"the simplest hymn would give him the keenest pleasure and a psalm could move him to tears of joy"

I’m grateful to a friend for sending this article to me, both because it’s about music and the tensions around its use in religious contexts, but also because it majors on Augustine of Hippo. He lived in today’s Algeria, and was one of the most influential early Christians, someone that Martin Luther and also Bangor’s own Robert Blair looked back to.

Increasingly it can be seen that the Reformation wasn’t about installing a new system, it was restoring the original factory default settings. 

Augustine’s famous book City of God is being cited again today by some Reformed theologians, as it was written at a time when the familiar world order (the Roman Empire) was falling apart, and there was a need to recalibrate exactly what Christianity meant while all around it crumbled. History just repeats itself. Keep calm and carry on...

- full article here, on HistoryToday.com