Oh, my. Perfect Christmas gifts for the little tykes in Beulah City.
I recommend American Sermons for anyone interested in this important American genre. And it is an important American genre, maybe, like Jazz, the important American rhetorical mode. Because for better or worse--and usually for better and worse--Americans tend to be a nation of sermonizers. Even criticisms of the sermon "This is the type of theology that poisoned and hurt my innocent childhood." are cast in biblical metaphors. (That said, there's something very Blakian that I love about Alison's remark.)
(You could probably work the music of Warren Zevon and Nick Cave into it eventually, if you tried.)
Certainly Will Oldham.
In spite of all the fluff that's been talked about the influence of WWII on Tolkien, WWI always seemed the deeper influence to me. The collapse of old civilizations; the withdrawing of things innocent, and magical and bright from the world, the general melancholy. When Frodo says "I am wounded, wounded, and I shall never really be healed," the words sound in my head like an echo from the trenches.
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