Here’s a poem for the Old Adam and Eve. by Julie Sheehan I hate you truly. Truly I do. Everything about me hates everything about you. The flick of my wrist hates you. The way I hold my pencil hates you. The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped in the jaws of [...]
Here is a hymn for today from William Shrubsole, who died on this day (August 23) in 1829 at Highbury (b. November 21, 1759, at Sheerness, on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, England). ” … as a young man, Shrubsole worked as a shipwright in the dockyard, then as a clerk. In 1785, he moved [...]
A hymn by Martin Luther: For feeling come and feelings go, And feelings are deceiving; My warrant is the Word of God, Naught else is worth believing. I’ll trust in God’s Unchanging Word Till soul and body sever: For, though all things shall pass away, His Word shall stand forever. Though all my heart should [...]
Preface to the Wittenberg Hymnal That it is good and God pleasing to sing hymns is, I think, known to every Christian, for everyone is aware not only of the example of the prophets and kings in the Old Testament who praised God with song and sound, with poetry and psaltery, but also of the [...]
by James Baldwin Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone. That all men are, when the chips are down, alone, is a banality—a banality because it is very frequently stated, but very rarely, on the evidence, [...]
On this day (August 16) in 1637, hymnist Aemilie Juliane was born in Heidecksburg, in the castle of her father’s uncle, Count Ludwig Guenther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, where her father and family had to seek refuge during the Thirty Years’ War (d. December 3 1706). After her father died in 1641, and her mother the year [...]
“I MUST make one confession” Ivan began. “I could never understand how one can love one’s neighbours. It’s just one’s neighbours, to my mind, that one can’t love, though one might love those at a distance. I once read somewhere of John the Merciful, a saint, that when a hungry, frozen beggar came to him, [...]
A poem on Genesis 6, by Wislawa Szymborska. Into the Ark An endless rain is just beginning. Into the ark, for where else can you go: you poems for a single voice, private exultations, unnecessary talents, surplus curiosity, short-range sorrows and fears, eagerness to see things from all sides. Rivers are swelling and bursting their [...]
Today (July 7) is the birthday of painter Marc Chagall, born in Vitebsk, Russia (1887). He was the eldest of nine children in a poor Jewish family. His father worked at a salt herring factory. He wanted to be an artist, and he moved to St. Petersburg, where he failed his first entrance exams for [...]
