Author: Fred Sanders
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ChaseGiving
Freddy Age Seven interprets the great American holiday, Thanksgiving, with this image of mayhem. At first glance, I took it for a battle between pilgrims (tall black hats, blunderbusses) and indians (feathered headdresses, tomahawks, bows and arrows). But upon closer examination, neither side is clearly chasing the other. Everybody’s running to the left, firing bullets…
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The Second Person, in Person
Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God. That means he is God the Son, and that, in turn, means that he is the second person of the Trinity which consists of first the Father, second the Son, and third the Spirit. The one God has always been tri-personal, but in the fullness of time,…
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Off the Tracks!
It’s got a geometric simplicity that is mesmerizing. The repetition of circular and triangular forms creates a visual field in which every line is significant. This is a front view of a steam train coming down the tracks, or at least trying to come down the tracks. SOMETHING is in the way, and the engineer…
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John Perkins: 5 Things to do if the Foundations Be Destroyed
Last Saturday, John M. Perkins spoke at the annual harvest banquet of the Los Angeles Bible Training School. Perkins is a living legend, and LABTS is a great old school “dedicated to the task of instructing Christian workers in the Word of God.” It seems that lots of churches are starting Bible Institutes and Ministry…
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How He Worked for Christ: R.A. Torrey
Like all reasonable people everywhere, I always expected to be a super-hero when I grew up. I figured it was just a matter of time before my latent superpowers manifested themselves. But my sixteenth birthday came and went, no superpowers. My eighteenth birthday came and went, no superpowers. By that time, I would have settled…
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Flower Flower Flower Flower
It’s not exactly 36 Views of Mount Fuji, but this set of drawings by Phoebe Age Five does keep the viewer on the move. There is a dance between the human figure and the flowerpot that draws the viewer in. You realize that you are not just watching a person dance around a flower (which…
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Why Ephesians is the Greatest (Thomas Goodwin)
The puritan Thomas Goodwin (1600-1679) wrote a breathtaking commentary on Ephesians: about a thousand dense pages that only cover up through chapter two, verse 11. Before launching into his exposition, Goodwin offers a few remarks about just how great the epistle to the Ephesians is. He quotes Jerome’s comment that Ephesians is “like the heart…
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Passing the Time
Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886) wrote a wise book on The Study of Words in 1851. Trench is excited about words, and keen to spread that excitement to his readers. “Words are living powers, are the vesture, yea, even the body, which thoughts weave for themselves,” he says on the first page of this long love-letter…
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Happy Vikings Go Exploring
Vikings: “They’re cool,” says Freddy Age Seven warily, “but they’re not good.” These Vikings, though, are happy enough adventurers. Their tiny boat has a grin of its own as it rocks through the spiky waves. Rows of oars dip down into the sea and a strange, boxy, union-jacky flag structure surmounts the truncated mast. Loot,…
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Worst Coleridge Poem Ever!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the greatest minds ever to write in English. But aside from the justly famous Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he didn’t manage to finish very many extended poems. That mind should have produced an English epic, but instead he produced Wordsworth –no small contribution to English letters. And aside…
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Cowboy Psalm: Turn ’em ta Tumbleweeds
Psalm 83 depicts a dreadful scene: the enemies of God’s people devising schemes to wipe them out of existence. Against this background, the Psalmist prays for deliverance, asking God to do to these enemies the kind of things he did through champions in the book of Judges. One line is especially striking. I grew up…