Metrical Psalms for Advent

I want to encourage the use of psalms in liturgy. To this end I have committed to compiling a small booklet of metrical psalms for use this coming Advent (Year B). As with everything else I publish I will release the work under a CC BY-SA licence so that other people can use it, free of charge, without having to bother me for permission.I aim to have two settings of each of the psalms for the...

Psalter Commons

I have a new project! It's called Psalter Commons and I would love your help with it. I'd like the words of the psalms to be freely available for liturgy and study, but copyright law means the only truly free translations are quite old. If you have translated or paraphrased a psalm or many psalms, please feel free to add the texts! They don't need to have music, though if you do have music that's...

Ruht wohl

Last night I went to hear Bach's St John Passion at St Paul's Cathedral. The cathedral is not the best acoustic environment for it, to be honest: there's a very long echo and the sound just gets incredibly muddy. Bach is better, I think, with some clarity.The Passion was sung in English. As a rule I tend to prefer singing in the original language and as an audience member I think I feel the same,...

The Singer and the Song

Maggi Dawn, looking for debaters on the subject of scripture and translation, asked some questions on Twitter this morning which got me thinking.@maggidawn: The Message: do you love it or hate it? I'm looking for debaters on the subject of translation@maggidawn: The King James Version: beautiful or incomprehensible? I'm looking for debaters on the subject of scripture and translation@maggidawn:...