“Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken” survives, meanwhile, in shape-note songbooks, set to Alexander Johnson’s 1818 tune “ Jefferson.” In any of its various settings, though it assumes the distinctive ...

“Glorious things are being spoken of you on Twitter, O City of God”—or so we might adapt the words of the psalm from which Augustine’s The City of God takes its title. God’s in his Twitterverse, and ...