25: Singing in Dungeons; and Dolly Parton Is Magnificent

Peter and Susannah open the Music issue podcast series with a discussion of Anabaptist music: the beautiful and occasionally grim songs of the Radical Reformation.

But what is music for anyway? They talk about music as a crucial aspect of the human Telos, and the need for the body of Christ to worship Him in song. The sheer power of music has been recognized in all the philosophical traditions of the world as well: music can call out the best in you, and can make you worse. It is not something to be taken lightly.

Then they bring on Mary Townsend to talk about Dolly Parton and her exhibition of the Aristotelian virtues of magnificence and magnanimity: the way in which she spends money out of thoughtful love for the public good, and the way that her generosity in song reflects a fundamentally Christian experience of having been given a gift of song. In this way, Dolly may serve as a truly Christian corrective of Aristotle’s more masculine and humorless magnanimous man. The petite blonde woman from Tennessee may be the closest thing we have to a living example of public and thoughtful greatness that is also good and beautiful.