“Only the lover sings,” said the wise philosopher Josef Pieper. Here at Word and Song we’re delighted to bring to you some of the great old love songs that people used to know, because it does seem that years go by in our time without anybody composing a single sweet or mirthful song of love. Where did all those songs go to? When you love, you want…

“Now then,” says Saint Peter, as he looks up from his desk, scanning a folder full of papers describing your life, and you expect him to ask you to explain this or justify that. But you are not ready for his question. “My good man, what songs do you know?” “Songs?” you ask, repeating our Word of the Week. “Yes,” says Peter. “You know, those melodio…

Dear friends, we thank you for the prayers for our daughter, Jessica. She is home after a rather harrowing stay at the hospital and is stable, but still in need of serious medical attention. I am sending along the song I had planned to write about for last week’s Sometimes a Song, when our word was “sky.” But with a nod to childhood and summer, I’m…

As it happens, I am writing these words just as a picture of my mother and father on their wedding day flashes before my eyes, both of them young, and never did I know them to be otherwise, even when my father lay dying at age 56, and even now that my mother is drawing near to the sunset of life. What a wonderful thing it is, to be a child! And for…

I never have understood the desire to leave childhood behind, in the way that a traveler leaves a dusty wayside inn, his mind wholly on some misty destination which somehow he never does reach. We’ll fondly say of a grown dog that there’s still a lot of puppy in her, and one of the sweetest sights, to my mind, is that of an old man talking to his g…

For this week’s Poetry Aloud is a long read. But it’s a poem that schoolchildren once loved, and that has given us the idea of the “albatross around the neck,” the punishment that attends to the Ancient Mariner in our ballad today, because without any motivation, he had so little regard for the beautiful creature of God that he shot it, for no reas…

Sometimes what people used to do strikes me as so remarkable, I hardly know whether we live on the same planet, under the same blue sky. The author of our Hymn of the Week, the Reverend William Chalmers Smith, entered Marischal College, in Aberdeen, Scotland, when he was 14 years old. Was “college” just a fancy name for a secondary school, as in Et…

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” went the old jingle, and, “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” That ancient wisdom can be found in the words of Jesus, when the Pharisees and the Sadducees demand from Jesus a sign from heaven. Putting him to the test, they were, because they didn’t want to heed his words and consider all the people he h…

Today at Word & Song I have a new musical style to introduce to you. The genre was short lived, and occupied the years between Elvis Presley’s induction into the Army and the “British Invasion,” with the arrival of the Beatles in 1964. The style was called The Brill Sound, named for the Brill Building in Manhattan, where a group of song writers and…