An arrangement of the shape-note tune for “Oh, Glorious Hope” performed by Timothy Seaman on hammered dulcimer
Today’s hymn is by the great Charles Wesley (1707-1788). It speaks of the life to come in terms of the promised land. I don’t think it’s a popular hymn, and the tune performed in the video above is unfamiliar to me. If you know this one, please tell us of your experience with it.
“The reason why the world does not know us is that bit did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:1b-3 ESV).
1 Oh, glorious hope of perfect love! It lifts me up to things above; It bears on eagles’ wings. It gives my ravished soul a taste, And makes me for some moments feast With Jesus’ priests and kings.
2 Rejoicing now in earnest hope, I stand, and from the mountaintop See all the land below. Rivers of milk and honey rise, And all the fruits of paradise In endless plenty grow.
3 A land of corn, and wine, and oil; Favored with God’s peculiar smile, With ev’ry blessing blest; There dwells the Lord our Righteousness, And deeps His own in perfect peace, And everlasting rest.
4 Oh, that I might at once go up; No more on this side Jordan stop, But now the land possess; This moment end my legal years, Sorrows and sins, and doubts and fears, A howling wilderness!
I read one time that Hitchcock wasn’t going to end the movie Psycho the way he did, but his producer insisted he provide an explanation. The story couldn’t end with a wrap-up of the crime. It needed a psychiatrist to give the audience a reason for it. This is because Americans want to know why an evil thing occurred and how could it be prevented in the future.
I felt this need while listening to a couple crime stories this week. In one story, four boys in rural Vermont decided to break and enter a remote home. Two of them said they would murder anyone who happened to be home, and they all carried knives to help, if the need arose. It did, but only the original two attacked the mother and daughter they found. The story was mostly told by one of the two in police interviews. He was an emotionally distant Mormon kid who lacked friends and was beginning to explore gang activity.
In the other story, an elderly couple was kidnapped in an effort to rob them. He said he would kill them after he’d obtained all the money. The wife was able to tip off the cops, who located the man through his car. This culprit was a family man, described by a church member as a Christian who had it all. He had been even a church elder at some point. But along with all of this, he was also a constant manipulator.
If evil like this can come from both social outcasts and respected members, what can be done to foresee or prevent it? We need a healthy understanding of our common depravity, and that out of the heart these and other great sins come. We are not good people. Only the Lord can make us so.
What other things can we say today?
Great Musician: Tony Bennett died this week. Ted Gioia writes, “I probably own 30 or 40 of his albums, and his singing has been part of my life since childhood—when my Sicilian father played Tony Bennett records at our family home. At times, it almost felt like Bennett was a member of my extended family.
… “I could fill up an entire article just with stories of his acts of kindness. He radiated decency and generosity of heart. That showed up in his life and his music.”
New York City: “As for libraries, the sad truth is that, precisely because of the abandonment of broken-windows policing, those sheltered spaces are havens for the homeless and drug-addicted more than they are resources for the scholarly and intellectually curious.”
Found Music: The Kiffness takes internet videos and makes music with them. The one from July 15 seems appropriate to add here.
Photo: Christie’s Restaurant sign, Houston, Texas. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Writing for Christianity Today, Adam Graber suggests problems with artificial-intelligence-driven Bible reading software.
“As a digital theology expert, I believe these kinds of ‘BibleGPTs’ will continue to advance, proliferate, and eventually become proprietary systems. And as this happens, the church and its leaders will be prompted to make some momentous decisions about the Christian canon. This will, in turn, influence how we interpret the Bible and impact the future of our faith and practice.”
He goes to describe how AI-driven research tools could become like the knowledgeable friend who always has a ready answer for any question but who isn’t grounded enough in the Word to answer wisely every time. It may become another easy way to quickly survey the Bible, thinking we understand more than we do.
If you read the whole article, it doesn’t end as sensationally as it begins. He concludes saying we need to understand the Bible for ourselves, but the tone of the whole leans too much on people’s laziness. That isn’t new. We’ve always been lazy. I doubt AI will usher in more lethargy than we already indulge with the Internet.
“There Is a Fountain” performed by Timothy Seaman on hammered dulcimer
“On that day there shall be ja fountain opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness” (Zech. 13:1 ESV).
This popular hymn, published under the title “Praise for the Fountain Opened,” was written by the gifted and troubled Englishman William Cowper (1731-1800). For the last several years of his life, he worked with John Newton on many hymns and pastoral duties. Newton is likely the reason we have Cowper’s hymns. (Cowper is pronounced “cooper.”)
1 There is a fountain filled with blood, Drawn from Immanuel’s veins; And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains, Lose all their guilty stains, Lose all their guilty stains; And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains.
2 The dying thief rejoiced to see That fountain in his day; And there may I, though vile as he, Wash all my sins away, Wash all my sins away, Wash all my sins away; And there may I, though vile as he, Wash all my sins away.
3 Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood Shall never lose its power, Till all the ransomed Church of God Be saved, to sin no more, Be saved, to sin no more, Be saved, to sin no more; Till all the ransomed Church of God Be saved, to sin no more.
4 E’er since by faith I saw the stream Thy flowing wounds supply, Redeeming love has been my theme, And shall be till I die: And shall be till I die, And shall be till I die; Redeeming love has been my theme, And shall be till I die.
5 When this poor lisping, stamm’ring tongue Lies silent in the grave, Then in a nobler, sweeter song I’ll sing Thy pow’r to save: I’ll sing Thy pow’r to save, I’ll sing Thy pow’r to save; Then in a nobler, sweeter song I’ll sing Thy pow’r to save.
Do Americans know more than the first verse of “America, the Beautiful,” specifically the second verse with the words:
“America! America! God mend thine every flaw Confirm thy soul in self-control Thy liberty in law!”
In one simple line, we see the law, not as the source of our liberty, but as a tool for protecting it against those who would take it away. But what “it” is remains a question.
It’s that loosely defined something we can’t get enough of.
“More liberty begets desire of more; The hunger still increases with the store.”
John Dryden
Fred Bauer has a piece on the different views of freedom we’ve had since the colonial days. We had Puritans’ “ordered liberty,” Quakers’ “reciprocal liberty,” Virginians’ “hegemonic liberty,” and Appalachians’ “natural liberty.” These are taken from David Hackett Fischer’s book, Albion’s Seed.
“Ethical concerns,” Bauer writes, “factor into the notion of freedom as ‘elbow room.’ Patrick Henry argued that the centralized Constitution would threaten both ‘the rights of conscience’ and ‘all pretensions to human rights and privileges.’ That ethical strand offers a counterpoint to arguments that American freedom is simply about material prosperity. The genealogy of freedom is more complicated.”
Moving on to the links, we face a new frontier for ethical freedom in the choices we make with our technology. In other words, if we can do it, should we? How is using AI as described below not plagiarism?
One of the major reasons I think we need to stand against AI as authors specifically is I suspect a lot of publishing house CEOs are looking at it and thinking “you know, why do we pay all these editors anyway?” https://t.co/hVbrO31fKj
To repeat the July 13, 2023, tweet above for preservation, Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan) says, “One of the major reasons I think we need to stand against AI as authors specifically is I suspect a lot of publishing house CEOs are looking at it and thinking ‘you know, why do we pay all these editors anyway?'”
She retweets Maureen Johnson (@maureenjohnson) from earlier that day, who says, “Authors: we need to stand up with the actors. AI is ALREADY HERE in our work. I just spoke to a Very Famous Author who has to remain nameless for legal reasons. They are held up in a contract negotiation because a Major Publisher wants to train AI on their work.”
I’d think training a computer to mimic a popular author’s work would fall within the bounds of plagiarism. If not that, fan fiction.
Who furrows? Who follows? The owl in the hollow The hawk in the meadow The jay in the hedgeapple tree Who follows the farmer who furrows his fields? Who furrows? Who follows? We three.
Fiction: It may be common for online chat to express a desire for short novels, but do readers want them? Nathan Bransford talks about the dangers of writing shorter works. “When writers are grappling with bloated word counts, physical description tends to be the first to go. Tastes vary, but in my opinion, cutting too much physical description is almost always a mistake. We’re already in a physical description drought, please don’t make it worse!”
Trapped: In other news, 100 people were trapped for hours yesterday in Agatha Christie’s old home by a large tree that had fallen across the only access road. They hung out mostly in the tea room. One witness reported the staff were “doing a great job, they are giving us free tea’s and things. It’s a bit bleak.”
“Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” performed on hammered dulcimer
Today’s hymn is one of my top three favorites. “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” was written by Robert Robinson of Norfolk, England (1735-1790). It’s testimony to God’s sustaining grace has always appealed to me.
Hymnary.org says the tune for this hymn has been ascribed to many different people as well as no one at all. The Trinity Hymnal cites it as the one written or distributed by Asahel Nettleton (1783-1844), an American preacher who left a strong legacy with his publication of Village Hymns. “Nettleton’s hymnological work centred in the compiling of his Village Hymns, from which more hymns of the older American writers have passed into English collections than from any other source.”
Another good thing Nettleton did was to oppose Charles Finney in 1827. Bully for him.
1 Come, thou fount of ev’ry blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace; streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above; praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it, mount of God’s unchanging love.
2 Here I raise my Ebenezer; hither by thy help I’m come; and I hope, by thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home. Jesus sought me when a stranger, wand’ring from the fold of God: he, to rescue me from danger, interposed his precious blood.
3 O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be; let that grace now, like a fetter, bind my wand’ring heart to thee. Prone to wander – Lord, I feel it – prone to leave the God I love; here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.
Ukrainian novelist, activist, and winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award for 2021 Victoria Amelina was in Kramatorsk, a city in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. She was “with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists on June 27 when Russian forces fired two Iskander missiles at the city, hitting a popular restaurant downtown,” The Kyiv Independent reports.
The IT professional-turned writer, 37, had lived in the States for a few years before returning to Ukraine to research war crimes.
In September 2022, “Amelina went to the liberated village of Kapytolivka in Kharkiv Oblast and found the diary of her colleague, the children’s book author Volodymyr Vakulenklo, along with his father,” The Kyiv Independent reports.
“Vakulenko had buried the diary under a cherry tree in his yard before he was abducted by Russian occupation forces that March. The diary is now kept in the Kharkiv Literary Museum for posterity.”
In this 2020 interview with PEN Ukraine, Amelina offers this optimism (which I’ve had to translate via Google): To write Home for Home, I quit my favorite job, ruined the career I had built since I was seventeen. It was painful, and I’m still not sure if I did the right thing – I gained a lot, but I also sacrificed a lot.
“I would not advise making decisions motivated by something external. There must be an inner readiness to live by texts, to turn oneself into texts, to write even when no one reads. No publisher can refuse this. If literature is your way of interacting with the world, miracles will happen.”
She also lists the New Testament among the books that have influenced her the most. “It seems that in the near future my heroes will not stop dying for others, but this is not about death, but about resurrection.”
Here are some other things to read.
Poetry: Last year, Steve Moyer wrote about Ukrainian poetry having depicted the corruption of war for decades. “Many of the poets writing today in Ukraine, however, compose in free verse, relying more on repetition, word play, juxtaposition of images, and rhetorical devices than on traditional forms and meter to convey the harsh reality they’re witnessing. Images such as rotting fruit occur and recur. Debris lying in snow and crumbling bridges make their appearances.”
“When I was working on my Paul Revere book, I remember hesitating over Charles Ferris Gettemy’s biography, The True Story of Paul Revere. The book was over a hundred years old. I can’t write in it, can I? It felt like some sort of aesthetic crime. But then, no. I need to keep track of ideas and details. Why did I have it to begin with? To use. Once I ditched my reservations, the payoff was immeasurable.”
One of the books I’ve been reading this year is Carl F. Ellis Jr.’s Free at Last?: The Gospel in the African American Experience. It’s good history of African American movements and an exposition of the goals and promises they have held over the years. It’s a wealth of information and trivia that would make a great text for a semester course. The trivia mostly comes within the sixty-page glossary of people, places, and terms that may have been referred to in main text.
One of the terms explained in this glossary is the myth of the “curse of Ham.” It’s an idea I’ve known about for years, but I can’t remember how I first heard it. It came up several weeks ago on Twitter by one of those accounts that reads like a gateway drug to radicalization. It’s based on a few verses in Genesis 9, which read: “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (Gen. 9:24-25 KJV).
It’s a weird passage because of the unclear reason Noah is provoked to curse his grandson and bless two of his three sons. But you see when reading these two verses that Ham is not the one cursed. It’s Canaan, his son. The narrative at this point emphasizes Ham being Canaan’s father, and in the next chapter it spells out the Canaanite peoples and some of the cities they founded, including Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s easy to see the setup for the wrath God would pour on them when bringing Israel back to the promised land.
But the myth is that Noah’s curse was on the father, Ham, touching every one of his descendants in every generation. Ellis says those who paint Christianity as a white man’s religion use this as a proof. Some of them argue it’s a good reason for African Americans to convert to Islam, but aside from this being a foolish interpretation of Genesis, it comes from a ninth-century Muslim apologist.
Ham the son of Noah was a white man, with a handsome face and figure, and the Almighty God changed his color and the color of his descendants in response to his father’s curse. He went away, followed by his sons, and they settled by the shore, where God increased and multiplied them. They were the blacks . . .
Ibn Qutaybah, Kitāb al-maʿārif, p. 26
That, friends, is not Biblical theology. It misreads the written word of God and imagines an explanation to fit some human conclusion. If Christian orthodoxy is anything, it’s bound to God’s word (let the reader understand). Ellis adds that this idea was used to justify slavery within White Christianity-ism (an idolatrous civil religion that uses the language and forms of Christianity for its own ends).
In The Custom House essay that precedes The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne chafes at his inability to write and laments the dulling effects of his day job.
Suffice it here to say that a Custom–House officer of long continuance can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an honest one—is of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.
An effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position—is, that while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength, departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of self–support.
. . .
Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle’s pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease. Uncle Sam’s gold—meaning no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman—has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of the devil’s wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self–reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly character.
Even with this, he didn’t quit his day job. He was fired.
What do you think? Does a regular paycheck pull a man away from self-reliance, or this just the way creative types talk when they can’t sell something?
“God of Our Fathers” sung by the congregation of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church of New York City
Today’s hymn, “God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand,” was written by New York Episcopalian Daniel C. Roberts (1841-1907) to commemorate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. It was accepted by an Episcopal hymnal committee and given a fresh tune by organist George W. Warren for the commemoration of the United States Constitution.
1 God of our fathers, Whose almighty hand Leads forth in beauty all the starry band Of shining worlds in splendor thro’ the skies, Our grateful songs before Thy throne arise.
2 Thy love divine hath led us in the past; In this free land by Thee our lot is cast; Be Thou our ruler, guardian, guide and stay, Thy word our law, Thy paths our chosen way.
3 From war’s alarms, from deadly pestilence, Be Thy strong arm our ever sure defence; Thy true religion in our hearts increase, Thy bounteous goodness nourish us in peace.
4 Refresh Thy people on their toilsome way, Lead us from night to never-ending day; Fill all our lives with love and grace divine, And glory, laud and praise be ever Thine.
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