A funny thing happened this morning as I was googling exclusive psalmody (henceforth to be referred as "ep"). My eyes began to glaze over as I scanned one arcane, tortured argument either for or against ep after another (all written by men, by the way). I realized that I was experiencing the same Spirit/spirit-numbing weariness I had begun to feel many moons ago when I heard the umpteenth sermon on this topic. For an antidote, I dashed to my bookshelf and pulled down Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith and looked up this quotation: "I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish." Frankly, I think debates about exclusive psalmody and the regulative principle may have the same effect.
More important than these debates are the larger ones that loom behind these--modernity and tradition, freedom and faith and reason and interpretation of sacred texts. Epistemological certainty is not of this world; dogma can be deadening.
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