YESHVA Articles
Articles
Long-form reads for the Christian life, in English and Spanish.
Latest
Fanny Crosby and the Eight Thousand Hymns She Never Saw
Blind from six weeks old, Fanny Crosby wrote some eight thousand hymns, often for a dollar or two and often under a pen name. Her story is less about suffering than about a grandmother, a memorized Bible and steady, unglamorous work.
The Book Under Dostoevsky's Pillow: How a New Testament Given in Siberia Shaped His Great Novels
Minutes from a firing squad, Fyodor Dostoevsky was spared by a staged pardon and sent to a Siberian prison camp. On the way, a woman handed him a New Testament. He kept it for the rest of his life, and you can find its fingerprints on every great novel he wrote.
Be Thou My Vision: An Irish Prayer Older Than Its Tune
The hymn many people sing at weddings and funerals began as a medieval Irish prayer for protection, passed through a scholar's plain prose and a poet's verse, and only found its famous tune in 1919. Its path from a monastery to a modern hymnal is a story of patient translators.
The "New City" Outside Caesarea: How a Famine and a Bishop Gave the World the Hospital
In the fourth century, a bishop named Basil answered a famine with a soup kitchen, then built something no one had seen before: free beds, doctors and care for anyone who needed them, including people with leprosy whom everyone else had cast out.
Bach's Bible: The Pencil Notes That Show Why He Signed Every Score to God's Glory
A pastor visiting his cousin in a Michigan farmhouse in 1934 noticed a signature on the title page of an old German Bible. It was Johann Sebastian Bach's, and the notes in its margins say what he thought music was for.
The Abbot Who Wanted More Light: How Suger of Saint-Denis Gave Us the Gothic Cathedral
In 1144, a small, tireless abbot near Paris dedicated a church choir unlike anything Europe had seen, with walls that seemed made of colored light. Why Suger built it that way says as much about theology as about engineering.
The Slave Ship Captain Behind "Amazing Grace" and the Conversion That Took Forty Years
John Newton found God in a storm in 1748, then went on captaining slave ships. The true story behind the world's most-sung hymn is slower and more honest than the legend, and it says a great deal about how grace actually changes a person.
A Mighty Fortress: The Hymn Luther Wrote for Frightened People
Martin Luther wrote it in the years of plague, threats and his own dark moods, and it was in print by 1529. The story of "A Mighty Fortress" is less about a defiant reformer than about a man who needed a song to stand on.