Essay / Literature

Leaves, Lines, and Rymes (Spenser’s Amoretti #1)

HAPPY ye leaues when as those lilly hands, which hold my life in their dead doing might shall handle you and hold in loues soft bands, lyke captiues trembling at the victors sight. And happy lines, on which with starry light, those lamping eyes will deigne

Essay / Podcasts

Andrew Jones Interview

Biola University and the Torrey Honors Institute are proud to present GodblogCon 2008 this September 20-21st. GodblogCon invited Andrew Jackson, Rhett Smith, Cynthia Ware, Matthew Anderson, and Marcus Goodyear to interview Andrew Jones of the Tall Skinny Kiwi who will be speaking at this year’s

Essay / Theology

The Gist of the Lesson

R. A. Torrey wrote dozens of books, oversaw academics at the two greatest Bible Institutes in America, and carried out a round-the-world preaching tour that made headlines in big cities on five continents. He was a busy man and he worked on a grand scale.

Essay / Theology

R. A. Torrey’s Greatest Sermons

R. A. Torrey (1856-1928) was the most important evangelist between Dwight L. Moody and Billy Graham. In the eighty years since his death, his fame has declined, so that he is no longer a household name. But his name is still powerful: you can hardly

Essay / Theology

“Permit Me, Then, to Address You as Dying Persons…”

It’s a phrase Charles Simeon used fairly often in his preaching career, usually toward the end of a sermon in order to double-underline his point. “Permit me, then, to address you as dying persons, and to ask what you will think of these things when

Essay / Podcasts

Summer Reading Recommendations

A book, a hammock, a cool glass of lemonade, and a gentle summer breeze. There is still time left in the summer to enjoy cultivating the mind and exercising the imagination. John Mark Reynolds, Paul Spears, and Fred Sanders share their picks for good summer

Essay / Philosophy

Naturalism, Human Persons and Rationality: Admitting the Problem

The recalcitrant nature of human persons for scientific naturalism has been widely noticed. Thus, Berkeley philosopher John Searle recently observed, “There is exactly one overriding question in contemporary philosophy.” How do we fit in?….How can we square this self-conception of ourselves as mindful, meaning-creating, free,

Essay / Theology

All Three Reasons to Be Humble

“There are three great motives that urge us to humility,” says Andrew Murray in the Preface to his book Humility. The first is that we are creatures, the second is that we are fallen, and the third is that we are redeemed. First: Creatures have

Essay / Theology

King David’s Personality

I figure King David was an ENFP. If David had taken the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, he would have scored as an extrovert who thrives on contact with others, an intuitive person who sees meanings in everything, a heart-person who makes decisions based on feelings,

Essay / Literature

Kit Smart: Crazy Praise

Christoper Smart (1722–71) , known to companions as Kit, was a learned poet who wrote plenty of poems which are mostly unreadable now by anybody outside the guild of English literature studies: Ode to the Earl of Northumberland, To Ethelinda, and Lines After Horace —that

Essay / Misc.

Scream No More!!!

John Wesley, in a letter to the American Methodist preacher John King in 1778: Scream no more at peril of your soul. God now warns you by me, whom he has set over you. Speak as earnestly as you can, but do not scream. Speak

Essay / Literature

Literary Nicknames

When a nickname really fits somebody, it catches on and comes to mind easily. But when somebody doesn’t have a good nickname, it’s no good forcing things. I was recently leafing through a fun book, Asa Don Dickinson’s 1931 list of classics called The Thousand