Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts, Cultural Histories, and Contemporary Contexts

Music, Calligraphy, and the Performance of Sacred Texts

Jonathan Homrighausen — 2022-11-25

A Pilgrimage of Words

Jonathan Homrighausen — 2022-11-25

As an artform which interplays word, image, and gesture, calligraphy and lettering arts carry an underrated and understudied potential for exploring sacred texts and theologies. This paper explores that potential through a close analysis of British lettering artist Ann Hechle’s 1985 Psalm 121 manuscript. Hechle’s manuscript book of this psalm explores relationships between form and content to create a visual performance of the psalm. The product is not merely a beautiful copy of the psalm, but an exegetical engagement with themes of blessing, faith and pilgrimage. Hechle’s Psalm 121 visually performs the language of oral blessing, elevates the psalm’s affirmation of God’s protection, and leads readers on a pilgrimage of hand and eye as they traverse the book’s vellum pages. Hechle demonstrates how calligraphy can be so much more than just “beautiful letters.”

Language Heightened

Devon Abts — 2022-11-25

Poets and calligraphers are united in their appreciation for the beauty of words. Yet whereas many poets compose according to principles of sound, the calligrapher is guided above all by the sense of sight. This essay seeks to elucidate the hermeneutical dynamics at play in contemporary calligraphic renderings of poetic texts composed for oral recitation, using the work and interpretive legacy of Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as a test-case. After briefly introducing my theme, I turn to consider Hopkins’s theory and practice of aural composition, drawing on specific poems to illuminate his mastery of acoustic depth. I go on to examine three transcriptions of his work by three contemporary calligraphic artists, focusing on key interpretive choices each scribe makes when translating Hopkins’s aural art into a visual form. At each stage of my investigation, I demonstrate how both the poet and his interpreters invite recipients of their artwork to a deeper appreciation for the wonder of language in ordinary circumstances.

My musick shall finde thee

Lucinda Mosher — 2022-11-25

In this essay, I accept scholarly assessments of the theology of Renaissance poet George Herbert (1593–1633) as high sacramental ecclesiology melded with Synod of Dort (1618–19) Calvinism (which I describe briefly). This given, I consider what theological messages we can expect to find in lyrics drawn from Herbert’s poetry. I make the point that music can amplify the meaning of a text. I then describe in depth the doctrine taught in three well-known poems when set as a choral anthem.

A Musical Composer’s Interpretation of Sacred Text

Peter B DeWitt — 2022-11-25

When a composer in the Western music tradition of the last 500 years sets a text to music, they make certain choices about that relationship, which may depend on their emotional reaction to the text or to their pictorial perception of it. Emotional and pictorial linkages between music and sacred text are described in two examples, one a musical setting of a Christian liturgy, and one a variation set on a Christian folk hymn in which the variations draw on the texts of successive stanzas. These linkages are part of an extensive history of usage of devices by which a composer responds to textual inspiration. Because of the centuries during which associations between music and text have been developed in the minds of composers, performers and listeners of Western countries, the music can become an enhancement of, or even a substitute for, elements present in the text.

“It wasn’t about Me”

Megan Wines — 2022-11-25

This paper uncovers how Terrence McNally’s 1998 gay passion play Corpus Christi braids together queerness and religiosity to highlight that queer people are also welcome at the “spiritual table.” By bringing together his life experiences as a gay man who grew up in Texas with the biblical passion story, McNally highlights ways in which the Bible has been weaponized against gay men specifically, while at the same time creatively retelling Jesus’s execution to undercut that weaponization.

Roland Betancourt, Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy and Gordon P. Jeanes and Bridget Nichols, editors, Lively Oracles of God: Perspectives on the Bible and Liturgy

Jonathan Homrighausen — 2022-11-25

Roland Betancourt, Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2021)

Gordon P. Jeanes and Bridget Nichols, editors, Lively Oracles of God: Perspectives on the Bible and Liturgy. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press (2022)

Yuhang Li, Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China

Lucinda Mosher — 2022-11-25

Yuhang Li, Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China. New York: Columbia University Press (2020)