Author: Fred Sanders
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Colossians in Cambridge (Torrey Cambridge 2024)
This July, professors Paul Spears and Fred Sanders are taking a group of Torrey students to Cambridge, England to read Colossians with all our might for three weeks. Every July since 2010, a few dozen students from Torrey Honors College have done this special summer course in Cambridge. We cycle through Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians…
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Growth into Great Things (Augustine)
There’s an Augustine quote, widely available on all of the “Swell Quotations” websites, that just seems too good to be true. Here it is: “Really great things, when discussed by little men, can usually make such men grow big.” When a quote is extremely quotable, widely applicable, attributed to somebody famous, but not footnoted, my…
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“Invest Me With a Graduate’s Gown” (Kit Smart)
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 long, later poems Song to David and Jubilate Agno. But…
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A Few Questions for You (Commencement 2023)
This was the commencement address I gave to Torrey Honors College’s class of 2023. Torrey is a Socratic Great Books program, where the pedagogical coin of the realm is questions. So I put together an appropriate commencement talk. It’s for a very specific audience, has some in-jokes that were designed to appeal to exactly these…
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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 our tradition is to cut the page count by half,…
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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 getting through it efficiently.
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“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 was compiled and edited by Hannah Williamson for the admissions…
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Raisin in the Sun: Text and Film
Not long ago, the Torrey Honors College added Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun to our regular curriculum. Any time you drop a twentieth-century text into a Great Books curriculum, you’re taking a gamble: No matter how well the book is regarded, it’s only harvested a measly few decades of reviews, and we prefer…
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The Gates of Linden Hills
A pilgrim and his poet-guide, side by side, gaze up at the gates and read the weather-beaten inscription: I am the way out of the city of woeI am the way to a prosperous peopleI am the way from eternal sorrow If you know your Dante, you recognize this as the sign over the Gates…
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Iliad: Why the Lattimore Translation
The curriculum of Torrey Honors College starts out with Homer’s Iliad. This means the book has a special place in the life of our program: students we have admitted into the program but haven’t met in person yet mostly read it in advance over the summer, and then show up on campus for our formative…
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Seismic Retrofit Apologia
“When the people in the pew ask the pastor to explain the Trinity, they do not want clever analogies or carefully worded creeds. They want to know what Scripture says about the Trinity.” Carl Beckwith says this in his book The Holy Trinity (Luther Academy, 2016, p. 113), and he’s exactly right. Beckwith goes on…
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The Joy of the Lord
Luke 3:21-22, the baptism of Christ: “the heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove…” Brothers and sisters, we are reading here about the Holy Spirit, so what is there for me to say? Lift up your hearts: the Holy Spirit is as mysterious as the wind…