Our Love, Crucified
I've told my students that if they hear me singing a hymn in Welsh as I walk down the street, they are to consider it within the bounds of possibility, but if they see me walking into a museum of modern art, they should call for an ambulance, because something must be terribly wrong.
Yet I think there is something worse than modern art with all its obtuseness, ugliness, and offense to the human and the divine. It is the sacred, vandalized. Which would you find less tolerable? A gallery of Picasso's paintings in his cubist stage, or a modernized Sistine Chapel, with smiles painted in on all the faces of Michelangelo's Last Judgment, and the devils and the damned whited out?
Most current Christian hymnals are like that, alas. It is by no means easy to uncover exactly what a badly vandalized or abbreviated hymn once said. I understand editors are sometimes squeezed for space, so they choose to omit stanzas that can be left out without doing violence to the whole. Still, that should be a last resort. As for revision, everything that editors have done since 1965, almost without exception, has been stupid, ungrammatical, sloppy, vague, or treacherous. Thus, most Christians in English-speaking nations do not know what they are—and are not—singing.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
Anthony Esolen is the author of over thirty books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House). He and his wife Debra publish a web magazine, Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com), on poetry, hymnody, language, classic films, and music. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
29.5—Sept/Oct 2016
on the Loss of True Community & Rising Political Desperation by Karl D. Stephan
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
