When Saint Augustine wrote his Confessions, looking back upon his young life of intellectual confusion, empty ambition, folly, and sin, he did not say to God, “Why did you not make everything perfect for me?” Do we even know what perfection would imply? He didn’t say, “Why did you not protect me from all the wrong I did?” Do we or do we not want to…

In 1957, a now-forgotten gospel singer named Billy Williams (with a group called “The Charioteers”) released a cover of an old Fats Waller recording of “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” and earned himself a million-seller gold record. The song wasn’t new, obviously, and some of the its popularity came from its nostalgia value. Bu…

When I was a small boy, I recall that there were sober and intelligent religious programs on television on a Sunday morning. The most winsome might have been Davey and Goliath, a clay-cartoon of quite high quality, wherein the boy, Davey Hansen, had to learn lessons of truth, honor, charity, forgiveness, and trust in God, all while accompanied by h…

Whenever Debra and I happen upon a movie like today’s Film of the Week, we have a standing jest that comes from Ricky Ricardo’s comic mispronunciations of English in the old I Love Lucy show: “The man’s got magnesia!” Of course, Ricky meant amnesia, which would require the services of what Ricky, dazed by the English spelling, once called a “physik…

One of our most beloved hymns of remembrance, included in many an Episcopalian hymnal, originally had the title, Yesu bin Mariamu, as it was written in Swahili by the Anglican missionary, Edward Stuart Palmer. Once I saw that title, the linguist in me said, “No, it can’t be — bin Mariamu sounds Semitic!” Well, so it is. That’s because the Muslim Ar…

Have you ever looked up on a dark night and tried even to estimate how many distant twinkling objects are visible to the naked eye? Well, there were so many stars shining in the firmament of American popular music of the early to mid-twentieth century that it’s impossible ever to hope to count them all. Most of the time here at Sometimes a Song I k…