Never Enough Singing is the title of the Festschrift published in 2011 on the occasion of Seth Kasten’s retirement from the Burke Library. It is among the items featured in the inaugural exhibit in the Seth Kasten Memorial Exhibit Case.
Seth (1945-2017) was a reference librarian at the Burke for more than 35 years. In that time, he helped countless students, faculty, and visiting researchers from near and far. Alongside his devotion to the library and its collections, Seth was a passionate musician and choir leader, founding and conducting the annual choir at the American Theological Library Association conference as well as the men’s and women’s scholas at Union. For decades he worked as an organist at many churches around the city. His wide interests made him an avid explorer and he took numerous trips to Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. This exhibit draws from the Burke’s special collections that Seth did so much to care for and share, and reflects his deep love for music, liturgy, and travel. Please come by a have a look!
Part of the Burke’s celebrated Missionary Research Library Collection, this work translates an early section from the ancient Indian Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana. Though it resembles writing, the text is printed.
This manuscript on paper contains chants for the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Mass. The musical notation is nagelschrift, an early modern form so-named for its resemblance to a horseshoe nail (nagel). This book was part of the collection of Leander van Ess, the core library of Union Theological Seminary at its founding in 1838.
Among the Burke Library’s most frequently consulted collections is the Missionary Research Library (MRL), an extensive body of books, pamphlets, reports, periodicals, and archives that originated in 1914, following the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference of 1910. Created by, and initially intended as a research resource for, Protestant missionaries working in various mission “fields” around the world, it is today understood as one of the richest repositories in the U.S. for area or global studies. As the self-understanding and goals of primarily liberal Protestant denominations and organizations changed over the course of the twentieth century — from evangelization to more broadly humanitarian work in education and public health — a wide variety of materials nevertheless continued to flow into the perennially underfunding MRL. In 1976, the MRL became part of the Burke Li
Several academic presses, including Brill and Eerdmans, have been regularly publishing works on the history of missions, evaluating the significance of Protestant as well as Roman Catholic missionary endeavors. A recent work of particular interest for the Burke’s MRL collection is David Hollinger’s 
influence of these individuals and the movements and organizations they fostered. Because many had grown up and been educated outside the US and often possessed deep cultural and linguistic knowledge, they tended to be sympathetic to a broader range of perspectives and experience as well as critical of both the domestic and foreign policies of the US government. They espoused a nascent version of what would later be called multiculturalism or pluralism. Though they were not always successful in achieving their cultural and political goals (he notes their often vehement but failed opposition the Vietnam War, for one),