Author: Fred Sanders
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Putting Things Together Helps You Think
People who work mainly with intangible things —ideas, interpretations, theories, reviews, explanations— are exposed to a unique kind of danger. Ideas usually don’t kick back at you in a way that forces you to notice. If you make a mistake in interpretation, usually nothing explodes or catches fire. If an academic has a wrong idea…
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Craig Hazen’s Five Sacred Crossings: Truly Novel
For sheer awkwardness, there’s not much to compare with the moment when a friend hands you a book and says, “Here, this is my first novel, I hope you enjoy it.” That happened to me this January. I was lucky, though: the friend was Craig Hazen, and the book was Five Sacred Crossings: A Novel…
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Four Views of Clyde Cook
This brief note may not be 36 Views of Mount Fuji, but Dr. Clyde Cook was a mountain of a man: he was tall, for one thing –only 6 foot 3, but he acted so much taller. And his life and legacy repay examination from many angles. Here are the ones that come to mind…
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Thrynnysse
The word “Trinity” is not in the Bible, true enough. But don’t let the fanciness of the word “Trinity” throw you, it just means “threeness.” I was looking around in some Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, Bible commentaries a while ago, and saw that the word “Trinity” showed up there just as “thrynnysse.” I was getting…
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How to Sin With Money
A lot of people think the Bible says “Money is the root of all evil.” But it says something quite different: I Timothy 6:10 says “The love of money is a root of all sorts of evils.” There aren’t very many kinds of trouble that loving money can’t get you into. Misconstruing this verse could…
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Titanic Day
Freddy Age Seven draws a remarkably accurate Titanic from memory: the color scheme, the tilted smoke stacks, and all. And memory is what it’s all about on this anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Highlighted against the stark white of a dramatically over-sized iceberg, the great ship goes down. In the background, the Carpathia…
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“Trinity, Schminity”
I have committed my life to helping people understand the doctrine of the Trinity, and especially to seeing how it is relevant to their spiritual experience. I think it is a profoundly biblical doctrine, a reasonable thing to believe, the solution to numerous theological difficulties, and a powerful boost to spiritual insight. But I don’t…
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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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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,…