Songs at Twilight
The most beautiful sound I have ever heard was created by about a dozen old men in a little church on the island of Lewis and Harris.
You will probably never hear it. It is part of a culture that is fading away.
Lewis and Harris is the northernmost island of the Outer Hebrides, and it feels like a different world from most of Scotland. Stacks of black peat sit in front of the homes, to burn for fuel, and the smell of it is always on the air. A sign at the start of a path, reading “Please Respect the Sabbath,” does not seem out of place. The sun in the winter rises at 9:00 in the morning and sets at 3:00 in the afternoon. It is a place of desolate beauty and old-fashioned faith.
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Daniel Witt is a writer and English teacher living in Amman, Jordan.
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more on Culture from the online archives
22.3—April 2009
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by J. Daryl Charles
31.6—November/December 2018
Victimhood Culture Scapegoats Its Very Source by Michael P. Foley
more from the online archives
22.6—July/August 2009
on the Integration of Anger into the Virtuous Life by Leon J. Podles
14.6—July/August 2001
The Transformed Relics of the Fall
on the Fulfillment of History in Christ by Patrick Henry Reardon
31.5—September/October 2018
on the Congregation as a Wilderness by Paul Gregory Alms
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