Linda Borecki

Book Symposium: Liturgy as a Way of Life (Linda Borecki)

This week’s review of Bruce Ellis Benson’s Liturgy as a Way of Life comes from Linda Borecki. ———– “Thus, the very being of life is improvisatory – by which I mean that it is a mixture of both structure and contingency, of regularity and unpredictability, of constraint and possibility. Further, if God is indeed still […]

Bruce Benson

Book Symposium: Liturgy as a Way of Life (Benson’s Response to Phillips)

Following up on Monday’s opening review of Bruce Ellis Benson’s Liturgy as a Way of Life by Ed Phillips, Bruce offers his response below. —————- First, I want to thank Ed Phillips for such a thoughtful response to my book. It’s always a pleasure to respond to reviewers who have interacted with one’s work at […]

Ed Phillips

Book Symposium: Review of Benson’s Liturgy as a Way of Life (Ed Phillips)

We begin our Book Symposium with a fantastic review by L. Edward Phillips. Ed’s engagement with Bruce raises a series of excellent practical and philosophical questions. His review will be of interest to academics, but especially reflective practitioners. You’ll find Ed’s bio below. ————— Over the course of history, Christianity has had a bumpy relationship […]

Dominique Ovalle, Jen Grabarczyk-Turner

I Love You: An Interview with Dominique Ovalle

An interview with California artist Dominique Ovalle on painting, beauty, murals, cockroaches in Palau, and a reality behind life as an artist.

Joshua Busman

“Then” What Do We Do?

  If not for his tragic suicide back in 2008, today would have been the fifty-first birthday of award-winning writer David Foster Wallace. By nearly any account, Wallace was the greatest talent of his generation. In addition to his sparkling fiction, which included sprawling, encyclopedic novels such as Infinite Jest and beautifully crystalline short short stories […]

Joshua Busman

Some Thoughts on History and Pluralism

Earlier this week, I had the good fortune to attend a lecture by the preeminent music scholar (and frequent NY Times contributor) Richard Taruskin. Taruskin was on campus as part of a weekend-long conference which commemorated the centenary of Stravinsky’s (in)famous ballet The Rite of Spring, but his lecture this morning commemorated a slightly different […]

Joshua Busman

Exercising Your Second Commandment Rights: Luther and Calvin on Music

Many of the most important debates of the recent “worship wars” in evangelicalism (including the form/content divide identified in yesterday’s post) have their origins in two important conflicts from the first few decades of the Reformation: first, the debate over the exegesis of the Ten Commandments or “Decalogue,” and second, a broader conversation about the […]

Joshua Busman

On Praise and Worship Music: An Essay to its Cultured Despisers

“Praise and worship” music is one of the most oft-evoked and heavily contested markers of evangelical Protestantism in the United States. Its most vocal advocates herald praise and worship and its meteoric rise since the 1960s as nothing less than the rebirth of Western Christianity, citing its unique ability to attract an entire generation of […]

Brett David Potter

Are Artists the High Priests of Culture? Part I

In his seminal Art in Action (1980), Reformed philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff emphasized the way in which the artist, “when he brings forth order for human benefit or divine honor,” participates in “man’s vocation to master and subdue the earth” (77). Such a creationally-grounded ‘job description’ applies equally to artists inside and outside the boundaries of the church. On […]