In 1970, Zondervan published Phillip Keller’s A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. In 1988 they are offering A Musician Looks at the Psalms: A Journal of Daily Meditations. The musician who does the looking is arranger/composer Don Wyrtzen, who has produced more than 200 anthems and sacred songs.
A Musician Looks at the Psalms is a record of Wyrtzen’s personal encounter with the God of the poet-king. He characterizes almost every passage from the Psalms with musical language: Prelude, Paean, Polyphony, Dirge, Descant, Discord. Wyrtzen’s reactions to the Psalms are divided into 365 short sections for ease of devotional use. When read one page after another, the book feels choppy and underdeveloped. When read one page a day, it can be thought provoking.
Wyrtzen’s passion for alliteration can be overwhelming (“Opus of Oppression,” for example) and his inventiveness seems occasionally undisciplined (as when he calls his editor “a verbal virtuoso, a semantic Paganini” or refers to one passage as the “Drone-Pipe of Judgment”).
But if you are looking for a different sort of devotional aid, give this nicely illustrated volume an audition.
Capsized!
Cry from the Mountain, World Wide Pictures’ 1985 story of rescue from a white-water kayaking accident and a marriage bound for the divorce court, was released for home video purchase on December 1. The movie features a typical World Wide Pictures plot—a visit to a Billy Graham crusade (in this case, Anchorage, 1984) helps troubled family members become reconciled to God and with one another. The Alaskan scenic footage adorned by moose, bear, and pontoon plane is beautiful even on a nine-inch screen. And the reverent kerosene-lamp glow that lights a child’s visit to a ruined chapel is reminiscent of a painting by seventeenth-century French artist Georges de la Tour.
The video is in Christian bookstores.
The Smell Of The Greasepaint, The Amens Of The Crowd
With only 180 members, the Manhattan Lamb’s Church of the Nazarene is no megachurch. But its composition—actors, artists, architects, executives, professionals, as well as former pimps, pushers, and prostitutes—makes it remarkable. And its ministry is unique—a church, a health center and kitchen, and a theater (“offering alternative, value-oriented drama to the Broadway theatre-goer,” says a brochure). Located just one-half block off Times Square, the church began celebrating its fifteenth birthday this fall.
The theatrical aspect of Lamb’s ministry was founded in an east-side brown-stone in 1973 by Paul and Sharon Moore, beginning with some dinner theater presentations staged in a restaurant owned by a member of the congregation. The theatrical character of the congregation was further solidified with the 1975 purchase of the Lambs Club, a historic actors hangout. The Lamb’s Theatre began formally in 1979 when a production of Puff, the Magic Dragon was made possible by a grant from Noel Paul Stookey (of Peter, Paul, and Mary).
This month, the Lamb’s Theatre continues to entertain off-Broadway audiences with Godspell, the well-known musical romp through Matthew, and a musical adaptation of O. Henry’s The Gifts of the Magi.
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