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.
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.
Event: The Gathering
I will be performing for “The Gathering”, the annual retreat of the UCC Women of Michigan, at the Kettunen Center in Tustin, Michigan, on June 12, 2015. My playlist is still undecided, but I’ve promised to do “The Buddha Kicked My Butt!” It’s a weekend event; my concert will Friday evening.
Contact Sallie Anderson at (989) 732-9001 for more information about The Gathering.
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.