Comments

• Nick Tamen Shipmate

  June 24 edited June 24

  Thanks for the report, Miss Amanda. Enjoyable and interesting, as always!
  
  I do feel the need to make clear that the unnamed businessman-turned-politician no longer professes to be Presbyterian. In an October 2020 interview with Religion News Service, he said: “Though I was confirmed at a Presbyterian church as a child, I now consider myself to be a nondenominational Christian.”
  
  Presbyterians everywhere breathed sighs of relief.
  
  I’m also going to confess that I’m (again) a little confused as to what exactly is meant by “hymn sandwich.” I see the term used by different people to describe a variety of types of service. The order of the May 25 service at Fifth Ave. Pres is what Presbyterian would call the Service for the Lord’s Day, and the general format/flow would be familiar to Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans and others as the common Western ordo without Communion, though with a few differences. Celebration of the Eucharist is considered the norm for the Service for the Lord’s Day; when the Eucharist is not celebrated, the service proceeds from the prayers of the people to the offering, prayer of thanksgiving, final hymn and blessing/charge—Ante-Communion or Missa sicca, as it were.
  
  Is “hymn sandwich” used here simply as a way of saying “no Communion”?
  
  
  
• Amanda B Reckondwyth Shipmate

  June 24

  A hymn sandwich alternates between singing and spoken prayers or readings. This service wasn't strictly speaking a hymn sandwich, I confess.
  
  I can't imagine what branch of non-denominational Christianity would bless the thoughts, words and deeds of the businessman turned politician in question.
• Nick Tamen Shipmate

  June 24

  Amanda B Reckondwyth wrote: »

  I can't imagine what branch of non-denominational Christianity would bless the thoughts, words and deeds of the businessman turned politician in question.

  One whose doors neither you nor I would want to darken, I suspect.