Year: 2008
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If Jane Austen Wrote The Office
If Jane Austen wrote The Office, it would be a comedy of manners in which several characters were obvious buffoons, and the wittier characters were constantly inviting us to join them as they saw through the silly people with whom they were forced to interact. It would take place inside of a social and economic…
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Curtain of Flowers and Gaps: Jim Hodges at SFMOMA
Modern art often seems as if it’s just going out of its way to bug you. It was with some trepidation that I visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last weekend. I knew I’d get to see some of my favorite pieces: Things like a whole room full of Paul Klee’s playful drawings,…
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See Creatures by Contour
The contour line, says Kimon Nicolaides in his classic book The Natural Way to Draw, is where the seeing eye meets the touching hand. A drawing made with a contour line is a drawing that touches the edge of the object represented, but touches it by proxy, with a marking instrument on paper. “Place the…
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Five Sacred Crossings: I Wrote a Novel, What Was I Thinking?
Craig Hazen, 2008. Notice the question mark in the blog title. If I had ended with an exclamation point, this little essay would most likely be a warning for all of you never to try this. I did go through the “what was I thinking!” stage. But I am not there anymore. Indeed, I think…
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On the Coarseness of Digital Dialogue
The internet has made dialogue possible with individuals around the world; however, has the coarsening of our language prohibited us from engaging in this much heralded dialogue? John Mark Reynolds, Paul Spears, and Fred Sanders explore the coarsening of online conversation and offer several insights into the nature of the problem. Click here to listen!
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Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, But Not Both
George Steiner published a book back in 1959 called Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism. Like all of Steiner’s books, this first publication of his ranges over a lot of territory and sheds light all around. As with most of Steiner’s books, I had to read only the parts I could understand,…
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Knowledge of God, Knowledge of Self (Calvin’s Institutes)
John Calvin’s masterpiece, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, has a classic opening statement. He wrote it for the first draft of the book when he was 26, and it stayed the same right through the much larger final edition of the book. Here it is: Nearly all the wisdom which we possess, that is…
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Christianity Made Interesting: The Inklings
It’s hard to account for just how much influence continues to stream from that little group of writers called the Inklings. Never mind that the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien have survived into the twenty-first century in the unlikely form of Hollywood blockbusters trailing cash and merchandise as far as the eye can…
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Ten Books that Influenced C.S. Lewis
The Christian Century, that venerable old journal of what Christianity looks like from the mainline denominations, asked C.S. Lewis in 1962 for a top ten list of books that had exerted a formative influence on him. I’m currently re-reading Wordsworth’s Prelude, and had a vague memory that it was on Lewis’ list. So I looked…
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Undergrad Conference on Good & Evil at Biola
One interesting sign of intelligent life in American colleges is the proliferation of academic conferences by, of, and for undergraduates. These undergrad conferences, where college students present arguments and research to each other, are popping up in more and more disciplines these days. Biola University’s student government, Associated Students, is calling for papers NOW for…
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Go On, Agree with God
I’ve been describing “confession of sins” to my kids as agreeing with God about sin. Etymologically, that’s correct: greek homo (same) + logeo (say) = to say the same thing. Sometimes, of course, we just don’t want to say the same thing about sin as God does. He’s entitled to his opinions, of course, but…
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Life, a Preparation for Death
In January, I had the privilege of taking twenty Torrey Honors Institute students to Rome, Italy for two weeks. Not only was I impressed by these students’ attention, interest and appreciation for great art and architecture, but I was also impressed by their appreciation for an opportunity to travel and learn. Though there were many…