Rotundus.com

Some of you know that lately that I've been gathering some books with the intention of doing some comparative reading between the paedo- and credo- views of both baptism and communion. What do I have thus far (on my bookshelf or in the mail)?

• Children of the Promise: The Biblical Case for Infant Baptism (reccommended by Shawn)
• Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace (reccomended by a church planter at Calvary Grace, a fledgling Calgary reformed baptist church)
• Believer's Baptism, edited by Tom Schreiner (blogged about a few times by Justin Taylor)

I'm still scouting out books on the Federal Vision and the idea of paedo-communion. Athanasius Press (pro-Federal-Vision) seems to be having a 30-50% off sale on some of its books February 13-14. I'll probably pick up copies of the Paedofaith and "Case for Covenant Communion" books (I'd probably buy all 3 relevant to the topic, but due to the $20 limit at which Canada customs collects tax, I think that I'll keep any order at two.)

I do need some books that constrast with those books advocating the Federal Vision though. P&R published The Federal Vision and Covenant Theology: A Comparative Analysis which may be a good counterpoint to the other books. Anything else out there worth reading on this subject?

From time to time, people besides Dave post things on Rotundus that may be of interest to the readers. This is another one of those times.

Some people are very adamant about using the term "stanza" as opposed to "verse". Curious, I did some looking around yesterday to see why that might be. The criteria for stanzaic form is a fixed number of lines in each stanza and a shared rhyming scheme. That does sound about right, but it seems that "stanza" is more of a poetic term than a musical term. Wikipedia claims that with regards to music, a "stanza" is more commonly referred to as a "verse".

But wait, isn't "verse" also a poetic term? Indeed, and when used as a poetic term, it usually refers to a line of poetry or to metrical poetry. But like many other words in English, "verse" has multiple meanings, and in this case refers to a formal section in a song. This definitely sounds more vague than the definition for "stanza". To go into the details of musical form is beyond the scope of this post (there's enough to write an entire post dedicated to it, maybe even a series), but I also don't want to leave people hanging. The psalms and hymns that we sing in church are in strophic form, and the sections in this form are commonly referred to as verses.

So which is more correct, "verse" or "stanza"? For the purposes of settling the argument, I think both are fine. I'll personally be sticking with "verse", as "stanza" seems to refer just to the text of the psalms/hymns and not to the complete psalm/hymn with the music.

Those of you who feel strongly for stanza, I'd be curious to hear why you believe it's more appropriate. Everyone is welcome to comment though. I'd be especially interested to hear what someone more knowledgeable about music has to say (Frank?).

I've posted a few times about the idea of taking some books that have fallen into the public domain and trying to convert them to audiobook format for free distribution. Ventures such as Soli Deo Gloria Books and Banner of Truth have in recent years printed up copies of these books. That would be useful for converting to audiobook format, but the problem is that these copies in general appear not to be copies in the pure sense. Sometimes the works are abridged and sometimes the spelling and grammar is updated to fit modern conventions. That makes these books easier to read, but at the same time as these modifications have been introduced, these books by default are covered by copyright law (unless the book explicitly disclaims such).

Because of this, I've been looking at other ways of obtaining source materials. There are a few websites out there with source material, including CCEL, but I can't find a book that I think would work well as a starter for this project. This lead me to Google Books which is placing online scanned copies of some books that have fallen into the public domain. One of the problems with this is that the scanning is done by machine. While this allows for a high volume it can also lead to some problems. Consider pages 334 and 335 of a book by Thomas Brooks. I'm still busy exploring links off Reformation Ink