Wikipedia article on my hometown

I looked up my hometown on Wikipedia this morning:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogersville,_Missouri

Under the heading "Children", this is what someone had to say about the town:

"Rogersville is home to many intelligent and forward-thinking children of all ages. They love Wikipedia. They don't love Rogersville. They feel trapped. They are high."

Funny, but true!
RCB

Religion and Halloween

I took Wesley trick-or-treating last night in our neighborhood. At one house, the woman didn't hand out candy but instead put in a fundamentalist tract entitled "Eternal Life is a Free Gift". It reminded me of an incident that happened several years back when Carrie and I lived in Roanoke, Virginia.

We had gone to the movies to see "The Last Temptation of Christ", which had been stirring up a bunch of controversy there (as I'm sure it did in Memphis). There were churches protesting outside, and as we entered, a man handed Carrie a gospel tract. She promptly said thank you, opened her purse, and handed the man a card with the UU principles on it that she'd picked up at church. The man was absolutely dumbstruck! He had been so accustomed to having the communication of his faith be a one-way conversation that he had no idea of how to respond to someone ready to turn it into a dialogue.

I think I'm going to order a stack of those cards and have them at my door whenever missionaries ring the bell. A little reverse prosletyzing might be good for Jackson....

See you Sunday!
Ross

Music for Sunday Nov. 5

Hey everybody,

We'll have choir practice again this Sunday at 9:45 after a week's hiatus.
For the offertory anthem, we'll sing "Dream a Dream". We'll make another go
at the "Unitarian chant" postlude. For the prelude, I'd like to do #357
from the hymnal, "Bright Morning Stars". I think it's familiar to most of
you, but I'll post MIDI files of the hymn on the website in case you want to
listen to it.

See you Sunday! - Ross

Interfaith Thanksgiving Service

Hi all,

There is an Interfaith Thanksgiving Service again this year on Tuesday evening November 21, at Beth Sholom, 6675 Humphreys Boulevard, 38120 (where Kirby ends at the Wolf River). I believe the choir, or at least some of you, have participated in the combined choir for this service in previous years. Are you interested in doing this? I'll check with you again Sunday morning to get a head count. See you then! - Ross

Music for Sunday, October 9

Hi everybody,

Great job on "Home and the Heartland" Sunday! I was really pleased with how everything turned out. I'm going to have to put my copies on cardboard or something, though--my copy of the anthem blew shut while we were singing, even though I had 2 paper clips weighting each page! One of those things they don't teach you in music school.... :)

For Sunday, we'll be doing "Come Into This Place of Peace" for the prelude and "We Dare to Question" for the offertory. I'll play something for the postlude. We'll start rehearsal at 9:45 Sunday morning.

Hope everyone's work week is off to a good start. Tuesday is a light teaching day so I have a chance to catch up on paperwork--although my chamber choir is singing at chapel service this afternoon. I interface with the United Methodist Church quite a bit in my job here, so it's always nice to come back to Neshoba!

See you Sunday! - Ross

Great job this morning!

Hi Singing Neshobans,

Great job with the music this morning! I was really pleased with our first rehearsal together and thought the offertory anthem went really well. Making the transition to a new director is a big adjustment, and I really appreciate your flexibility and positive energy in trying new things.

I'll be checking with Rev. Bill when he gets back regarding upcoming services and sermon topics. Ideally we'll get choir music planned out for several Sundays in advance, and I'll post it on the website and blog, and e-mail it to you as well. Picking music for a Unitarian choir is challenging! The "sacred" choir music published is overwhelmingly geared towards traditional Christian services, so you either have to wade through a lot of music labeled "secular" to find pieces that fit our UU principles or alter lyrics in traditional sacred music. I tend to take the first route when possible. It seems many times that when traditional Christian texts are altered to be more inclusive, they still end up not saying much that's meaningful to our tradition. I've occasionally taken traditional pieces and applied an entirely new text to them.

Next week we'll sing "Home and the Heartland". Oct. 15 we'll sing "Come Into This Place of Peace" for the prelude, with offertory anthem TBA.

A little bit about my religious and musical background to show you what my spiritual path has been:

I grew up in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It's a splinter of the Mormons, founded by Joseph Smith's family and followers left behind in Missouri and Iowa after Brigham Young took the rest to Utah. They've recently changed their name to Community of Christ to distance themselves from the Mormon church and are basically mainline Protestant with a pacifist slant, and surprisingly liberal.

My childhood in the church was quite positive; I didn't rebel against it but gradually outgrew it. I directed a Methodist church choir in undergrad but did a lot of reading about other traditions, including UUism. Carrie and I joined the UU church in Charlotte, NC right after we got married in 1986, and I served as choir director there for 2 years; I did my master's in choral conducting at UNC-Greensboro while we were there. We've lived in several different places, and were members of the UU churches in Roanoke VA, Columbia MO, and East Lansing MI, where I did my doctorate in choral conducting. I was music director at the Columbia and East Lansing UU churches as well.

We moved to Jackson in 1995 and were really bummed out that there wasn't a UU church up there. We joined Neshoba in 1997; the drive made our attendance sporadic at times, but the more time we've spent in Jackson, the more we've felt a need for spiritual connection with like-minded people, so we made the commitment to become regular attendees. I was absent for a year and a half for financial reasons, temporarily directing the choir at an Episcopal church in Jackson whose priest and 1/3 of the congregation split with the church over the gay ordination controversy. It was a really interesting experience going back into a traditional church and witnessing the denominational turmoil; I'd love to speak at church about it sometime. I came back to Neshoba in January and have been SO glad to be back. What a great church! I'm really excited about this new phase of my musical and spiritual life!

It was great to have a new bass today! If you know of anyone who we might be able to persuade to sing with us, let me know, and I'll give them a call. See you next Sunday!

Ross

Greetings Neshoba Choir!

Hey everybody!

I'm really thrilled to be your music director starting October 1. I know that I will enjoy working with you immensely, and I hope that it will be a rewarding experience for you as well.

I use a blog to assist communication with my choirs at Lambuth University, so I thought it would be a good idea to set one up for the Neshoba choir as well. You can also post comments back to the blog by clicking the "# comments" link at the bottom of this post.

See you at church!
Ross