Viewing all items in Resource Category: God in the Arts

In the Middle Ages, at the end of the Christmas Midnight Mass, the clergy would often tell the animals’ version of the Nativity story and imitate the sound of each animal. The cock would crow ‘Christus natus est.’ (Christ is born). The cows would moo ‘Ubi?’ (Where?). The sheep would bleat ‘In Bethlehem.’ And the...

“What a composer has to do is to find out the real message he has to convey to the community and say it directly and without equivocation…if the roots of your art are firmly planted in your own soil, and that soil has anything individual to give you, you may still gain the whole world...

John Henry Newman was a great Victorian churchman, an inspired Anglican preacher and teacher who became a Roman Catholic in 1845. Newman was also a poet and wrote hymns that have remained perennial favourites – among them, ‘Lead, kindly Light ‘and ‘Praise to the Holiest.’ The first hymn was written when, as an Anglican, Newman...

At the end of his life in 1924, Gabriel Fauré, the French composer, said to his sons, “When I am no longer here, you will hear it said of my works, ‘After all, that was nothing much to write home about!’ You must not let that hurt or depress you. It is the way of...

The German theologian, Karl Barth, is reputed to have said, “Whether the angels play only Bach in praising God, I am not quite sure; I am sure, however, that en famille they play Mozart.” It is a lovely image of angels in the heavenly courts above, mirroring the human enjoyment of music making here on...

In 1956 a small novel by a German writer, Johannes Rüber, appeared in an English translation. It was called ‘Bach and the Heavenly Choir’ and tells of Pope Gregory XIX’s desire to elevate Bach to the ranks of the saints. To bring together the Lutheran bishop and his own cardinals, he organizes a great Bach...

‘Surprised by Joy’ is the title C S Lewis gave to his spiritual autobiography. To him, joy meant not just the name of the woman he eventually married, but also an awareness of God’s glory and goodness. It was something that, like Wordsworth, he experienced in childhood, and later in his thirties when his faith...

 May is traditionally the month of Mary, the mother of Jesus. When we read of Mary in the Gospels, we sense the heartache and trial of much of her life: a teenage mother giving birth in a stable, fleeing with her new-born baby and Joseph to Egypt, losing the child Jesus while on pilgrimage to...

In the 1980s thanks to Godfrey Smith, a columnist for The Sunday Times, there was a series of letters about particular pieces of music that have the TQ – the Tingle Quotient. As we listen, the music sends a shiver of excitement up and down the spine and opens out for us a new world...

In this series we have looked at the psalms of the Old Testament and the songs of the New Testament, and now we enter the Middle Ages. But it is the Middle Ages through the eyes of a record producer in the last century. In 1980 Ted Perry decided to found a new independent record...

St Luke tells us in his Gospel that the angels sang praises to God at the birth of Jesus, and he has given us three poems that have become part of Christian song: the Magnificat, the Benedictus and the Nunc Dimittis. The first two are full of praise and rejoicing. The last comes as Mary...

Those words of the 18th century poet Christopher Smart remind us how faith and music have always gone hand in hand, faith inspiring the music and music expressing the faith. In this series we shall consider 12 pieces of music inspired by the Christian faith, beginning from its roots in the Old Testament. Among the...