Funny things happen in the world of the internet.
August 28th was the feast day of St. Augustine, so I sent out last year’s post on the influential theologian via Facebook and Twitter. For whatever reason it got far more attention than when I first posted it. Recycling can be fun.
The best thing, though, was that Sam Rocha, whom I’ve never met, tweeted me back. Rocha is a philosophy of education professor at the University of British Columbia, and a blogger on the Catholic Channel of Patheos.
More to the point, Rocha is a musician. His first album, Late to Love is a set of soul music meditations on Augustin’s Confessions. He released the CD on the Feast of St. Augustine, and held a release party concert at Regent College that night.
Apparently he was combing the Twittersphere for people tweeting about Augustine and sharing the news. (Kudos for excellent marketing strategy, Dr. Rocha.)
Well, I couldn’t fly to Vancouver to join the party.
However, it is a really cool project.
I’m all over diving into a classic text like the Confessions, and letting poetry and music emerge in a new context. It is a book that invites us all to a deeper consideration of faith in Christ and the shoddy brokenness we bring to the project.
Rocha is a translator for us, not a transcriber. We do come late to love, only to find ourselves transformed by God’s boundless grace. In Christ we are enabled to be ourselves and begin to love for the first time.
It is music that doesn’t really fit standard genres like “Contemporary Christian.” Thank God. You have to hear it for yourself. He has a site where you can hear several of the tracks on SoundCloud — just click here.
If you give it a listen you may find yourself wanting to order a copy. Or maybe you’ll head back to give the Confessions another read. Or both.
(By the way, there are no affiliate links here. This is just for fun, and to encourage good work on great texts.)
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I’d love to hear from you in the comments: What do you think of Rocha’s music? Has Augustine’s Confessions had an impact on your life and faith?
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