[See part IV].  This is my concluding post on the “Phenomenological Explorations of Music” series.
Having examined the calculated aspects of jazz improvisation, as well as highlighting the some of the ways in which improvisation and places of indeterminacy emerge and exist in classical music, I now turn to discuss (by way of Benson’s insights), the idea [...]

Dr. Joel Garver offers a helpful analysis and commentary on the recently released WTS documents in relation to the suspension of Dr. Peter Enns.   If you are following this situation, Joel’s post is worth reading, as are the WTS documents.

I am currently reading via interlibrary loan, J. Todd Billings’ new book, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).  Although I haven’t finished the book yet, what I have read up to this point (about 100 pages) is excellent!  Billings has done a great service to Calvin scholarship, showing himself quite conversant both [...]

My beautiful, brilliant and extremely delightful daughter, Ashley, has recently been showing signs of a budding philosopher (as well as a budding ballerina, a budding botanist, and a budding comedian).  Below are some of the more philosophical comments and inquiries that she has posed recently:

(1) Application of the principle of non-contradiction. How so? We use a timer [...]

I came across this delightful little passage in Catherine H. Zuckert’s article, “Hermeneutics in Practice:  Gadamer on Ancient Philosophy.”  Anyone who has done graduate work at UD (and who is not a Straussian) will appreciate this.
Gadamer made the difference between what he means by reading a text in its own terms and Leo Strauss’s insistence [...]

I recently came across this website, as I was searching for information on artist, Romare Bearden.  The excerpts below are taken directly from the website, here and here. In case you are not familiar with Bearden’s life and work, please visit the site and enjoy the virtual tour, which includes a biography and a showcase [...]

Contrary to the common negative characterization (see part III), improvisation as expressed in jazz involves a high degree of prepared and calculated musical ideas.  All too frequently we hear the rather pejorative comment that in jazz it matters not what note one plays given the dissonance prevalent in jazz and its penchant for non-resolution.  Though [...]

Historic Christianity, in line with the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, rejects both Nestorianism, which includes the idea that with the God-Man we have two persons, one of divine nature and one of human nature, and Eutychianism, viz., the idea that the divine nature absorbs the human nature in the Incarnation.  Thomas Aquinas, e.g., following [...]

Regarding the history of the term “improvisation,” and the unfortunate negative attachments that have come to be associated with it, Jeremy Begbie writes,

At first it [improvisation] carried the relatively neutral sense of extemporization, [...] By the 1850’s it appears to have acquired pejorative connotations-off-hand, lacking sufficient preparation (as in ‘improvised shelter’, ‘improvised solution’).  Many musicians [...]

What I have in mind with this flexibility that maintains identity (see part I) can be illustrated by way of a jazz musical example, specifically, what is called in jazz parlance, a “lead sheet.” A jazz lead sheet is similar to a notated score for a classical piece; however, only the melody is written [...]

As Bruce Ellis Benson explains in chapter two of his book, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, we tend to think that a musical composition is finished when the piece in its “final” version is written down.  However, there are a number of assumptions that we should question in connection with such a conclusion.  First, why [...]

Scotus discerns different senses of goodness, e.g., primary or essential and secondary or accidental goodness[1].   In Quodlibet, q. 18, we read,
Just as the primary goodness of a being, called “essential” and consisting in the integrity and perfection of the being itself, implies positively that there is no imperfection, so that all lack or diminution of [...]

Given that we are in process of being confirmed in the Anglican Church and have been out of the narrowly defined Reformed world for a few years now (which by the way does not mean that we have abandoned our Reformed beliefs–just read the 39 Articles, which of course resound with Reformed teaching; the Anglican [...]