Michael Linton

We just got our Census form in the mail. Well, it’s not the census form, it’s the warm-up census form, telling us that we’re going to get the census form shortly and to look forward to it. We have a week to get all excited before the main event (guess this is what the Department of . . . . Continue Reading »

I just lost my lunch all over my desk watching the Youtube promo for this “Alma Mater” release of “Music from the Vatican,” voiced-over by Pope Benedict. They keep saying “it works, it just works,” but I suppose that what they mean is that it will work if they make a . . . . Continue Reading »

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past ten days, you might not have heard that the big news hasn’t had anything to do with pirates off of the horn of Africa, or bankers on Wall Street, or politicos in Washington or most certainly professors in a university anywhere. . . . . Continue Reading »

On January 27, 2009, Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA 11th District) responded to a caller on C-SPAN , who, struggling to support her family while earning fewer than ten dollars an hour, was questioning the unaccounted recent federal bailouts. She was polite, but angry. Here’s my . . . . Continue Reading »

Happy New Year. Yes, I’m pushing it, but not as much as you think. I’m not talking about those woozie performances of “Auld Lang Syne” and the Rose Bowl, but instead the first Sunday of Advent that started off this week.Once a year I have the pleasure of introducing our students . . . . Continue Reading »

Britain’s Daily Telegraph is reporting that the Chinese are beginning to put the kibosh on performances of classical music with Christian themes. A performance of the Mozart Requiem by the Sinfonica Orchestra di Roma intended for the main square of the city of Dujiangyn (where thousands were . . . . Continue Reading »

New York’s Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the world’s largest gothic cathedral, offers this on the evening of October 31: a “Halloween Extravaganza & Procession of the Ghouls.” For $15 you can sit in the nave and watch a screening of the silent movie “The . . . . Continue Reading »

It’s hot here in Tennessee and I’m thinking about Popsicles. I’ll get back to that.Last weekend, my wife, Janet, and I drove over to Hohenwald, seat of tiny Lewis County, Tennessee (pop. 11,000-plus). Although best known as the place on the Natchez Trace where Meriwether Lewis met his . . . . Continue Reading »

It’s Christmas, so we’re singing carols. OK, it’s not Christmas, it’s really Advent, and “carol” has a particular set of musicological meanings that don’t have anything to do with Christmas—but we call almost any tune we sing in December a “carol” . . . . Continue Reading »

I was stunned. I have been teaching college freshmen for about thirty years in big state institutions, elite conservatories, smallish private universities, and Christian colleges, and I’d never seen anything like it. Like many of us reading these pages, I was in the middle of that spring . . . . Continue Reading »