Still Here After All These Years

You blog author is still alive and well, although sometimes kicking and screaming. My personal life continues to develop and shouldn't be of much concern here. However, my new church job provides for a better selection of music coming from the organ console and this is certainly satisfying. Issues in church music remain but are beginning to be subsumed by a major greater discussion over the nature of the church itself. This discussion will have to develop further before it is clear where church music is headed next. I am continuing my research on these matters and expect to have more to say in the fairly near future. Best wishes for a safe summer. The CCM

9/11 Truth: Why Musicians Should Care

At this time I am continuing to read the important work of  David Ray Griffin* called The New Pearl Harbor Revisited. It was already apparent to me after thirty pages that there was sufficient question about the official story that a completely independent and new investigation was needed. Now, after many more pages, my feeling is only stronger: the official story is not now and never has been truly credible.


As a person of faith, I have had particular concerns. Being a creative individual, and musician, there has long been something in the eye of this beholder suspicious of the official line.  In the transcript linked to below, David Ray Griffin talks about some of these concerns.

The G. W. Bush administration put forward draconian cuts in social programs.  Arts programs certainly were not plentifully funded during his Presidency.  The War on Terror drained funds away from many needed social programs.  In short, this is the reason why musicians should care about the issue of what really happened on 9/11.

*former professor of theology
David Ray Griffin Article

Words of Hope for the World Now

As these last days of winter flow by and spring draws nearer, worry about the world economy is stronger than it has been in months.  Protests are erupted, especially in Portugal, as well as other places. 

It thus seems timely to reflect on the state of the world and the state of one's own mind, for these are indeed trying times.  His Eminence Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch, offers a message for Great Lent.  The opening of this message is below.  For the full message, click on the highlighted text at the end of this post. 


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Beloved brothers and sisters, children in the Lord,




The holy fathers, who arranged everything in an orderly manner, instituted a period of ascetic discipline and spiritual purification for forty days prior to the great feast of the Lord’s resurrection. This ascetic rule assumes the form of a limitation on foods through fasting, but especially an abstinence from evil. The saintly hymnographer characteristically emphasizes that a genuine and favorable form of fasting for God is the estrangement from wrongdoing, control of the tongue, alienation from anger, separation from evil desires, including gossip, deceit and swearing, restoration of justice, disengagement from passionate thoughts, fervent confession, cleansing of the conscience, “which there can be nothing more difficult,” refraining from “harmful passions, from envy and hatred, indeed from every wickedness,” shunning of “the mind’s perversion,” admission of transgressions. For “the Judge is close, at the door,” and he tries hearts and minds, since “He is everywhere present and fills all things.” (Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete)

Message for Great Lent