From now through Easter Week enjoy a 20% discount on new paid and gift subscriptions to Word & Song. Click the button below to visit the discount offer page. Easter Paid Subscription & Gift Offer Today we are revisiting at Sometimes a Song, as seems appropriate to the Saturday before Easter, a folk hymn that some of our readers have heard before. M…

Specials on upgrades or gift subscriptions are up now through Easter Week. It is Holy Week, and since we’ve already featured my four favorite films — well, three films and a television series, Jesus of Nazareth (here) — on the death and resurrection of Jesus, I thought, “What shall I do now?” We’ve written about Barabbas (here), based on Par Lagerk…

Specials on upgrades or gift subscriptions are up now through Easter Week. In honor of Holy Week, and our word, holy, I’m presenting one of the grandest hymns in the Christian tradition, a mighty poem that I think pierces to the heart of sorrow and triumph, and shows most powerfully the complete inversion of worldly values that the Cross represents…

If I remember correctly, Harvey Cox, in The Secular City, put forth a certain image as emblematic of his time — and ours too, I guess. It was a billboard, with a scantily clad woman selling a gigantic hot dog. Cox wasn’t criticizing such a society. He was describing it, and he was, with some reservations, its champion. The Frenchmen of the high Mid…

Ask me to tell you what my favorite song is and I will not be able to give you an answer. And that includes hymns. I have probably got fifty “favorite” hymns, maybe more. And those are just my very favorites, among hundreds of hymns I love. So after waiting for nearly three years for Tony to write about the word, “music,” I found myself lost in an …

As you may have surmised from my essay for our Word of the Week, music, I think there’s a real mystery in why we sing, and how and when and what we sing. Let’s step back and think about it. Suppose you ask a friend who does a lot of driving, “What’s the best way to get to New York from here?” You expect straight information. “Take Route 7 west, the…

Sometimes a Song’s origin can be traced back a long, long way. For today, during our week of the “season,” I immediately thought of a “modern” folk song with a lyric from the antiquities. Of course the lyrics, the poetry, we have in English from the King James Version of the Bible, dating to 1611, the time when Shakespeare was coming to the end of …

I must confess to an intellectual sin. I delight in the paintings of Norman Rockwell. I know I’m not supposed to do this. As a college professor, I have a duty to pretend to others that I derive real satisfaction from poems whose sentences cannot be parsed, from sculptures that look like green blobs from a bad space-alien movie, from spattered canv…

For a lot of people before the advent of modern medicine, and for many people still, our Word of the Week, season, didn’t suggest blooms on the cherry trees, or corn as high as an elephant’s thigh, or leaves in scarlet and gold, or Jack Frost sending down the wonders of the snowflake, no two alike. Or I should say that it did suggest those things, …

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?