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:

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.

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.

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.

YouTube channel organized

Over the past two months I have uploaded quite a large number of videos to my @ByzantineCalvinist YouTube channel, mostly guitar performances of the Genevan Psalm tunes and a very few hymns and canticles. But I have also posted videos relevant to my new book, Citizenship Without Illusions. Last week I reorganized the material in my channel, grouping them into playlists devoted to 

• Political Visions and Illusions
• Interviews and conversations
• Commentaries and lectures
• Citizenship Without Illusions
• Hymns for guitar
• The Niagara Psalter, and
  
• The Genevan Psalter

Some of these playlists include videos from other channels relevant to my work, including reviews of my books and personal interviews. I will be adding more to these lists over time. In the meantime, take a moment to click on some of the links immediately above and see what's on offer.

Liturgy page amended

As visitors to this blog will note, the right sidebar contains several pages devoted to matters related to the Genevan and other psalters. One of these is a page titled LORD'S DAY LITURGY  for Reformed Churches. I have now updated this page by adding several performances of tunes from my YouTube channel, especially the Genevan Psalter playlist. I have also provided two alternative settings of the Decalogue, to be used depending on whether the law is read according to its first or third use. The setting and metrical versification for the Creed are my own.

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:

Psalm 122:

Psalm 149:

Incidentally, I have received a second grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship in support of further editing of my Genevan Psalter collection. I have chosen as a general title, "The Genevan Psalter for Everyone," and will shortly be seeking a publisher. If anyone knows of a possible publisher for my collection, I would be grateful for any suggestions. Thanks in advance.