Locally Grown Classical Music

I believe that the arts are important for all people because they speak to a greater reality, a shared experience, and a way of living that we all encounter in a unifying way but can allow for a diversity of the experiences of the individual. The arts, when liberated from the constricting interpretations and demands of the ivory tower, can offer an experience of truth that is specific to the individual experiencing the music/painting, etc.

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Mo' Money, Mo' Faith

A mentor warned me of two sermons that bring fear and trembling to a pastor – the Easter sermon (because you can only do so much with the story and because you have a larger than normal audience and because most of them there are not committed Christians so you have to temper your sermon a different way than you would for the people who are there week after week, and because for some reason everyone expects your sermon to be so amazing that everyone who is there will be inspired to become a committed church member) and the Stewardship sermon because your salary depends upon it and the babies need to eat.

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Find a Friend, Hug a Friend, and Meet God

There are those relationships that are surface, that are seen as strictly the level of acquaintance. There are those relationships of enemies, and those that are in passing. Those are interesting in their own ways, but I would like to consider those relationships that are deep, meaningful, and in various ways, intimate. I don’t want to focus on these relationships because I am some kind of creep (although that may be true in its own right), but because I think that in these relationships something is experienced and happens. It is my argument that in those deep and meaningful relationships we are made to be aware of something greater than that which can be seen or conceived.

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Worlds of Faith

In many ways faith is about world-building. We are not creating the world we live in, but offering explanations and descriptions for why the world is as it is. We start with certain assumptions and shared beliefs like the belief in the existence of God and that this God is love. Such a assumption shapes our view and experience of the world. From there we try to make sense of our experiences, we try to explain the dissonances, and we try to understand the world in which we dwell based on those assumptions.

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