Nathan Gregory — The Tym Before

Back Lot Music will release a soundtrack album for the gothic fantasy movie The House with a Clock in Its Walls. The album features the film’s original music composed by Nathan Barr (True Blood, The Americans, Hostel, Cabin Fever, Hemlock Grove, The Son) who used the historic Wurlitzer pipe organ in his score, which he recorded at his new recording studio. The composer spent five years restoring the Hollywood Golden Age instrument (originally built in 1928 for Fox Studios, and used in iconic films including The Sound of Music and Journey to the Center of the Earth), which is making its first appearance in a film in 25 years.

Gregory the Great was, after Augustine of Hippo, perhaps the most influential of the Fathers in the Latin West during the Middle Ages. He put Augustine's thought into a form which proved accessible and acceptable to mediaeval readers, and…

Conrad Leyser examines the formation of the Christian ascetic tradition in the western Roman Empire during the period of the barbarian invasions, c.400-600. In an aggressively competitive political context, one of the most articulate claims to power was made, paradoxically, by men who had renounced 'the world', committing themselves to a life of spiritual discipline in the hope of gaining entry to an otherworldly kingdom. Often dismissed as mere fanaticism or open hypocrisy, the language of ascetic authority, Conrad Leyser shows, was both carefully honed and well understood in the late Roman and early medieval Mediterranean. Dr Leyser charts the development of this new moral rhetoric by abbots, teachers, and bishops from the time of Augustine of Hippo to that of St Benedict and Gregory the Great.

When barbarians invaded the Roman Empire in the years around 400 AD, Christian monks hid in their cloisters–or so it is often assumed. Conrad Leyser shows that monks in the early medieval West were, in fact, pioneers in the creation of a new language of moral authority.