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…

Before the fall, as we hear from Scripture, Adam and Eve were naked, but they felt no shame. That isn’t because they were foolish. We’re the ones who are foolish. They were innocent. Of course, once they eat of the forbidden fruit, they do feel shame, they weave together some fig leaves for loincloths, and they skulk — hiding from God, as they thin…

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…

For this week’s Poetry Aloud we have a short poem from my book-length poem, The Hundredfold, continuing the theme of peace. The idea is simple, and it came to me from one of the things my father taught me to do when I was a small boy. We’d go up to the bald top of the mountain that overlooked our town in Pennsylvania, because there, where not much …

To my mind, of all the English poets of the nineteenth century, Gerard Manley Hopkins, priest, scholar, philosopher, teacher, and poet, was the most amiable. He was a brilliant man whose brilliance somehow went unnoticed. He was often in frail health, though he was a tireless worker, and his superiors did not consider that perhaps his tirelessness …

“Peace is the tranquility of order,” said Saint Augustine. I love that saying. Even to think of it soothes my soul. Imagine, not having to try to reinvent the world, but to let the order of creation guide your steps. It lets you breathe a little, doesn’t it? You enjoy peace — our Word of the Week. Yes, I know that not everything in the human world …

As soon as Tony mentioned the word “life” for our Word of the Week, one song leapt into my mind. I listened to “That’s Life” and immediately was transported back to my childhood. I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in a house full of crooners, with Frank Sinatra headlining the show. “That’s Life” gives us Sinatra at the peak of his career, perfect…

Our Poetry Aloud at Word and Song this week focuses on that giant of English verse, William Wordsworth, and three of his sonnets, all of them written between 1802 and 1804, when the poet was still a young man, patriotic, trying to urge his fellow Englishmen to see the beauty of their land, to think about things other than buying and spending, and t…

When my mind returns to my childhood, I can’t say that I ever enjoyed the scenes that built up the soul of the young William Wordsworth, the author of our Poem of the Week, a short passage from his lifelong work, The Excursion. I was never a shepherd on the mountains. I never enjoyed day after day outdoors, from dawn to dusk, in any season but the …

Eastertide is still with us, and we should not cease to rejoice, because the whole world turns a corner with the resurrection of Jesus. Life and not death is brooding on the waters. The mouth of death is glutted with itself and shall be shut forever. Grave, where is thy victory? Death, where is thy sting? Upgrade to Support Word & Song So we have f…

Once Dr. Franklin nearly electrocuted himself with a kite, a Leyden jar, a key, and a thunderstorm, the materialists of the western world thought they’d drawn near to the secret of our Word of the Week, life. Now, by life they didn’t mean what Jesus meant by it, when he said that he came to bring life, and that in abundance. God is life, and maybe …

A lot of songs fit the bill for this week at Word & Song. It seems that singing and songwriting and friendship are often found in each other’s company. So what better song for today than one which was inspired in part by a particular friendship and was first performed by a couple of performers who had been friends from childhood. I’ve written about…

Our Poetry Aloud at Word and Song this week is also about friendship, as it’s featured in what’s called a “conversation poem,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The situation is this. The poet isn’t in good health, so he has to stay behind in a bower of lime trees — not the citrus trees, but what are otherwise called linden trees, while his friends are o…

Chapters 17-19, Teaching english & Chapter 6, Unlocking

Let's begin from the very beginning. There are so many acronyms related to ESOL. You have probably heard such words as ESL, ESOL, ELL, EL, L1, L2, and LEP. What do they all mean?