A Hymnary.org reader reports that he was watching the new National Parks film series by Ken Burns, and much of the accompanying folk music consisted of old hymn tunes. You know how melodies can get stuck in an infinite loop, running through your head? Well, he had one, and a search through his hymnals yielded no relief. Then he remembered the new Hymnary.org melody search tool he’d read about. He typed in a few notes and there it was! Mind loop relieved and an idea for planning the next worship service planted.
Our new melody search tool, the summer project of student Nat Burns, lets you enter some notes on a virtual keyboard and find similar melodies. It searches some 2800 hymn tunes indexed at Hymnary.org for which we have scores. Give it a try!
If no law of God had prohibited idols to be made by us; if no voice of the Holy Spirit uttered general menace no less against the makers than the worshippers of idols; from our sacrament itself we would draw our interpretation that arts of that kind are opposed to the faith. For how have we renounced the devil and his angels, if we make them? What divorce have we declared from them, I say not with whom, but dependent on whom, we live? What discord have we entered into with those to whom we are under obligation for the sake of our maintenance? Can you have denied with the tongue what with the hand you confess? unmake by word what by deed you make? preach one God, you who make so many? preach the true God, you who make false ones?
One of the marks of any folk song is that its origins cannot be traced. That is certainly the case for this infectiously joyful song. "There's No God as Great" is known all over Central and South America by evangelical Christians who love to sing one song after the other, often stringing them together in medley fashion. This hymn is built in four sections, almost like a little medley in itself. Each section is repeated and is based on a different Scripture passage.
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Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this "landowner"—for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate—was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else.
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