This summer a group of Torrey Honors College students will be travelling to Cambridge, England for a three-week course in Great Books by local authors. One such local author on our list is Christopher Smart (1722-1771; Pembroke College BA 1744). We’ll read and discuss his
Uncategorized Essays
The Best Half of Augustine’s City of God
Everybody should read Augustine’s City of God. (Go ahead; I’ll wait. All done? Great.) To do our part toward that end, we assign it as mandatory first-year reading in the Torrey Honors College. But “vast is the work, and arduous,” as its author noted, so
Five Tips for Reading Homer’s Iliad
The first book we read in Torrey Honors College is Homer’s Iliad. Incoming students have to read it before the first day of class, before they’ve met their professors or their cohort. Here are five strategies for reading the book well, understanding it deeply, and
“Faculty Favorites Outside Our Curriculum”
Here’s a fun list from some profs in the Torrey Honors College: Books we love so much we would each include them in our regular curriculum (if we could all agree on them and on what to cut to make room for them). This list
Essay / Theology
Polanus: Tales from the Classroom
Ten hours of discussion of the actual text wasn’t enough for us, so Ryan Hurd and I are inviting some guests to come talk with us about the trinitarian theology of Amandus Polanus. This week we asked Dr. Tyler Wittman to talk with us about
Best Picture Books Ever!
by Danielle Hitchen Story books are an integral part of forming a child’s moral imagination, therefore good story books are integral part of forming it well. As a child reads, she has a chance to go on adventures, face dilemmas, and explore new terrain all
Trauma and the Trinitarian “God of All Comfort” (Review)
In the latest issue of the Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care, I co-authored a book review with Chris Gibson, a PhD student at Gateway Seminary. Chris and I have been working on the doctrine of divine impassibility and how it relates to human
Biblia Pauperum (Ascension)
There’s a particular type of late medieval document that we call a Biblia Pauperum. We call it that because at some point in the nineteenth century scholars started calling it that, but “Bible of the Poor” is not very descriptive: there’s nothing about these books
The Joy of Psalmtooning
Psalmtooning? Well, I haven’t heard that word in about ten years. But I made it up, and I used to do it all the time back when my kids were little. Psalmtooning is a form of Bible study that encourages children to use their natural
Why It’s Hard to Trace “Trajectories and Continuities” (Muller)
In Richard Muller’s volume on the doctrine of God (vol. 3 of his Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics series), he sets himself the task of reconnecting some broken links in the history of theology, links without which the doctrine of God cannot be grasped. It is a
How It’s Supposed to End
When you make a plan to kill a public person, the kind of public person who is animated by a powerful inner force, you’d better make sure to kill him. But even if you succeed there’s that powerful inner force to deal with: what if,
Spiritual Manifestation of the Son of God
Fletcher of Madeley (1729-1785), one of the first Methodist theologians, wrote a small spiritual masterpiece called Six Letters on the Spiritual Manifestation of the Son of God. It gets republished now and then: In a 1968 printing, Martyn Lloyd-Jones called it “undoubtedly a spiritual classic”