random thoughts on music of all kinds
I've posted before on occasion about the power of music for those battling mental ill-health. Music was a gift to me from very young age - not that I was particularly gifted, but that I was surrounded by people who…
A couple of weeks ago, James Cary invited himself for lunch - and then we hooked up online with our old friend Barry Cooper (now living in Florida, for reasons best known to him and his new wife) for a…
Happy New Year Y'all! Sacred Treasure Tim Keller wrote a helpfully argued piece for the New Yorker last month: Can Evangelicalism Survive Donald Trump and Roy Moore. Chris Green has a good piece on sermon illustrations Ian Paul asks whether…
I'm not quite sure why I first did this, but started making wordles for U2 albums a while back. So naturally, with a new album out this week, I wanted to do another. I've had all kinds of things buzzing…
Sacred Treasure Former LibDem leader, Tim Farron has been saying some really important things in the last week about the state and nature of western liberalism. Here is his original Theos lecture: What Kind of Liberalism do we want? Then…
A few hours in Timothy Dudley-Smith’s company, through the medium of his recent A Functional Art: Reflections of a Hymn Writer, is extremely well spent. Now in his 90s, it is wonderful to find that his acuity, humanity and insight are…
I've just seen U2's performance of Bullet the Blue Sky on last night's Fallon. Oh. My. God. That's no expletive. But a prayer. A Prayer of Rage. A prayer I prayed this morning because I was struggling to pray, for whatever…
This post is not exactly in the heat of the moment. But because the site for which I wrote the article is no longer in action, I presumed that the world needed the benefit of its insights (hoho) and so thought I’d repost, albeit with the notes from the talk I’ve given a few times based on it. (more…)
It's nearly 10 months since I last did a combo - so here's the latest. William Cowper is a personal hero - he has featured often on Q and in talks over the years. What a man: he persevered through…
In a weird parallel to Bowie's Blackstar, Leonard Cohen was to die just a few days after You Want It Darker came out. He also wrote and recorded it while battling terminal illness. Mortality is understandably central to the album's concerns, therefore -…