Essay / Education
The book of Hebrews is the grand finale of the first semester in the Torrey Honors Institute. After the freshman fall, the curriculums for Torrey’s two houses take their separate ways: the Morgan House following a roughly chronological path to bring them up to the
Essay / Education
Just a few pages into George Steiner’s 1999 autobiographical work Errata: An Examined Life, he tells a story about how he started learning Greek at age 5. No, “Greek at 5” isn’t the amazing part. The amazing part, to me, is that he grew up
Essay / Education
Biola’s Torrey Honors Institute has just announced the hiring of Dr. Chris Mitchell, who will begin teaching at Torrey next fall. As one of the members of the search committee that selected Chris, I’ve had the chance to get to know him over the past
Essay / Education
I happened to be re-reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment the same weekend that we hosted a recruiting event for the Torrey Honors Institute. As I spent time reflecting on my membership in this learning community, I noticed the stark contrast of the radical isolation that
Essay / Theology
Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact was a Roman Catholic comic book that ran every two weeks from 1946 to 1972, and contained a little bit of everything. Here are two panels from a Lent feature. Treasure Chest generated so much content that it was
Essay / Art
It’s not exactly a comic book, but there is an old catechism that certainly makes an interesting use of sequential images for the purposes of teaching Christian doctrine. The Huntington Free Library in the Bronx published a facsimile edition of a “pictographic Quechua catechism” that is
Essay / Theology
This is a gospel tract I designed, an evangelism tool. Well, it’s not so much an evangelism tool as a “how to think well about evangelism” tool, not to be used in presenting the gospel but instead to be used as a spur to think
Essay / Theology
At the very beginning of the Christian church, before it was ever called “Christian” or often called “church,” it was a large group of new believers in Jesus gathered in Jerusalem, figuring things out as they went along. They were learning how to be disciples
Essay / Avant-Garde
Downstairs: A well-dressed reveler arrives, as previous guests doff exo-togs at a handy hat rack. Climbing a ladder to the second floor, partiers pile up on at least two chairs to watch the big game. I count at least a dozen there. Snacks are on
Essay / Theology
As I launch into a semester of teaching Hebrews and a year of hearing it preached, I wanted to exhume these 3 Scriptorium posts I wrote in late 2010, the last time I taught a class on the book. By the way, the little title
Essay / Theology
(Reposted from 2010) Hebrews is a book of the Bible for people in hard times. Should you read it now, or later? In terms of the book’s actual background, we don’t know much for certain about the situation of those who first heard these words.
Essay / Theology
The book of Hebrews seems to have been written for the ear. Or, if that claim is true, perhaps it should be made in this form: the sermon to the Hebrews was designed to be spoken aloud. The author of Hebrews frequently uses words that