Sermons at Park Street Church, Boston

I have been enjoying Dr. Gordon Hugenberger’s sermons thanks to technology that facilitates the distribution of contents. Dr. Hugenberger is senior minister at Park Street Church, Boston; he has also taught at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. A friend of mine who studied under Dr. Hugenberger at Gordon-Conwell and later earned his Ph.D. in Old Testament at University of Sheffield, once described Dr. Hugenberger as the finest preacher in New England. Dr. Hugenberger has a good sense of humor, and, even though, as he himself admits, his sermons tend to be long, they are indeed well composed and a pleasure to hear (not to please men, of course, but edifying and uplifting). I greeted Dr. Hugenberger once when I visited Boston in March 2004, and asked him about his work on the commentary on the Book of Judges. I had learned from my friend more than ten years ago that he had been working on it, and Dr. Hugenberger was a little surprised that I knew about his work. I have his book Marriage as a Covenant, and am now eagerly awaiting his commentary. I marvel at his ability: ministering at a church like Park Street Church is not for the faint of heart, and he is also doing a theologian’s work! There is one thing on which I disagree with him, and that is his egalitarian-leaning position. His paper on that topic has been effectively refuted, I think, by his friend Wayne Grudem. But I guess I can live with that dissonance for his greatness in other areas.

Since I spend quite a bit of time on the road to and from work (about 20 minutes each way), I find it helpful to listen to the sermons while driving. An mp3-player with an FM transmitter doesn’t really work that well in my car; the FM reception tends to be noisy. So my current solution is to record the sermons on CD-RWs, which can be reused many times, and fortunately the CD player of my car can read CD-RWs. However, sometimes the CD player gets confused when I restart the car, and it cannot resume from where it last stopped. This could be an annoying problem if I record the (long) sermon as one track. I experimented with various solutions, and the best solution I have found is as follows:

1. Convert the mp3 to WAV format using lame --decode
2. Resample the WAV format to two-channel 44.1k sampling rate, using sox. I compiled sox on my PCs with cygwin. This resampling may take some time, but I can always pipeline the steps.
3. With a cuesheet file that breaks the resampled WAV into 5-minute chunks, I can then use Exact Audio Copy to write the WAV file into the CD-RW with gapless tracks.