Back in September, Garrison Keillor appeared at the Washington National Cathedral. He gets a spotlight in this week’s Religion and News Weekly over at PBS, which you can see here:
These were people with no money and not much in the way of books, except for the Good One, of course, and commentaries on it, and they read their Scripture very, very seriously. They departed from all of this—from the stone and from carved wood and from images and from gold and silver and vestments. And they met in plain rooms and spoke plainly, as a result of which there were never very many of them.
They believed in forgiveness in theory, but in practice it was, of course, it was of course more difficult, and living in a small town, they knew much too much about you to be merciful sometimes. But they loved, they loved the King James. They loved Scripture. They loved old hymns. They wouldn’t have belonged in the praise churches today, where people gather in big gymnasiums, and they hold their hands up over their heads, and they sing what we call 7-Eleven songs, where you sing seven words 11 times.
Over at USA Today, Cathy Lynn Grossman wants to know whether this is a “fair” slam against praise music.
But if you’d rather get the whole thing with acapella context (quite a bit of it, actually), the Cathedral archive is here (direct link to Windows Media File).
From here.