Awhile back I attended a concert of the Eric Whitacre Singers at the Cathedral of St. Paul. During the intermission, I joined a long line waiting to enter the restroom. Sitting just outside the ladies room was this bell: As you can well imagine, I am immediately drawn to church bells, so I gave it…
Bells
A Reunion in Coffeyville
With plans set to drive with my sister and mom to Wichita, Kansas for the weekend, I checked out my trusty Rand McNally Road Atlas, which I never go anywhere without, to see how far it would be to make a side trip over to Coffeyville, KS. For those of you who have read my…
Casting a Bell
Each time I discovered an old bell in China, I found myself wondering “how in the world did it get here?” They were, after all, from the United States, Russia, France, and Germany. I didn’t give much thought to how the giant bells were made. So when I ran across this video recently, I was dumbfounded….
Casting a Bell
In my book The Bells Are Not Silent, I write about the origin of the use of bells in the church: Catholic tradition has it that the first time bells would have been heard in a church was in the Roman city of Nola, near modern-day Naples. Saint Paulinas, the Bishop of Nola, initially used…