Day: December 20, 2010

A Christmas buffet

A wandering soul with an internet connection looking for spiritual sustenance in this holy season can find all matter of wonders. There’s the Huffington Post’s 10 best religion books of the year feature, Scott Gunn’s blog posting on the world’s worst Advent calendars, and the winners of Stephen Prothero’s Make Your Own Religion contest, which he ran in a class at Boston University.

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Christmas carol trainwreck

Maggie Dawn directs us to this recording of O Holy Night, captured by the Music Academy. Apparently, it is for real. And, as one commenter said, it is not without sincerity.

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God and social media

My question is whether social media really does level hierarchies in as thoroughgoing a way as some of its most ardent theorists suggest. Any number of public figures use Facebook and Twitter as part of a strategy that fosters visibility for their ideas and initiatives, and only a minimum of interaction around very safe sorts of ideas. And I am not saying there is anything wrong with that.

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New group, Equality Matters, to press for same-sex marriage

As gay people around the country reveled on Sunday in the historic Senate vote to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a liberal media watchdog group said it planned to announce on Monday that it was setting up a “communications war room for gay equality” in an effort to win the movement’s next and biggest battle: for a right to same-sex marriage.

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The poetry of Handel’s Messiah

A recording of Messiah was the first “adult” Christmas present I remember receiving. I was 16, and had sung a few choruses from Messiah in high school chorus. My parents gave me the Robert Shaw Chorale’s performance, my very own – probably the first classical album I owned, too. I cried when I opened it. I hadn’t realized how much I really wanted to be able to listen to this music.

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Loose the prisoner

O Clavis David

O Key of David, and Sceptre of the House of Israel,

Thou That openest and no man shutteth, and shuttest, and no man openeth:

Come, and loose the prisoner from the prison house,

and him that sitteth in darkness, from the shadow of death.

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