Perichoresis in Musical Time and Space: a draft toward thinking through Trinitarian ontological reflection, sensory integration, and the process of sensory integration as a metaphor for coordinating theories rather than setting them against each other (like sight against hearing)

This should be thought of as a first draft toward what "may" become a longer, larger-form project. I can't promise that it "will" but the idea of "Perichoresis in Musical Time and Space" has been lingering in my mind for about five years.  Consider this a first draft.   (7-2-26 OR consider this a new appendix for Ragtime and Sonata Forms)

Alan Jacobs quotes Northrop Frye on what "Romance" is as a genre and how it isn't what people tend to think it is ...

https://blog.ayjay.org/macdonald-and-fantasy/

Romance: Not what people today call romance — i.e., a story about luuuvv — but rather a story that has a more capacious sense of the real than the realistic novel typically has. So Northrop Frye in a discussion of kinds of hero:

If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established. Here we have moved from myth, properly so called, into legend, folk tale, märchen, and their literary affiliates and derivatives. 

Sounds like Denji from Chainsaw Man to me.  Fans of the manga and anime might bristle a moment at the prospect that Denji is a stereotypical romance protagonist but it's not all that far-fetched to suggest that Denji and Tanjiro from Demon Slayer fulfill the same basic trope.  The comparative demonologies of the two series certainly differ but I didn't dash off this post on a drizzly Seattle night to dive into the comparative diabologies of Chainsaw Man and Demon Slayer or Dan da Dan. That would be some project to think about later. 

One advantage of the trans-Pacific cultural exchange of the last fifty years has been it's not that hard to pull up spirit cosmologies in popular entertainment that features liminal beings of the sort a lot of Western theologians pre-emptively dismissed as not worth talking about from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries.  Cue up Mark Sneed's Taming the Beast if you like for a survey of how Western scholars have seen ways to "tame" the traditions about Leviathan and Behemoth from The Book of Job.  That said, now that Andrei Orlov's Supernal Serpent has been published it's no longer accurate to say there is little-to-no scholarship on the axis mundi tradition of interpreting Job in English language scholarship. 

The 2020s form of "where are the evangelical intellectuals?" question, and the question of whether there is or can be an evangelical elite in the United States, a sampling from Mere Orthodoxy, Old Life and Aaron Renn's Substack and First Things article

https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-promise-of-a-christian-small-magazine

January 26th, 2026

By Jake Meador

 

... Really, the best way to read Schaeffer is not even to regard him as an intellectual himself, so much as someone who attempted to relate to intellectuals in the same way that someone like Hudston Taylor related to the Chinese. In other words, Schaeffer was less an intellectual himself and more a very sensitive and shrewd missionary to readers of the intellectuals.

 

That reminds me … of something from years ago …

https://mereorthodoxy.com/francis-schaeffer-and-christian-intellectualism

and how D. G. Hart wrote a response to Meador’s older piece saying:

 

https://oldlife.org/2016/08/23/was-francis-schaeffer-an-intellectual/

 

I wasn’t reading Time in 1960 but fifteen years later I was reading Schaeffer and the better description of the apologist is not as missionary to intellectuals but missionary to would-be intellectuals.  …

 

Francis Schaeffer as a missionary to would-be intellectuals is pretty blunt but probably also very true.  

Kazuhito Yamashita 1961-2026

Well, 2026 is under way and we're not even at the end of the month yet and the news is that the Japanese classical guitarist Kazuhito Yamashita has died. 

https://slippedisc.com/2026/01/classical-guitar-star-64/

Atanas Ourkouzounov: Sonate No. 7 for guitar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQcbYMNkzNE

I mean, after all, I practically kicked off the blog by mentioning the guitarist composer when I mentioned him in my third post, so why wouldn't I share that he's composed a new sonata as of 2025? :)