Christmas Angel
I was at a concert a few days ago, of an all male choir, the Chor Leoni. It was amazingly beautiful, gentle and sweet. The baritone, Steve Maddock sang Christmas Angel, composed by a Vancouver songwriter.
I can’t find a version on the internet of Steve singing this song. It is there somewhere because I have listened to it. Available here. However, I can guarantee that it is as sweet and beautiful as this version, sung by a woman. This post rates as “egalitarian” in that the voices of an all male or an all female choir, makes a complete choir. There is no need for women to “complete” men. They are intact in and of themselves, and women also have to right to non-contingency. Let’s just love each other. Let men and women be whole.
This is also a tribute to Diane Loomer, who founded and directed this choir for many years, and composed the music below. She died last week, a few days before the Christmas performance.
BLT 
I was surprised and fascinated to learn that your response to this choir was to call it “egalitarian”—and of course you are right, relative to certain traditions. In other religious communities, a single-sex choir would have been designed specifically to exclude women from fully public performance, and indeed, that was my initial reaction to seeing an all-male choir. I mention this only as an illustration of an earlier discussion of the difficulty of defining “feminism” across communities. I think this helps show how a specific behavior in one religious community might have quite a different, even an opposite, significance as the very same behavior in a different community. An accurate “translation” of the behavior requires attention to the context.
Hi Courtney,
I didn’t give enough background perhaps. Diane Loomer had previously founded an all female choir, Elektra, before founding and directing Chor Leoni. These are in no way religious choirs.
I call this egalitarian partly because members of the choirs are egalitarian, and being egalitarian does not diminish the male or female characteristics of the members, as some suggest. They are egalitarian and fully male, not “wimpy” as the Piper and Grudem duo would like to imply.
Sometimes separate venues allow male and female both to develop the full range of talents. Some say that girls benefit from going to an all girl school, since the girls are obliged to fill all leadership roles, and they outperform girls educated in a coed setting.