Author: Matthew Westphal

Museum Of The Bible Finds A Key Audience: Evangelical Bus Tours

“Officials hope that the museum will become as much of an attraction for faith-based group tours as the Capitol or the Library of Congress, and that hordes will pass through the 40-foot-high, two-ton Gutenberg Bible portals depicting text from Genesis. Tour operators such as Purpose Driven, most traveling by bus and religious in nature, are critical to the museum’s success.”

Here’s The Ultimate Scientifically-Determined Playlist For When You’re Tripping On Mushrooms (And It Features Classical Music!)

Research psychologist Bill Richards, who works on clinical studies at Johns Hopkins in which patients are given psilocybin as a potential treatment for depression or anxiety or as an aid in quitting smoking, assembled the list, and he avoided trance and techno: “Orchestral music is less distracting and less likely to give room for a person to fall back on normal patterns of thinking.”

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters To His Children As Father Christmas

“In December 1920 Father Christmas wrote a letter to a modest house in the Oxford suburbs, enclosing a watercolour sketch of his own rather more exotic domed snow house, approached by a flight of steps lit by ice lanterns. ‘I heard you ask Daddy what I was like and where I lived,’ he wrote to three-year-old John Tolkien, and as the family grew to four children, he continued to write every Christmas for 23 years, until the youngest, Priscilla, was 14.”

The Best Of The Best Books Of The Year Lists For 2017

Melville House helpfully offers a guide to which of the far-too-many lists are worth paying attention to – among them, The Best List That’s Interactive and Lets You Play With Filters to Figure Out What to Read Next, Best List That’s Chosen by Actual Readers and Not Critics, Best List That We’re Partial to Because There’s a Melville House Book On It, and Best List that Features a Book About Sharks.

Purcell’s ‘Dido And Aeneas’ – The More We Learn About It, The Less We Know

Musicologist Ellen T. Harris wrote an authoritative book on this opera three decades ago – a book she has had to completely revise and reissue based on all the info scholars have uncovered over those years. Yet “we know even less [now] than we did then, or at least less than we had imagined. We can no longer say with certainty in what year the opera was written, where it had its premiere, who performed it or even what the original score contained.” In this essay for the Times, Harris explains what it turns out that we’d wrongly assumed and what we’ve learned that upended those assumptions.