Farewell, Oremus

At a sacred music class last month, we compared notes about favorite websites for Anglican church music. I think Oremus was at the top of the list.

Alas, that was past tense. For a term paper (for this class), I went to Oremus to look up hymns from my favorite hymnal, and found this sad notice:

Started in 1997, the Oremus Hymnal is no more as May 30, 2017 due to copyright concerns. As I do not have the time or interest to update hundreds of webpages, I have taken the long overdue step of closing down this site. I am sorry that the material here will no longer be available here, but in the over two decades since starting this project, many other, excellent sites have become available. Google Books also has hundreds of historical hymnals available to browse for free.

If you need further help finding hymns, I suggest you go to Hymnary.org, which contains many more texts and audio files than I could ever hope to produce on my own.

Due to many requests, I have put the hymn suggestions for the lectionary back up. None of the links work, but they do list the first lines.
Lectionary Year A
Lectionary Year B
Lectionary Year C
This site was created by Steve Benner and was last modified on May 30, 2017.

On the one hand, I can sympathize with Steve, having created a much simpler website (on a different topic) the same year. Rather than a single guy, Hymnary.org has behind it the resources of Calvin College and its Calvin Instiute of Christian Worship.

From a legal standpoint, it should have been possible to include U.S. hymnals prior to 1923. British copyright law seems to provide 50 years after the death of the author (which means The English Hymnal and other Vaughan Williams has been available almost a decade). But again, I still understand why it wasn’t worth separating the wheat from the chaff.

There is one other reason I go to Oremus: the Liturgical Psalter, a little-known (but beautiful) translation whose licensing rights reverted to the authors in 2001. It's almost as poetic as the Coverdale psalter (found in most prayer books of the past 400 years), and a lot easier to understand.

Still, the index of dozens of Anglican hymnals at Oremus will be missed. I’m not sure if Hymnary can fully replace it, but that's a question for another time.

Finding Hope

Recently I was looking for books on hymns at Amazon.com, hoping to find some of books suggested by The Hymn Society of America available cheaper from a used bookseller. (Sorry, HSA — if I have to pay new prices I’ll buy it from you, but money is tight right now.)

Browsing for these books produced some interesting ads from Christian booksellers and other peddlers of hymn books. The most interesting find was an online database from Hope Publishing (est. 1892), entitled “Hope Hymnody Online”.

Hope is pretty clear about what they’re doing and why. To enter the site, it says

In order to use the Hope Publishing Company online hymnody website you must reside in the United States or Canada. Hope Publishing Company owns or administers the contents in these territories. You may download one copy of any selection for your own personal use. To make any further copies you must get permission from Hope Publishing Company or belong to and report the copying activity to CCLI, LicenSing or OneLicense.net By selecting "I Agree" you are verifying that you reside in the U.S. or Canada and will only legally use the contents accessible on the site.

To download a PDF, it similarly says:

You have selected to download a copy of the hymn. You have permission to print one copy for your personal use. To make any further copies (for your church congregation, church bulletin, an overhead slide or computerized projection,etc...) you must get permission from Hope Publishing Company or belong to and report the copying activity to CCLI, LicenSing or OneLicense.net

In other words, they want you to sample their content and then recommend it for your church to sing (which will generate revenues).

What’s in the database is not all that exciting: hymn texts, their authors and the names of possible tunes to use with them. No authoring dates (they are obscured by a 20th century copyright date), no history, no music. It’s also skewed towards their post-1960 collection, although it does list older Christmas hymns. (PDFs seem available only for the recent ones).

One contemporary composer that I recognized was Carl P. Daw, Jr., an Episcopal priest who served on the Hymnal 1982 committee and has a number of hymns there. (He’s also currently executive director of the Hymn Society.)

The choice of search options are pretty interesting, however: title, tune name, author, composer, meter. There is a list of themes such as Advent, Christmas, Easter, Lord’s Supper and a few dozen more.

What seemed unique was the option to search (even in this limited pool) by scriptural reference. For example, a search for John 14:6 matches 30 hymns, including this one by Christopher Idle

God the I AM who does not change
brings mercies ever new;
no time nor space exceeds the range
of One whose grace this world finds strange-
yet we have found it true.

So Jesus Christ, from yesterday
through all todays the same,
the same for evermore, the Way,
the Truth by whom alone we pray,
the Life, the sovereign Name:
…

While the content (the product) is little too contemporary for my taste, it certainly will be of use to others. It also offers a model of how traditional Christian hymnody could be presented by a university or non-profit research group.

Beliefnet unbeliever

This is a bit off-topic, but as a religion blogger I felt compelled to comment.

This morning's paper brought the news that Rupert Murdoch is adding Beliefnet to his Fox Entertainment media empire. The property will become part of Fox Digital Media, with wonderful cross-promotion opportunities for Zondervan and Fox-owned religious media.

The joke opportunities are endless. As the London Guardian reported:

Lo, Murdoch did bring the good news and stored up riches on earth

Rupert Murdoch is out to prove that you can serve God and mammon after all. The media tycoon's Fox Entertainment has bought beliefnet, the largest online faith and spirituality network.

The site is a portal that includes interviews with celebrities and politicians, social networking tools, blogs, inspirational stories, sacred text searches and views from teachers and preachers. Discussion boards carry topics such as "Can inter-faith dating work?" and "Extreme abstinence". Beliefnet was founded in 1999 and the company claims to have 3 million unique visitors a month and nearly 11 million subscribers to a daily email newsletter. Beliefnet provides content across a broad range of faiths.

I've never ever been impressed with Beliefnet: as its title says, it's about "faith and beliefs," and not the R-word.

I'm not interested in "belief," I'm interested in religion, specifically Christianity and the Anglican strain therein. So (as regular readers know), I frequent GetReligion, VirtueOnline, the Issues Etc. Internet radio show, and (as time permits) Christianity Today.

Certainly more general coverage of religion can be interesting, as with the Washington Times BeliefBlog plugged by GetReligion this week. (Blogger Julia Duin is author of some of the best PECUSA schism coverage by any daily newspaper). But I've always thought that Beliefnet tried too hard to avoid any point of view, as reinforced by its founder's defense of the Fox buyout:

That’s a lot of diversity within the company. For those concerned that News Corp won't tolerate viewpoints that arent conservative Christian, consider that Harper One has published Jim Wallis, Paolo Coelho, Feisal Abdul Rauf, Jean Houston, Robert Bly, the Kama Sutra, the Pagan Book of Living and Dying, the Koran and more.

As for the idea that being part of News Corp means that we're going to have to abandon our mission of tolerance and respect for a wide variety of faiths, I’d first like to call your attention to the only quote from Fox in the press release announcing this:

“Beliefnet has garnered respect for its commitment to quality, editorial strength and unbiased approach to faith and spirituality from a broad range of consumers, religious and political leaders, journalists and advertisers,” said Dan Fawcett, President of Fox Digital Media.

There you have it. Beliefnet is worried about losing the loyalty of those who consider "Fox News" a swearword, or fear religious media being controlled by "conservative Christian" viewpoints. So it doesn't want to show any signs of adhering to a particular faith — the faith to which I adhere (along with Fred Barnes and others).

Yes, I know there's a wide range of viewpoints within the evangelical community as represented by CT, but it's among the most oft-mentioned news sources used by religion reporters. And GetReligion has a new liberal Catholic contributor from the left coast, who agrees on many but not all of the tenets of his LCMS, Orthodox, Episcopal (and ?) co-authors. Another source is the magazine World, which a friend reads in the paper form.

But all of these start from a common point:

that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. (1 Timothy 1:12)

That should be a point on which all Anglicans can agree, since it was included in every prayer book from 1549 to 1979. (This means an emphatic "yes" to question #2 of the famous tmatt trio.) That is certainly not a "belief" shared by the whole world, particularly those afraid of "conservative Christians."