In Sunday's Arts section of the Washington Post, an interesting article about one man's efforts to restore the pipe organ to its proper place in the concert hall. I wish he had not felt the need to denigrate the role of organs in churches, but he is right that the concert repertoire is too little known. A good follow up article would be about the organ builders who have, in recent decades, made some magnificent instruments for concert halls. If memory serves, it was the C.B. Fisk concert organ at the Meyerson Hall in Dallas that got the ball rolling back in 1990. (Happy to be corrected if anyone can think of an earlier installation in recent years.) Recently, concert halls in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington have all seen important instruments installed, each one different from the other, all of them glorious in their way. Organ building is a great art form that warrants not only the patronage of people and organizations in a position to purchase one, and they are not cheap, but of the media which covers the arts too.
At Politico, how the Democrats take a straight forward fight over the Supreme Court vacancy, a fight that can only help them, and muck it up with abortion politics. Ugh. The Emily's List crowd, like the Koch Brothers, use their money to advance their cause and the politicians just roll over, even when it harms the party.
At RNS, Mark Silk on the "end of religious identity politics." This is a good thing, to be sure.
