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2 unusual facts about Phillips Brooks


Phil Brooks

Phillips Brooks (1835–1893), Bishop of Massachusetts in the Episcopal Church during the early 1890s

The John Bohlen Lectureship

1879: Phillips Brooks, The Influence of Jesus, Griffith Farran & Co.


A.D. Club

Phillips Brooks - lyricist of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and namesake of the Phillips Brooks House Association

Annunciation to the shepherds

Phillips Brooks' O Little Town of Bethlehem (1867) has the lines "O morning stars together, proclaim the holy birth, / And praises sing to God the King, and peace to men on earth!" The originally German carol Silent Night has "Shepherds quake at the sight; / Glories stream from heaven afar, / Heavenly hosts sing Alleluia!"

Bela Pratt

During this time, Pratt sculpted a series of busts of Boston's intellectual community, including Episcopal priest Phillips Brooks (1899, Brooks House, Harvard University), Colonel Henry Lee (1902, Memorial Hall, Harvard University), and Boston Symphony Orchestra founder Henry Lee Higginson (1909, Symphony Hall, Boston).

O Little Town of Bethlehem

The text was written by Phillips Brooks (1835–1893), an Episcopal priest, Rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia.

Oak View, Norwood, Massachusetts

Some of the most prominent figures hosted in Oak View during those years were President (and later a Supreme Court Justice) William Howard Taft, President Calvin Coolidge, Russian Composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, artist John Singer Sargent, Episcopal Bishop of Boston Phillips Brooks and philosopher William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Viscount Kentaro Kaneko of Japan, tenor John McCormack and others of similar stature.

St. Luke's and St. Margaret's Church

It was the only parish in the diocese founded under Bishop Phillips Brooks, the famous preacher and author of O Little Town of Bethlehem.


see also