Our Word of the Week, birthday, has me thinking about childhood again, and all the more since a lot of old birthday pictures have been showing up on our screen. There’s one of old friends of ours, from almost thirty years ago, when Davey was invited to a party for a little boy who was his age, in a family where there were eight kids at the time, fo…

I have to admit that I asked Tony to choose “melancholy” for our Word of the Week because while we were watching an old film noir called “Johnny Eager” recently, I heard a very old tune in the soundtrack, a much-loved and oft-performed song called “My Melancholy Baby.” The melody has been haunting me all week, and haunting is the right word, becaus…

This week, as I’ve been considering melancholy, I’ve defended it as that sweet feeling of twilight, with the moon shining on the waters, and perhaps a loneliness that is not unpleasant, because you know that it is a temporary thing. Your loved ones are in the house on the hill, and the lights are shining. But there is another melancholy that in fac…

When I go through my many old hymnals from all kinds of places and traditions, I am struck by the sheer variety in the best of them, the range of human feelings, the meditation on not only what is light and pleasant, but on the sorrows of this life — a fitting thing for our Word of the Week, melancholy. So you may have supposed I would come up with…

Our Friday podcast is open to everyone in this week, in honor of Saint Valentine’s Day. Click on the image below for a special gift discount today. .When did young lads and lasses begin to give each other presents on February 14? All the way back in the French courts in the high Middle Ages, it seems – and those French courts included the ones in E…

You might think it would be hard to turn our Word of the Week, romance, to a hymn — unless you’re steeped in the poetry of the Middle Ages. Every time I say, “Middle Ages,” I hope you’ll think of all the bold and bright color of those high times between about 1000 and 1300, when the weather was warm, the Vikings were growing barley on the coasts of…

In honor of our Word of the Week, candle, I’d like to look at someone whose works to me are like a candle in the dark, Charles Dickens. I’m thinking here of that powerful light in the window, set in that wonderful ship turned into a house on the beach at Yarmouth, in the novel David Copperfield. The situation, as you may remember, is this. Mr. Pegg…

Who said that the contemplative life is superior to the active life? Well, everybody did. You can find it in Plato — as C. S. Lewis’s Professor Kirk said, scratching his head as he wondered why young people didn’t know this or that, “It’s all in Plato, you know.” But you will find it everywhere in Scripture too. Debra’s long thought that poor Marth…