And, of course, “Amazing Grace” sung to the Coca-Cola tune “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”

You know, God’s grace kept us Christian through all this. Yet I remember it as so sincerely meant.

Actually, the evangelicals that became Orthodox back in 1986 …

Something else I’m ignorant about, apparently. Anyone care to give a Reader’s Digest summary of what happened? Thanks.

Just wanted to echo David T. Koyzis’s comment #13. I don’t ever hear anymore anyof the super-cool super-spiritual songs the singing of which was the sine qua non of the committed Christian in my college days. [Did that sentence just make sense? Oh well.]

Except that, for some reason, “It Only Takes a Spark” still shows its hoary head every so often.

We have tossed overboard a boatload of hymns that served us well for centuries, and replaced them with stuff that, in the long run, we ourselves don’t even like. Makes alot of sense.

Amen. Modern worship is pretty much worship for the attention span challenged.

Somehow, some way, we are all sooo going to regret this someday. Well, we will suffer for it, anyway. We’ll probably be too dumb to realize we should regret it.

I also am part of the arrogant oligarchy in terms of the size of the church I attend. I could not attend any of the new megachurches. I am not in favor of that trend. My parish is very small, and I prefer it that way. In addition, I have a relationship with my priest where he actually knows me well. I think that works much better when I go to Confession..

: )

You put your finger on a very good example of where, perhaps, we have too easily dismissed the example of our fathers, and their grandfather’s grandfathers when it comes to educational practices, content and theory.

I don’t think I’ve read anything on this blog that has caused me to laugh quite as hard.

“In my own church, those clamoring for the most stereotypically ‘contemporary worship’ services are baby boomers, whereas, younger folks hunger for something more authentic and connected to the broad and deep history of the Church, which is…[insert drum roll here]…the ancient Western Mass form of worship, which lives on in the thoroughly evangelically reformed Lutheran Divine Service of Word and Sacrament.”

The Reformed churches have also followed the basic pattern, if not the entire ordinary of the mass. I personally think that the Reformed churches dispensed with too much of the western liturgical tradition in the 16th century, adopting lengthy didactic monologues in their place, yet apparently believing they were returning to the patterns of the ancient church. However, the singular contribution of the Reformed churches was to recover congregational singing of the psalms in their entirety. Sadly, many Reformed churches have not kept to this.

But the problem today is that people think something is true because it is new.

In some ways, our ancestors had a better grasp of “how things work,” if you mean by “things” human beings. Because we are so enamored by technology, we see the “natural” as an impediment to our desires (which we equate with our good). For this reason, everything, including our bodies, becomes an artifice that may be manipulated by our wills for the fulfillment of our desires.

We’ve not reached the point where people who are geniuses may believe that they are morons trapped with a high IQ and thus require transintelligence surgery (i.e., moderate lobotomy). But we’re getting there. If people can have no false beliefs about their own inner life (the great dogma of our age), what is true of gender may be extended to other things. (We’ve already seen the macabre life of a white middle aged woman–Michael Johson–who believed he was trapped in a black man’s body).