Sally Thomas

A friend studying Old English, having read my brief disquisition on prayer and the word bead, elaborates on my amateur’s etymology lesson: Gebed is still in use in modern Dutch as “prayer,” though they hack it out a lot more than the OE, which sounds like yebed. Those Dutch . . . . Continue Reading »

Okay, Anthony, I give up. What is Kris Kristofferson doing in his pajamas on a church wall in — there’s a place in England called “Uckfield?” Barking I’ve heard of. Dorking I’ve heard of. Duck End I’ve been to. Ditto Wenhaxon and Onehouse. But never . . . . Continue Reading »

Uh, thanks for sending me this, Nathaniel. I mean, it is May already. And heaven knows you don’t want to leave these things till the last minute. I think I like this idea of Thomas Kinkade’s, of calling yourself “Painter of Something” and then trademarking the name. . . . . Continue Reading »

Over dinner last night my German-speaking husband let drop that our English word bead derives from the German beten, which means to pray. Not one to receive a piece of information lying down — if I had written my own marriage vows, my responses would all have been, “Oh, yeah?” . . . . Continue Reading »

I’m not a musician in any real sense of the word, only an enthusiast. In good choirs I’ve sung in, my contributions have been limited to reasonably non-incompetent alto-line filler, for pieces like Mendelssohn’s Richte mich Gott. That’s one kind of good choir: the choir which . . . . Continue Reading »

Doesn’t anybody play air guitar any more? Dude, you say. Air guitar? You mean, like, just . . . listening to some loud music and . . . pretending? Yeah, see, back in the day, what you would do was, you would put on a record in your room. A record. It’s a big round thing that comes in a . . . . Continue Reading »

So says Rainer Maria Rilke, in either the first or the second of the Duino Elegies — off the top of my head I can’t remember which. Meanwhile, over at Touchstone’s Mere Comments blog, they’ve been talking about angels. Though the conversation begins with the question of . . . . Continue Reading »

All right, class. We’ve been learning how God is one God, but three Persons, and I’m wondering if anyone can tell us the names of those three Persons. Anyone? Yes, you there. Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer? Um . . . well . . . those are things which the three Persons do, but they . . . . Continue Reading »

I used to love to buy eggs at Aldi.But no more. They’ve gone to a biodegradable “green” paper carton, which would be all right, except that the eggs now cost thirty cents more, and they’ve axed the Bible verse and the recipes, too.Your environmental gospel: less for . . . . Continue Reading »

I got my obedient plant from a friend, who warned me about it; she also gave me a baby Rose of Sharon, as well as several other less-religiously-inclined plants. She described them all to me as “thug-like,” meaning that you could just stick them right into the heavy West Tennessee clay . . . . Continue Reading »