Word & Song by Anthony Esolen | Substack

Word of the Week | In the ancient world, the passions were held in some suspicion, not that people didn’t indulge their passions, but still, the really wise Stoic, for example, was to be unmoved by any stroke of fortune, good or bad.

Mar 27

Irving Kahal/Sammy Fain | How often is it that apparent simplicity in a song is the result of nearly imperceptible strokes of genius that register not like the sound of a hammer on anvil, but like a gentle whisper heard immediately in the heart?

Mar 25

When Henry Baker calls the Lord "the King of love" he’s not just indulging his feelings. He knows that the Latin version of the psalm reads, “The Lord is my king.” And in his hymn he gives us the beloved 23rd psalm opened up, deepened, and fulfilled in Christ.

5 hr ago

It is not just that Helen Keller doesn’t know her name. It’s that the very idea of a name is not in her mind, and, says the mother with a note of agony in her voice, she is slipping away from them day after day — slipping into chaos and unmeaning.

Mar 23

Alexander Pope, 1712 | When Jesus approached the blind beggar in Jerusalem who was begging for alms, he asked him what he wanted from him, and the…

Mar 21

Word of the Week | Sight is the least material of the senses. The scientists say that photons have no mass: and if that doesn’t approach the purely…

Mar 20

From The Twelve-Gated City Listen now | The Second Gate (the Prodigal Son goes to the far country) | This week’s Poetry Aloud is a reading of an excerpt from my book-length poem…

Mar 10

“You’ll Never Walk Alone" is a song of hope, written when the world was literally at war, when so many were suffering so greatly, and when optimism was…

Mar 18

Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz | Dr. Praetorius spent several years in a rural town not as an ordinary butcher pretending to be a healer, but as a…

Mar 16

Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, 1696 | Our Hymn of the Week is one of the most moving of all the psalms, the forty-second, “As the hart panteth after the…

Mar 14

During Dvorak's illness, famed violinist Fritz Kreisler came to visit his friend, and asked him, “Anton, do you have any works that you have not yet…

Mar 11

Elwood P. Dodd is a man who likes everybody he meets, and who, as he says to the director of the Funny Farm where the family’s trying to get him, er…

Mar 9

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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