I have now added a performance of Genevan Psalm 11 to my YouTube channel and playlist. The full Genevan Psalter playlist now consists of 78 such performances with more forthcoming.
7 Apr 2025
20 Mar 2025
Lift Up Your Hearts: a hymnal review
From 1934 until quite recently, the Christian Reformed Church in North America worshipped with a succession of Psalter Hymnals, the most recent of which was published in 1989 and sported a grey cover. This volume sat in the pews of congregations until the grand shift to overhead slides with words, and in some cases music, projected onto screens, enabling parishioners to sing without books in their hands, as well as to sing songs not contained in the books.
Our own congregation replaced the grey Psalter Hymnals some years ago with a collection jointly produced by the CRC and the Reformed Church in America (RCA), called, Lift Up Your Hearts: Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs (LUYH). We read this on the hymnal's website:
13 Mar 2025
Psalm 10
My Genevan Psalter recording project continues apace with the addition of Psalm 10. The entire playlist can be found here: The Genevan Psalter.
21 Feb 2025
Psalms 28/109
Given their subject matter, Psalms 28 and 109 are probably among the less sung psalms in the church's liturgy. But the metrical psalters of the 16th and 17th centuries included all 150 Psalms. Here is my guitar performance of the shared Genevan tune, which can be found in my Genevan Psalter playlist on my YouTube channel.
13 Feb 2025
Revised New Jerusalem Bible, review
As a young man raised in a Christian home, I became enamoured of The Jerusalem Bible, a translation based on La Bible de Jérusalem, published in France in 1956. I had tried such paraphrases as J. B. Phillips' New Testament in Modern English and Kenneth Taylor's The Living Bible. In fact, I had received a copy of the latter at Christmas 1970 and read it from cover to cover over the next six months or so. I was so put off by its obvious anachronisms and excessive literary breeziness that I quickly abandoned it for something better. The Jerusalem Bible (JB), published in 1966, seemed an obvious alternative. It reads very well and has a certain literary quality that appealed to me. I found it intriguing as well because it included those extra books in the Old Testament that Protestants group together as part of the Apocrypha.
31 Jan 2025
YouTube channel organized
21 Jan 2025
Liturgy page amended
2 Jan 2025
The Genevan Psalter: YouTube channel
My work at uploading guitar performances of the Genevan Psalm tunes continues apace. The entire playlist can be accessed here: The Genevan Psalter. As of the beginning of 2025 the playlist consists of 63 such performances. Here are two recent uploads: