Thy Sea Is Great, Our Boats Are Small, and Other Hymns of To-Day

The title hymn alone contains more genuine faith than most volumes twice its length. "Thy Sea Is Great, Our Boats Are Small" - here is a theology of humility rendered in five perfect syllables. Van Dyke, an early 20th-century Presbyterian minister and Princeton professor, wrote these hymns not for cathedral choirs but for people navigating life's actual tempests: labor struggles, economic uncertainty, the disorienting speed of the modern world. His verses refuse to pap over difficulty with easy promises; instead, they meet the reader in the actual ocean. The sea appears again and again - not as metaphor but as fact, as the condition of passage. What emerges is a faith unafraid of smallness, finding courage not in the size of the boat but in the reliability of the one who holds the waters. These are hymns for anyone who has ever felt the deck tilt beneath them.