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…

We’ve talked about friendship this week at Word and Song, and that usually means that we’re dealing with persons. But is it possible for nations to be friendly with one another? If that’s so, what can such friendship mean? Is it just a term we use when the nations aren’t fighting all the time? Or does it imply that the nations are bound by ties of …

Alfred Tennyson, the author of these stanzas that serve for our Poem of the Week, had a friendship the like of which I’ve never had, and maybe it is hard for us, with all our distractions, to understand just how close two young and intelligent and virtuous men can grow, when their personalities are congenial and they share the same enthusiasm for b…

Dear friends and subscribers, I ask your prayers today for Tony, who has been ill. I’m stepping in to do this week’s hymn. Please excuse us f we are slow on replying to comments this week. God bless you all. — Debra Our longtime pastor, the late Richard Bucci of Sacred Heart Church, Natick, Rhode Island, had a particular devotion to traditional hym…

The ancients thought and wrote a lot about the heart of what it means to be someone named by our Word of the Week, a friend. Cicero wrote a charming treatise on friendship, in which he says, among many other things, that a friend is someone in whose presence you can think out loud. Cicero had a lot of enemies, as any political player is going to ha…

Through this weekend at Word & Song our Easter special continues with a 20% discount on all upgrades, gift, and new subscriptions. We wish you all the blessings of Eastertide. Easter Discount Sometimes a Song is a folk song. Most folk songs we feature at Word & Song are over a hundred years old, and some much older. By definition, a true folk song …

We have extended our Easter offer through the weekend of April 21st at Word & Song with a 20% discount on all upgrades, gift, and new subscriptions. It’s often been noted that there weren’t a lot of great stage plays written in English in the nineteenth century. I'm not sure why that was so, but I do know this — it is the great age of a new form of…

We are extending our Easter special through April 21st at Word & Song with a 20% discount on all upgrades, gift, and new subscriptions. We wish you all the blessings of Eastertide. Easter Discount Here It’s spring, right? So then, time for a merry poem about how wonderful the lasses are! When I was at Providence College, one of my students organize…

We are continuing our Easter discount through April 21st, with 20% off all upgrades, gift, and new subscriptions at Word & Song. May God bless you all during the coming week and through Eastertide. Easter Discount Here I’d like to set the scene for our Hymn of the Week by going back to the days shortly before Jesus was to die. He had come to Jerusa…

Now through April 15th at Word & Song our Easter special continues with a 20% discount on all upgrades, gift, and new subscriptions. We wish you all the blessings of Eastertide. Easter Discount Here People say that the color that gives us our Word of the Week, green, is the easiest of all upon the eyes. Red appears bold and brash — a little of it g…

Now through April 15th at Word & Song our Easter special continues with a 20% discount on all upgrades, gift, and new subscriptions. We wish you all the blessings of Eastertide. Easter Discount As we have seen rather frequently in these pages, Sometimes a Song is a work of musical genius. In general, musical talent shows up in early youth, but the …

Now through April 15th at Word & Song our Easter special continues with a 20% discount on all upgrades, gift, and new subscriptions. We wish you all the blessings of Eastertide. Easter Discount Here For this Friday’s Anthony Esolen Speaks, we’re going to do something a little different from what we usually do. That is, we’re taking a close look at …

Now through April 15th at Word & Song our Easter special continues with a 20% discount on all upgrades, gift, and new subscriptions. We wish you all the blessings of Eastertide. Easter Discount Here “We build a scha-pel,” says the Mother Superior, to the young black handyman who has showed up for a day’s work and a day’s wages. She has a thick Germ…

Now through April 15th at Word & Song our Easter special continues with a 20% discount on all upgrades, gift, and new subscriptions. We wish you all the blessings of Eastertide. Easter Discount Here I’ve long believed that George Herbert wasn’t just the greatest religious poet in English, but the greatest of all our lyric poets, regardless of what …

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?