An episode from 12/8/25: Note: A version of this episode was posted last week and quickly taken down when I realized the audio quality was poor. I have rerecorded it here; apologies to those listeners who heard the subpar version.Tonight, I read from John Eliot’s Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven. Gardiner talks about Bach’s Christian faith, how much we can expect listeners today to know about liturgical context of his music, as well as his intense attachment to the writings of Martin Luther. He also asks a fairly mundane question about Bach’s book-buying habits that humanizes the usually distant-seeming Bach quite a bit.I open the episode with a quote from the American poet William Cullen Bryant. Bryant was also a newspaper editor, and he once wrote to a friend who was concerned how this work would affect his poetry, “I do not like politics any better than you do; but they get only my mornings, and you know politics and a belly-full are better than poetry and starvation.”The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.Email me at [email protected].

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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