and pride in the spiritual life; and the promise of renewal both personal and universal.

The still life colored-pencil drawing commissioned for the album cover is by the Finnish artist Minni Havas; it portrays Easter lilies growing out of a compost heap. It was especially inspired by the concluding song, “All of Our Decayed Parts,” which is itself based on an excerpt from Book IV.16 of the Confessions:

Do not be vain, my soul. Do not deafen your heart’s ear with the tumult of your vanity. Even you have to listen. The Word himself cries to you to return. There is the place of undisturbed quietness where love is not deserted if it does not itself depart. See how these things pass away to give place to others, and how the universe in this lower order is constituted out of all its parts. “Surely I shall never go anywhere else,” says the word of God. Fix your dwelling there. Put in trust there whatever you have from him, my soul, at least now that you are wearied of deceptions. Entrust to the truth whatever has come to you from the truth. You will lose nothing. The decayed parts of you will receive a new flowering, and all your sicknesses will be healed. All that is ebbing away from you will be given fresh form and renewed. (trans. Henry Chadwick)

This album comprises just six of the thirty-some Confessions-based songs the trio has written; they are testing the waters with it to see if there is more interest and funding to record more, and then to apply this approach to other ancient and medieval theological and spiritual writings by such luminaries as Athanasius and Julian of Norwich. Some laypeople feel daunted to read centuries-old works, or assume that they’re mostly irrelevant. But the Anachronists seek to mine the riches of historical Christian thought and provide an easy access point through music, hopefully encouraging folks to seek out the sources. I’m excited to see what they do next! Follow them on Instagram @anachronists.music.

Favorite tracks: “God of the Runaways,” “All of Our Decayed Parts” (above)

5. All Shall Be Well by the Good Shepherd Collective, released June 27, 2025: This album consists mainly of gospel and hymn covers. The artists in this collective, whom I’ve mentioned many times before, are top-notch, and I’m always excited to see what they put out.

Favorite tracks: “Lift Every Voice” (James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson), “Ancient of Days” (Ron Kenoly) (this appears to be a re-release from the collective’s Gospel Songs, vol. 1; above), “My Jesus Is All” (the Staples Singers), “I Saw the Light” (Hank Williams)

Roundup: Advent video from Fuller Studio, making room for love, “Lord, Remind Me,” and more

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VIDEO MEDITATION: “Yearning and Promise (Advent),” dir. Lauralee Farrer (2017): The first in the seven-part Liturgical Meditations series produced by Fuller Studio (a resource center affiliated with Fuller Theological Seminary), this four-minute video features Advent scripture readings by Fuller alum Paul Mpishi (MDiv, ’17) in his native Swahili, set to beautiful cinematography by Lindsey Sheets, Timothy Kay, and Jordan McMahon.

“Yearning and Promise” explores Advent and the expectant longing for the birth of Christ through cityscapes, wilderness, and water from Chicago and Malibu, with scriptures drawn from Isaiah 40 and Matthew 1. The audio for this video is in Swahili with subtitles in English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Korean—a poetic way to represent the primary tongues of our community. . . .

The liturgical calendar spans the life of Christ in a single year—from anticipation (Advent), to hope (Christmas), to transcendence (Epiphany), to lament (Lent), to redemption (Easter), to the birth of the church (Pentecost), and through long, numbered days (Ordinary Time) back to Advent. The liturgical meditation series to which this video belongs relies on nature to tell the story of God, accompanied by scriptures traditional to each season.

The other Liturgical Meditations are “Fear and Glory” (Christmastide), “Desire and Light” (Epiphany), “Hunger and Healing” (Lent), “Death and Resurrection” (Eastertide), “Fire and Wind” (Pentecost), and “Mystery and Love” (Ordinary Time). Full playlist here.

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SUBSTACK POST: “The Most Powerful Muscle in the World” by Stephanie Duncan Smith: Stephanie Duncan Smith, author of Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway, reflects here on the strong and capacious “womb-love” (Phyllis Trible’s term) of God, and on the physical transformation Mary underwent to make room for him in her own body. Advent, Smith writes, is about “stretch[ing] to make room for love.”

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ARTICLE: “The Birth of Eternity into Time: Contemplating the Incarnation with Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto and Jorie Graham’s ‘San Sepolcro’” by Kathryn Stelmach Artuso, Mockingbird: This short article engages with a famous Italian Renaissance painting of the pregnant Mary (which the British writer Michèle Roberts calls “one of the most beautiful and powerful, sexy and numinous paintings of the Christian era”) and a modern ekphrastic poem about it.

Francesca, Piero della_Madonna del Parto
Piero della Francesca (Italian, ca. 1415–1492), Madonna del Parto, after 1457. Detached fresco, 100 × 80 in. (260 × 203 cm). Musei Civici Madonna del Parto, Monterchi, Italy.

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ZOOM GATHERING: Advent Art Salon, December 12, 5 p.m. ET: Image journal is hosting its fourth annual Advent Art Salon in two weeks, a free, hour-long virtual gathering featuring festive seasonal recipes, poetry readings, a musical performance, Advent reflections, and more. This year’s guests include poet Katie Hartsock, singer-songwriter Jon Guerra, composer Mike Capps, and writers Alex Ramirez (here’s his short story “Gabriel”), Meghan Murphy-Gill (author of The Sacred Life of Bread), and Jan Richardson.

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SONGS:

>> “Lord, Remind Me” by Jon and Valerie Guerra: From their album It’s Almost Christmas! Jon Guerra writes in the YouTube video description about how most days, hope feels naive; about the narratives in which we misplace our trust; about how Jesus, in his coming, tells a different narrative and brings our hope to fruition.

At Christmastime, Guerra writes,

Christians . . . celebrat[e] the arrival of a “shoot from Jesse’s stump.” It’s a transgressive celebration of fragility and vulnerability. We wanted a fully matured tree—God gave us a shoot coming from a stump. We wanted a strong leader—God gave us a vulnerable baby. We wanted a strength that dominates—God gave us a weakness that submits. We wanted victory—God gave us defeat, destitution, death.

How is this defying of our expectations hopeful? Well, theology at its atomic level says this: God is love. God doesn’t love as a decisive action, as though tomorrow the decision could be reversed. God is, always, love.

That love is not only towards humanity—it becomes humanity. It is not only compassionate towards the broken—it becomes the broken. It is unconditional love that becomes death—and in so doing, defeats it. It defies our expectations only to exceed to them.

So here’s to remembering hope in God’s unconditional love towards the desolate stumpiness of ourselves and the world this season—and to believing that this is not the end of the story. Lord, remind me.

>> “His Name Is Jesus” by Keiko Ying: Released this month on YouTube, this children’s Advent song by Keiko Ying celebrates Jesus as Emmanuel, “God with us.” Here is the lead sheet. The drawings and animation in the music video are by the songwriter’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Clara. [HT: Global Christian Worship]

Roundup: New Easter songs, joint Easter-iftar dinner, and more

Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

Here’s my new (nonthematic) playlist for the month of April!

But also, because Easter lasts through May 18, be sure to check out the 184 songs I handpicked for the season, which includes some new ones mixed in since the playlist’s original publication.

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NEW SONGS:

>> “He Lives” by Emma Nissen: Emma Nissen is a Latter-day Saint singer-songwriter from Arizona known for her gorgeous jazz vocals. Here she performs an original song about God the Father giving his Son, Jesus, to redeem the world through his life, death, and resurrection. “Let there be light, let there be love . . .”

>> “Living Among the Dead” by Caleb Stine: Alt-country singer-songwriter Caleb Stine, based in Baltimore, released this Johnny Cash–esque, resurrection-themed song just before Easter. The title and chorus come from the words the angels spoke to the women who went to Jesus’s tomb the Sunday after his death, looking for his body. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” they asked. “He is not here but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to the hands of sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again” (Luke 24:5–7).

The first verse narrates that momentous visit to the tomb. The second verse fast-forwards to the present day and raises issues of poverty, mental illness, substance abuse, culture warring, and militarism, some caused and others exacerbated by the death-dealing policies or neglect of the government. Many people look to politicians for salvation, trusting in their often empty promises, embracing their divisive rhetoric, and ignoring major character flaws for the sake of power. This song cautions us not to go to a dry well for sustenance—not to quench our thirst for living water in places that cannot give it.

The third verse tells of a “thin man in a dusty hat” who regales the story of a carpenter who healed and fed people, who drove out demons from bodies and greedy opportunists from temple courtyards, who befriended those of little means and those who were ostracized. He addressed human suffering head-on with tenderness and self-sacrifice. When the chorus comes in a final time, I hear in it that this loving, serving, reconciling Christ is still living, his Spirit is still moving, and that we ought to get behind that movement, practicing resurrection where we live. “Be not of fear, be of light, lift your head.” As the body of Christ, we should follow him in doing the same deeds and proclaiming the same good news of liberation.

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BLOG POST: “50 Ways to Practice Resurrection during the 50 Days of Eastertide” by Tamara Hill Murphy: Spiritual director and writer Tamara Hill Murphy of Connecticut shares fifty simple ideas for celebrating the Easter season in your day-to-day, including retelling baptism stories, visiting a botanical garden, watching a movie that makes you laugh, swinging on the playground, cooking a new veggie recipe, building a new piece of furniture, or washing your car by hand. “I find a lot of joy . . . in seeing these ordinary choices during my day as ways to practice a life that trumps death, a resurrection kind of life,” Murphy writes.

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PODCAST EPISODE: “The Beauty—the Poetry—of Christian Experience” with Benjamin Myers, Faith & Imagination: I listen to at least a dozen podcast episodes a week, and this one has been one of my favorites of the past few months. Dr. Benjamin Myers is a literature professor at Oklahoma Baptist University and a former poet laureate of Oklahoma. Here, host Matthew Wickman interviews Myers about two of his six books: A Poetics of Orthodoxy: Christian Truth as Aesthetic Foundation (2020) and the poetry collection The Family Book of Martyrs (2022). They talk about the incarnation and its implications on art; the disclosure of the extraordinary in the ordinary; the inherently unsecular nature of all good poetry; how beauty mirrors grace; the importance of the humanities in Christian education (how it “thickens up” the soul); the obligation of Christian art to capture both the “something good” and the “something missing” of our lives; and how love calls us to the things of this world.

A few additional highlights for me:

  • Myers came to faith after attending a Lessons & Carols service, compelled by the beauty and truthfulness of the story it told.
  • “Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder but also in the being of God.”
  • At 37:24, Myers reads a poem he wrote for his youngest daughter: “Elizabeth Discovers Rock and Roll.”

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INSTAGRAM VIDEO: from AJ+: On March 31 in the Borgerhout district of Antwerp, a mile-plus-long table set up along the Turnhoutsebaan brought together city residents for a joint Easter-iftar dinner. Easter is the most sacred feast of the Christian year, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus; on Easter Sunday, Christians break the forty-day fast they’ve held for the duration of Lent. Lent almost always overlaps in part with Ramadan, a Muslim holy month of fasting that commemorates the prophet Muhammad’s first revelation. On each day of Ramadan after sunset, the fast is broken with an evening meal called an iftar.

Easter-iftar dinner
Christians and Muslims in Antwerp broke their fasts together at an outdoor Easter-iftar dinner on March 31. Photo: Sanad Latifa.

Borgerhout carried out this interfaith initiative in collaboration with the FMV cultural association and other partners in the hopes of promoting dialogue, social cohesion, and connection. I love this idea of gathering folks together across lines of religious difference to enjoy community, good food, and spiritual celebration! For more information, see https://www.2kmsamenaantafel.be/.

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NEW ALBUM: Three Gifts by Liturgical Folk and Jon Guerra: Ryan Flanigan of Liturgical Folk and Jon Guerra have teamed up to release an EP of three songs, one for each of the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and love (1 Cor. 13:13). Here’s “the greatest of these”:

Roundup: One-word poems, “Go to Hell” musical setting, and more

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

POEM SEQUENCE: “The Unfolding” by Michael Stalcup: Michael Stalcup has published a sequence of five short poems in Solum Journal that “tells the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection by unfolding five words that take us from Maundy Thursday through Easter Sunday,” he says. “I wrote these poems in a very unusual way, restricting myself to words that could be formed from the letters in each poem’s title. . . . This poetic form calls for creativity within intense limitations, which seems fitting for Holy Week—a time when Jesus crafted the most beautiful art this world has ever known within the constraints of his own suffering and death.” Stalcup has also presented them on Instagram (click on the image below).

The Unfolding by Michael Stalcup

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ARTICLE: “Don’t Rush Past Good Friday” by Brian Zahnd: Pastor and author Brian Zahnd cautions us not to shortchange the cross on the way to Easter, but rather to slow down and dwell there, beholding the crucified Christ.

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SONGS:

>> “Friday Morning” by Sydney Carter, performed by Timothy Renner: This Good Friday song by the English folk musician Sydney Bertram Carter (1915–2004) is difficult—one might even say blasphemous. That’s because it’s voiced from the perspective of the “bad” thief, who is spewing hatred and bitterness over his fate and blaming God for having created such a cruel world. But we’re aware of an irony in the refrain that the convicted man is not: “It’s God they ought to crucify / Instead of you and me, / I said to the carpenter / A-hanging on the tree.”

Read or listen to a reflection on “Friday Morning,” by Andrew Pratt, here.

>> “Go to Hell” by Nick Chambers: This song is a setting of a poem by Pádraig Ó Tuama from his collection Sorry for Your Troubles (Canterbury Press Norwich, 2013). The title is shocking, I know, but it’s derived from a line in the Apostles’ Creed, where we Christians profess that after Jesus died, he “descended into hell.” The singer-songwriter, Nick Chambers, writes in the YouTube video description: “In between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is possibly strangest day of the Christian year. On Holy Saturday, not only is Jesus, the God-Man, in the grave; traditions abound about his descent to the dead, his ‘harrowing of hell.’ What does it mean for the coming down of God-with-us not to end on earth but ‘under the earth,’ extending hope to the furthest regions of human pain and abandonment? Such a question deserves more poetry than explanation.”

“Go to hell” is a slang expression of scorn or rejection, to which Jesus was no stranger. As in the previous song, there’s an irony here, in telling Jesus to go to hell—because he did. Literally. Ó Tuama meditates on how Jesus shares in our vulnerabilities and yearnings and seeks to pull us out of the hells we’re in and redeem our stories.

Hear the poem read by the poet here, or at the end of the Stations of the Cross video below. “he is called to hell, this man / he is called to glory . . .”

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GUIDED MEDITATION: “Stations of the Cross, Good Friday, 2020” by Pádraig Ó Tuama: In 2020 the poet-theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama put together this twenty-minute video reflection for Good Friday structured around the Stations of the Cross, consisting of photos of art he’s taken and the praying of collects he’s written. (Several of the collects can be found in his book Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community from 2017.) The throughline is a set of stained-glass Stations by Sheila Corcoran at the Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven at Dublin Airport; others are by Jong-Tae Choi, Gib Singleton, Sieger Köder, Richard P. Campbell, and Audrey Frank Anastasi.

Corcoran, Sheila_Veronica's Veil
Sheila Corcoran, Station 6: Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus, ca. 1964. Stained glass, Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven, Dublin Airport. Photo: Patrick Comerford.
Campbell, Richard_Stripped
Richard P. Campbell (Dunghutti/Gumbaynggirr, 1958–), Station 10: Jesus is stripped of his garments, 2001. Reconciliation Church, La Perouse, Sydney, Australia.

But before stepping onto Jesus’s Via Dolorosa, Ó Tuama considers Judas, sharing a stained glass panel by Harry Clarke that illustrates a medieval legend about the Irish monastic saint Brendan the Navigator. According to the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, on one of his voyages St. Brendan encountered Judas at sea, tied to an iceberg. He learned that an angel had taken pity on Judas in hell and given him a reprieve of one hour to cool himself from the flames of judgment. Ó Tuama then prays for those who, like Judas, are tormented by guilt and see no way out.

He closes with a reading of his poem “Go to Hell” (set to music in the previous roundup item).

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SONG: “For the Songless Hearts” by Jon Guerra: “There’s a lot of hubbub around Easter weekend in churches. And for good reason,” says singer-songwriter Jon Guerra. “But our hearts can’t always cooperate with the prescribed mood of the Easter season: ‘Celebrate! Be happy! Sing!’ Sometimes the last thing we are able to do is sing. Thankfully, Good Friday and Easter are not about mustering a mood. Good Friday and Easter are about remembering that there is One who meets us in our life and meets us in our death. He sings for us—and over us—when we can’t.”

That’s what “For the Songless Hearts” is about—a single released in 2017, and which Guerra sings with his wife, Valerie. In a Mockingbird blog post about it, Guerra admonishes, “Remember that before the tomb was empty, it was full. ‘When he was laid in the tomb, he laid right next to you.’” Jesus knew the depths of sorrow and the sting of death. We are not alone in such experiences.

Roundup: Nativity art from Asia, the Christ Hymn in Thai, and more

Victoria Emily Jones3 Comments

ARTICLES:

>> “How Asian Artists Picture Jesus’ Birth from 1240 to Today” by Victoria Emily Jones, December 18, 2023, Christianity Today: My first CT article was published this week! I was asked to curate and introduce a sampling of Nativity art from across Asia. By representing Jesus as Japanese, Indonesian, or what have you, these artists convey a sense of God’s immanence, his “with-us–ness,” for their own communities—and for everyone else, the universality of Christ’s birth.

Turun, I Wayan_In Bethlehem
I Wayan Turun (Indonesian, 1935–1986), In Bethlehem, 1958. Acrylic on canvas, 46 × 64 cm. Collection of Stichting Zendingserfgoed (Missionary Heritage Foundation), Zuidland, Netherlands.

>> “The Story of Christ in Chinese Art: Scholars at Peking University Make a Christmas Portfolio for LIFE,” Life, December 22, 1941, pp. 40–49: In doing research for my Christianity Today article, I found this old article from Life magazine that features eight Chinese watercolors on silk from the collection of Dr. William Bacon Pettus (1880–1959), an American educator and president of the California College of Chinese Studies in Peking (Beijing) in the 1920s and ’30s, which were being exhibited at New York’s American Bible Society at the time. With the ordination of six Chinese bishops by Pope Pius XI in 1926, the Chinese Catholic Church was transitioning from a mission church to an indigenous local church, and Chinese-style religious art—much of it coming out of the art department of the new Catholic University of Peking (Beiping Furen Daxue)—was part of that localization. Productivity seems to have continued at Furen during the Japanese occupation, as this article attests. Many of the students and faculty were recent converts to Christianity, though the article reports that non-Christians also enrolled and taught in the art program.

Lu Hongnian_Nativity
Lu Hongnian (Lu Hung-nien) ( 陸鴻年) (Chinese, 1914–1989), The Birth of Jesus, ca. 1941. Chinese watercolor on silk.

Here is one of the paintings by Lu Hongnian, who sometime after this article was published, in part through his having engaged the New Testament as inspiration for his paintings, became a Christian and took the name John. It shows the Holy Family in a mountainside cave, Mary gazing adoringly at her newborn son as Joseph brings more straw to cushion him. Beside them, an angel holds up a lantern for light, while two shepherd children approach from the entrance, eager to meet their Savior.

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SONGS:

>> “Philippians 2:5–11” by HARK Music: This song takes a traditional Thai melody, arranged by Tirasip Kraitirangul, and puts it to a Thai translation of the famous Christ Hymn from Philippians 2. It’s performed by the HARK Duriya Tasana Singers (feat. Somchairak Sriket and Damrongsak Monprasit) and Dancers, filmed on location at Chaloem Kanchanaphisek Park in Bangkok. The song is from HARK’s Thai Hymns Album (2014), which can be downloaded for free at https://harkpublications.com/?product=thai-hymns-album-2. The two-stringed bowed instrument you see at 3:21 is a saw u.

The Duriya Tasana (“Curators of the Arts”) ensemble was formed in 2012 under the commission of the Thai-Psalms Project, an endeavor to create Thai traditional and classical music settings for the psalms of the Bible. Many of the members are affiliated with the Bunditpatanasilpa Institute of Fine Arts in Bangkok. Thanks to my friend Janet, whose sister is preparing a move to Thailand, for alerting me to this group!

>> “Jesus You Come” by Tenielle Neda, performed with Jon Guerra: This song by the Australian singer-songwriter Tenielle Neda [previously], which she sings with Jon Guerra, makes a nice complement to the Thai song above. The performance is from “Songs for Hope: A TGC Advent Concert” on December 6, 2020.

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MIDDLE ENGLISH LULLABY: “As I lay upon a night”: Medievalist Eleanor Parker introduces a charming Christmas lullaby from fourteenth-century England, a dialogue between Mary and the Christ child, and provides a modern English translation of its thirty-seven stanzas. In the Middle Ages, says Rosemary Woolf, the subject matter of lullabies was often a prophecy of the baby’s future—presumably a romantic promise of great and happy achievements. But here it is the child who relates the future to his mother, thus providing the material for his own lullaby.

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ART VIDEO: “Third Sunday of Advent: Ethiopian Art: Gospel Book” by James Romaine: Every December, my friend James Romaine, an art historian who teaches at Lander University, publishes four videos on his Seeing Art History YouTube channel related to the themes of the season, part of his annual Art for Advent series. This year he’s chosen to focus on Ethiopian art, covering illuminations from two different manuscripts, a diptych icon, and a rock-hewn church.

In this video Romaine discusses the formal qualities of two paintings from a sixteenth-century Ethiopian Gospel-book, the identity of the figures, and the liturgical context of the book, including the use of the red veil that’s attached at the top, which, Romaine says, “both protects and sanctifies the icon,” creating a sense of anticipation for the Orthodox believer who, in faith, lifts the veil to see what is revealed.