Free Stuff
My sheet music and other free resources are available here. Just follow this link.
These things are under a Creative Commons license that allows you to download them and copy them freely—for any non-commercial use.
Enjoy!
Store
I have books, CDs, and a video series for sale from my store page. (I wish I could just give everything away, but one must eat!)
I’m especially excited about my new book, now available: My Burden Is Light: A Pastor’s Plea for Rationality, Honesty, and Humility.
About
Merry, Mystical Missives
Here you’ll find everything I’ve sent out to the mailing list for The Merry Mystic.
Getting It From Both Sides
In Chapter Three of The Inn of God’s Forgiveness, I wrote:
To summarize, here’s the bad news: if you want to claim the Christian tradition without affirming the traditional creeds, it’s a bit of an uphill battle. Confident creedal Christians will identify you as an inadequate believer, if not actually an agent of Satan; confident atheists will identify you as an inadequate doubter, still clinging to your discredited faith tradition; but in the face of both, you will have to insist on claiming your own religious identity.
It’s coming back to haunt me now. I’m advertising the web page for the book on Facebook, and people are occasionally commenting on the ad that appears in their news feeds. So far, the comments are of just these two kinds. There are confident creedal Christians who want to tell me that I’m not really a Christian — and there are atheists who are say things like “tired of these fairy tales in my news feed” and “he [Jesus] is a made up character in a storybook who cares.”
But oh well! I can’t really blame the atheists for being cheesed off: shouldn’t Facebook know enough about their interests to not advertise a book of Christian theology and hymns to them? But it’s interesting how reactive people are on this topic — reactive in much the same way on all sides. The atheists feel threatened and demeaned by an oppressive Christian majority. The conservative Christians also feel threatened and demeaned by the erosion of their tradition in an increasingly secular culture. And, of course, I feel pretty beleaguered myself, getting it from both sides. But it’s been very interesting to engage my conservative Christian commentators in online discussion. We often seem to be able to find some ground for mutual respect, though not always agreement. That’s progress. And meanwhile, the people who are not offended by the ad, though not posting, are coming to the web site and downloading the hymns. 1000 downloads and counting!
Earth Hymns
I’m working on two new hymns about the earth: one happy (“The Harmony of the Incredible Earth”) and one sorrowful (“Compassion’s Sting”). That’s sort of how I’m feeling these days. Sometimes the earth is so overwhelmingly beautiful that I just have to join in its song; sometimes the harm we’re doing, the harm I’m doing, to the earth is so sad that I just have to lament. Here’s a draft stanza of the first:
Oh, blessed is Earth, the prolific and sweet, Providing us plenty of good things to eat, With life on the surface and treasures below, What greater abundance could any bestow? Her fisheries, forests, and fields of grain, Her breathable breezes, her drinkable rain, The harmony of the incredible earth! The harmony of, the harmony of, the harmony of the incredible earth!
And here’s a draft stanza of the second:
When species vanish from the Earth, And ancient coral dies, When land erodes and life is stilled And burning forest cries, When silence falls where once the calls Of songbirds filled the air, You weep, O God, with every death And final breath, And yet we do not care.
I don’t think Keystone XL is a good idea — maybe that’s why this is on my heart today.
The Inn of God’s Forgiveness Available for Nook
The Nook version of my new book, The Inn of God’s Forgiveness and Other Hymns for the Progressive Church, is now available from Barnes&Noble. On most Nooks, the music pages themselves will be too small to read, but you can always for printing.
I usually use a Kindle myself, but I got a used Nook on eBay for testing this edition. It was pretty straightforward. I guess I already found most of the problems when I made my Kindle and iBooks Store editions.
The Inn of God’s Forgiveness Available on the iBooks Store
The iBooks version of my new book, The Inn of God’s Forgiveness and Other Hymns for the Progressive Church, is now available from the iBooks Store through iTunes. On most iPads, the music pages themselves will be rather small, but you can always access the pdfs here for printing.
I usually use a Kindle myself, but my son reads books on his iPad, so I was able to test it using that. Apple has an interesting free app for creating iBooks: their iBooks Author. I spent a few hours with this, and used it to build the first chapter of The Inn of God’s Forgiveness. I really like pop-up footnotes, and with some labor I was able to make that work with iBooks Author. It wasn’t easy: I had to create separate little graphics for the footnote links (a little .png for “[1]”, and another for “[2]”, and so on). But the result looked nice and worked well.
After some reflection, however, I decided not to go that route. The books produced by iBooks Author are fixed-layout things. But most of the people in my church who read ebooks do so largely because they can change the font size and read the book with large print. For that, a plain old .epub works better. So that’s what you get from the iBooks Store if you buy this book. It doesn’t have the fancy pop-up footnotes, but it can be read at different font sizes.
These are the (mostly video) messages sent out to The Merry Mystic mailing list.
Sermons and Such
Every week, I preach in the Open Prairie United Church of Christ in Princeton, Illinois. I’m not sending most of these out to The Merry Mystic mailing list; but on the outside chance you’d like to see a sermon, here they are.