Songs And Verses

Susan Hunt offers up a fun way to help kids learn truths about God. Each letter of the alphabet has a corresponding Bible verse, and each verse is accompanied by a story to illustrate the Scripture passage. Ages three to seven.

James Kugel’s essential introduction and companion to the Bible combines modern scholarship with the wisdom of ancient interpreters for the entire Hebrew Bible. As soon as it appeared, How to Read the Bible was recognized as a masterwork, “awesome, thrilling” (The New York Times), “wonderfully interesting, extremely well presented” (The Washington Post), and “a tour de force...a stunning narrative” (Publishers Weekly). Now, this classic remains the clearest, most inviting and readable guide to the Hebrew Bible around—and a profound meditation on the effect that modern biblical scholarship has had on traditional belief. Moving chapter by chapter, Harvard professor James Kugel covers the Bible’s most significant stories—the Creation of the world, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and his wives, Moses and the exodus, David’s mighty kingdom, plus the writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the other prophets, and on to the Babylonian conquest and the eventual return to Zion. Throughout, Kugel contrasts the way modern scholars understand these events with the way Christians and Jews have traditionally understood them. The latter is not, Kugel shows, a naïve reading; rather, it is the product of a school of sophisticated interpreters who flourished toward the end of the biblical period. These highly ideological readers sought to put their own spin on texts that had been around for centuries, utterly transforming them in the process. Their interpretations became what the Bible meant for centuries and centuries—until modern scholarship came along. The question that this book ultimately asks is: What now? As one reviewer wrote, Kugel’s answer provides “a contemporary model of how to read Sacred Scripture amidst the oppositional pulls of modern scholarship and tradition.”

This, the third book in the Wanderings and Sojourns series, was created in response to requests from people reading sections of the first two volumes: On Five Continents and Three Oceans and On Tropical Islands and Sparkling Seas. Those requests/suggestions were for a book comprised solely of the author's poetry and songs. Within these pages then are 80 such works including several found in the first two volumes but with many more favourites added. Here you will find the love songs that had no place in the previous books, some longer story-poems that themselves recount an entire tale, more parodies of popular songs, sketches of sea-folk, philosophies and insights born from the author's travels previously narrated. Here you will find a wanderer's reflections upon a life of unique experience. The poetic styles crafted are as varied as the themes; from the blunt language of the "lower decks" sailor to an ethereal abstract allowing the reader to add whatever interpretation they will to the meaning; from the nonsense child-like rhymes that carry an adult message to the wistful lament of the broken heart. Each reader will relate many of the poems to their own experiences and perhaps, for just a while, share with the author the spirit of what is written as it disturbs something from deep within their memory, their personal philosophy, their soul....

Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry invokes and critiques the relationship between blues-based popular music and poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume is anchored in music from the 1960s, when a concentration of artists transformed modes of popular music from entertainment to art-that-entertains. Musician Mike Mattison and literary historian Ernest Suarez synthesize a wide range of writing about blues and rock—biographies, histories, articles in popular magazines, personal reminiscences, and a selective smattering of academic studies—to examine the development of a relatively new literary genre dubbed by the authors as “poetic song verse.” They argue that poetic song verse was nurtured in the fifties and early sixties by the blues and in Beat coffee houses, and matured in the mid-to-late sixties in the art of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Gil Scott-Heron, Van Morrison, and others who used voice, instrumentation, arrangement, and production to foreground semantically textured, often allusive, and evocative lyrics that resembled and engaged poetry. Among the questions asked in Poetic Song Verse are: What, exactly, is this new genre? What were its origins? And how has it developed? How do we study and assess it? To answer these questions, Mattison and Suarez engage in an extended discussion of the roots of the relationship between blues-based music and poetry and address how it developed into a distinct literary genre. Unlocking the combination of richly textured lyrics wedded to recorded music reveals a dynamism at the core of poetic song verse that can often go unrealized in what often has been considered merely popular entertainment. This volume balances historical details and analysis of particular songs with accessibility to create a lively, intelligent, and cohesive narrative that provides scholars, teachers, students, music influencers, and devoted fans with an overarching perspective on the poetic power and blues roots of this new literary genre.

Over the years, many believers have written songs for us to be able to sing the word of God. Singing the word is one of the best ways to be saturated with its riches, to "let the word of Christ dwell in us richly" (Col. 3:16), and is also a wonderful way to "be filled in spirit" (Eph. 5:18-19). Scripture Songs represents a sampling of some of the 500-600 scripture songs we collected prior to 1993. This edition has been printed in response to the continuing requests for copies of Scripture Songs.

Unique, Powerful Way All Believers Can Experience Breakthrough In the Bible, Moses sang. Miriam sang. So did Deborah, David, Mary, Paul, the angels, and so many more. The Israelites went to war singing; they sang over victories, over happy moments and hard moments. They knew something we've lost sight of: When we learn to sing God's words back to Him, we align the deepest spaces of our hearts with the deepest places of His--and we experience breakthrough. So why do we relegate singing the Word to just worship teams? Julie Meyer, a Dove-nominated artist and worship leader, has been teaching all believers how to do just this. She shows that you don't need to know how to read music or even sing in tune. All you need is Scripture and a willingness to engage God in song. As you do, you will see heartache turn into hope, despair into destiny, fear into fearlessness. You stand on the Word, pray it, and even memorize it. Now it's time to sing it.