Saw Bill Edgar's email in a mailing list recently, contacted him for some advice and told him I was helped by his book "Reasons of the Heart". It was a primer in apologetics, emphasizing non-intellectual reasons for faith. He's a professor in Westminster, and turned out that he's quite a fan of the blues...
"The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically..."
Read the Full Article Ain't Life Hard? ...
"Truth is the highest virtue in the blues. The foremost blues singer of the Old Testament is surely Job. While his suffering appeared to him to have no purpose, he was vindicated in the end by a God who owed no accounts to him, but who nevertheless is incapable of injustice. Harold Courlander collected songs from the nineteenth-century African-American repertoire, including early versions of the blues with a biblical hue:
Old Job said, good Lord,
Whilst I’m feeling bad, good Lord,
I can’t sleep at night, good Lord,
I can’t eat a bite, good Lord,
And the woman I love, good Lord,
Don’t treat me right, good Lord."
"The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically..."
Read the Full Article Ain't Life Hard? ...
"Truth is the highest virtue in the blues. The foremost blues singer of the Old Testament is surely Job. While his suffering appeared to him to have no purpose, he was vindicated in the end by a God who owed no accounts to him, but who nevertheless is incapable of injustice. Harold Courlander collected songs from the nineteenth-century African-American repertoire, including early versions of the blues with a biblical hue:
Old Job said, good Lord,
Whilst I’m feeling bad, good Lord,
I can’t sleep at night, good Lord,
I can’t eat a bite, good Lord,
And the woman I love, good Lord,
Don’t treat me right, good Lord."
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