Ben has reminded us that it’s Milton’s 400th birthday.

Byron continues his great series on Jesus and climate change.

Jim reflects on what Courage for truth as an act of witness might mean.

New talks from the New Creation Teaching Ministry – Summer School 2008 have been added.

There’s also an interesting piece in today’s Washington Post on Brahms by Anne Midgette. She writes:

My antipathy for Brahms was never a matter of strong conviction: rather, a gradual observation that his music was not “taking” in the same way as the works of Beethoven, Bruckner or Mahler. Where as a teenager I delved repeatedly into the Beethoven symphonies, finding new treasures and obsessions on each hearing, the Brahms set remained curiously opaque, as impervious to my repeated essays as the monolith in the movie “2001,” so that I kept forgetting, each time I approached it, that the music was actually familiar.

Looking back, I think this naive perception was reacting against the same thing that Brahms lovers invoke when they say you can listen to his music over and over and never get tired of it. Brahms certainly offers more ideas per square inch than many other composers, deconstructing fragmentary themes or rhythmic patterns with sophistication and nuance. As soon as Brahms puts an idea on the table, he begins playing with it in a process that Arnold Schoenberg dubbed “developing variation,” merging two classical forms in a long process of aural working-out. It is no accident that some of his best and most popular works are variations: the Op. 24 Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, for piano, or the beloved Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56a, which Mahler called “an enchanted stream.”

But there is not always a lot of room, in these intense perforations, for air to get in. I have tended to respond to the compulsive part of Brahms, the composer who took 14 years to complete his first symphony, and wrote 20 string quartets before allowing one to see performance. To me, I think, it has communicated some of the aura of the cult of classical music: an intense self-satisfaction, an overworked, even overstuffed quality that reflects both the composer and the period in which it was written. And I am certainly not alone in finding the best Brahms performances to be those that let in some light — like the piano concertos with Leon Fleisher and George Szell, a staple of the repertory.

It had not struck me, until I read Jan Swafford’s excellent Brahms biography, that this overwork was part of an act of deliberate concealment (even variations, after all, are a process of concealment as well as transformation). As Brahms chewed over his pieces, he was also deliberately creating a facade to present to the world — and trying to conceal traces of his own human fallibility. As a result, I think I have had trouble finding him over the years. Even his own instrument, the piano, is seldom allowed to stand alone in his works; it is often veiled by other instruments, however essential its role.

Finally, a reflection on Why we travel…