One of our most beloved hymns of remembrance, included in many an Episcopalian hymnal, originally had the title, Yesu bin Mariamu, as it was written in Swahili by the Anglican missionary, Edward Stuart Palmer. Once I saw that title, the linguist in me said, “No, it can’t be — bin Mariamu sounds Semitic!” Well, so it is. That’s because the Muslim Ar…

Have you ever looked up on a dark night and tried even to estimate how many distant twinkling objects are visible to the naked eye? Well, there were so many stars shining in the firmament of American popular music of the early to mid-twentieth century that it’s impossible ever to hope to count them all. Most of the time here at Sometimes a Song I k…

In my entry on our Word of the Week, decide, I had occasion to talk a little baseball, and to mention the most decisive home run in Major League history. After all, you can’t get more decisive than hitting a walk-off tie-breaking home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game Seven, which is what Bill Mazeroski did in 1960. Maz is still with us…

Note: Due to a technical glitch with Substack, this post did not go out as scheduled. Our apologies! Our Poem of the Week is a soliloquy from Shakespeare’s second most quotable play — second to Hamlet, though you could make a case for Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth. Brutus is a friend of Caesar, and an ally of Cicero and w…

The year was 1858, the place was Philadelphia, and a young minister, Dudley Atkins Tyng, was delivering a sermon before five thousand men. It was a meeting of the recently formed Young Men’s Christian Association, back in the days when every word in that title meant a great deal. The Reverend Tyng, an Episcopalian, had been drummed out of his paris…

The most famous judicial decision in Scripture was both a matter of judgment and of detective work. You’ll remember the two women who came before King Solomon, each claiming to be the mother of a little baby. The true mother claimed that the other woman had had a child who died when she smothered it by accident at night, and before daybreak this ca…

This week at Sometimes a Song we will be listening to an American jazz standard. In fact, “Body and Soul” may be the most-recorded jazz tune of all time. It has been performed by singers and musicians as various as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Billie Holliday, Perry Como, Guy Lombardo, Sarah Vaughn, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, …

For our Friday podcasts this fall, Dr. Esolen will continue to read all of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn aloud, chapter by chapter! And now Huck, who has stolen back the money the “Duke” and the “Dauphin” have swindled out of the three orphan girls, is working out a plan to get that money back to them, to expose the deadbeats as the frauds they are…

I mentioned a couple of days ago, in discussing our Word of the Week, soul, that you might give up your life for something you believe in, or for the people you love most in the world, but giving up your soul is another matter. And in our Film of the Week, All My Sons, the main character, Joe Keller (Edward G. Robinson), has made that terrible trad…

The author of our Hymn of the Week, or at least of the first stanza, was quite a player in the politics and the English church of his day. His name was Richard Baxter, a man who seemed capable of putting everybody off, not because he was boorish or aggressive (he wasn’t), but because he would not go along to the bitter end with one or another form …

“And God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” says the sacred author, “and man became a living soul.” For me that is one of the most profound verses in all of Scripture, and one of the most mysterious. It cannot simply be that ha-adam was lifeless and inert before that breath, and then he got to move around. Michelangelo, I think, dramat…

Sometimes a Song is little but lovely like our selection for this week, “How High the Moon.” What it comes down to are two verses and a refrain with slight variation, and a brief but wistful and tuneful melody. That’s all, but wow! what a musical punch this little song packs. Written by a not-so-famous lyricist (Nancy Hamilton, better known for her…

What does it require to be someone in a position of high authority? How do you get the best from the men you lead? In Paradise Lost, as we saw yesterday, Satan enjoys the lordliness of it all, but it’s an odd kind of leadership that sweeps your followers straight into hell. Yet the true leader cannot be a merely nominal one, either. He must be both…