Year: 2008
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Nothing to Praise
If you’ve never encountered the poetry of Richard Wilbur, one of the most distinguished living Christian poets in the U. S., you might consider picking up his recently published Collected Poems 1943-2004. While much of twentieth century poetry contemplates the anxieties of our age or confesses the tumult of the individual psyche, Wilbur’s lyrics are…
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Biblical Fasting
Fasting is a biblical practice, but it’s biblical in a peculiar way. It’s presupposed on page after page, but never explained. “When you fast” is a typical beginning for a biblical sentence on the subject, and it leads modern readers to wonder if we missed a page somewhere back in the Old Testament —maybe in…
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Those Top Twelve Books, Online For Free
Last week I listed the books we use for our semester On Knowing God, which amount to a Top Twelve Theology Books list from the whole of Christian history. A reader sent me a follow-up note pointing out that all but one of the books is available online at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. While…
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On Knowing God: The Top Twelve Books
In the Torrey Honors Institute, we teach an 8-unit class called “On Knowing God.” Following our great books curriculum and a Socratic pedagogy, we give students a one-semester introduction to the classic Christian texts. In fact, when the faculty designed this intensely theological semester, we realized we had a chance to assign, along with the…
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General Education: Pursuing Truth and Understanding at the University
America’s leading universities have lost their way. They no longer educate children to be good, follow truth, or acquire knowledge; this is a significant problem. It is important for students applying to college or parents looking to make a significant four to five year educational investment in the life of their child to understand this…
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On True Repentance
Some time ago, I was having coffee with a friend when our conversation turned to the topic of repentance. Neither one of us could really remember a time in our Christian lives when we were so sorry for our sins that we threw ourselves at God’s mercy, repented of our sins, and begged for God’s…
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Deep Calleth to Deep
Salvation, according to the Bible, comes from God’s self-giving. That’s pretty high-falutin’ theologizing, even if you leave the Trinitarian part out of it. But it’s also immediately relevant to our lives. There is an evangelical spirituality which corresponds to the deeply personal nature of God’s self-giving. It is a spirituality that focuses relentlessly on God…
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An Olympian Standard of Bible Study
In the preface to Bernard Knox’s book Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time, he tells this story: As an undergraduate at Cambridge I had been awestruck by a statement of Walter Headlam, a brilliant Cambridge scholar whose career was cut short by his early death at the age of forty-eight in 1908.…
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The Deep Things of God: The Gospel
Let’s go inside of the place Paul takes us in First Corinthians 2: secret wisdom only available through a Spirit who searches the deep things of God; a knowledge of God’s ways that is only possible if you have the mind of the Messiah. How far in to the deep things of God does this…
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The New Covenant: A Father, His Son, and Their Spirit
The gospel is good news because it is saving. Judgment day didn’t have to be good news, it could be very bad news for you. But it’s good because it brings three important things. Here’s a little Trinitarian sub-outline of the gospel: A. It brings God as our Father. Not just God as the creator,…
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Adam and Eve, “Outside” by Mark Jarman
I don’t read very much contemporary poetry; I admit that I like my poets dead and classic. But one poet I do try to keep up with is Mark Jarman, who teaches at Vanderbilt and is somehow associated with a movement called the New Formalism. I don’t know what’s New or Formal about it, or…