Author: Fred Sanders
-
Coleridge the Wind Harp
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was evidently fascinated by Aeolian harps, string instruments played by the wind without human intervention. Just as novelties they are fascinating instruments, no doubt, but Coleridge saw in them an emblem of poetry itself. In fact, in one of his early poems, 1795’s The Eolian Harp, Coleridge takes the wind harp as…
-
Genevieve Foster and the World of Columbus
Genevieve Foster is the author of a number of histories for young readers, published in the forties and fifties. Foster is a great story-teller who knows how to include all the information you’d expect in a kids’ history, but who also reads widely enough to gather up some surprises from primary text and older histories.…
-
Cramming for the French Test
Back in 1995, I found myself in a situation that is common for graduate students: needing to demonstrate basic reading knowledge of a modern language in case I should need it in my future research. The kind of knowledge required isn’t exactly what you’d call learning the language, certainly not with any fluency. But it…
-
Welcome to the Humean Race
David Hume (1711-1776) was a real gadfly of a philosopher. As skeptics go, he was one of the champion doubters of all time. Reading his work can be bracing, because he knows more variations on “Oh, really?” and “How do you know that?” than anybody between Montaigne and Foucault (You can use that line to…
-
Making Comics with Scott McCloud
Cartooning is an art form that communicates with great immediacy. We don’t rely on comics for the best literary writing of all, and we don’t look to cartoonists to be the greatest visual artists. Good as the writing and art may be in a comic, we usually look for the highest achievements of word and…
-
F. B. Meyer Talks to His Lamp
F. B. Meyer (1847 – 1929) was a great Baptist pastor and commentator about a hundred years ago. In his commentary on Zechariah (The Prophet of Hope: Studies in Zechariah; Fleming Revell, 1900), Meyer pondered one of Zechariah’s visions, the vision of a seven-pronged lampstand which was constantly supplied with oil by pipes that ran…
-
Sola Scriptura: “Only Such Objections as May Rather Be Turned Into Cautions”
The wise William Burt Pope, asking about whether it is right to confess sola scriptura: Q: What objections may be urged against the general principle that the Bible is the sole rule of faith? A: Only such objections as may rather be turned into cautions; such as the differences in the confessions of the churches,…
-
How the Trinity Freed the Slaves (part II)
(Part I was here) A friend sends this photo from the west African country of Benin. The Benin coast is known as a slave coast, and has a fearsome monument known as The Gate of No Return marking the point of departure. A different monument, this one commemorates the coming of Christianity to Africa. I…
-
Horsemobile
An enormous horse carries seven people in comfortable seats with cushy backs. He is led by a helpful cowboy (note the hat and spurs) whose expressive lasso guides the beast and covers the vehicle. The people inside have a range of emotional responses.
-
Refuse to Choose
Are you a heart Christian or a head Christian? Do you think the essence of Christianity is in holding to the right doctrines, or in feeling the right affections? Should we devote ourselves to defending the truth, or to reaching an experience of God’s presence that requires language of mysticism to describe? What’s more important,…
-
Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective
Hot off the presses from Broadman & Holman Publishing is my book Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective: An Introductory Christology. In this book, Klaus Issler and I bring together six chapters by six authors who argue that “the savior who died on the cross and rose from the dead is the eternal second person of the…