Author: Fred Sanders
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Why Was Mother Teresa Sad?
Next month, a book of Mother Teresa’s personal letters will be released. Almost nobody’s read it, but everybody’s talking about it anyway, especially the fact that Mother Teresa (1910-1997) was long racked with doubt and a sense that God had withdrawn from her life. According to a surprisingly good article in Time, the book apparently…
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On Great Artistic Ages (Like the Athens of Aeschylus)
How did Aeschylus do it? His plays are so powerful and engaging that he will never lose his place in the front ranks of dramatists. We only have seven of his plays extant —a tenth of what he produced— but even if we had only one, we would recognize in it the hand of a…
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“Empowered Am I to Sing” This Translation Literal
In 1877, renowned poet Robert Browning published a translation of the play Agamemnon by Aeschylus. Or perhaps “translation” is not quite the right word for it –on the title page, Browning claimed credit not for translating, but transcribing. Since the transcription crossed the language barrier from Greek to English, though, we have to call it…
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Heavy Surf
As John Ruskin says in his 1857 work The Elements of Drawing, “Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colours variously shaded.” To the eye of a painter, everything is color-patch bumping into color-patch. At the thin edge where…
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Fifty Love Songs to the Bible (G. Campbell Morgan’s Hymnal)
People claim to believe all kinds of things, but if you want to find out what they really believe, see what they can sing about. As I’ve tried to identify what the great evangelical tradition has believed about Scripture, I have found plenty of arguments, manifestos, controversies, and declarations. But I also found a hymnal…
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The Sense that Miracles Make
Miracles are all about getting attention. The miracles reported in the Bible are no exception, and are sometimes designated as signs and wonders, that is, pointers and shocks. The miracles that Jesus Christ did during his earthly ministry bear this twofold structure prominently: they startle and indicate; they shock and they point to something. What…
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Exhortation to the Students Upon Their Return to the University after the Vacation (Bishop Robert Leighton)
Summer is over and the students are icumen in. For all who are returning to campuses to take up again the sober business of learning, here is a little gem from the great evangelical bishop Robert Leighton (1611-1684). I publish it here without any extra comment, because I hardly know what to add to words…
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B.R.I.G.H.T.Y.
Freddy Age Seven turns his attention to the Brighty mythos, and decides that no straightforward illustration can capture it. Instead he approaches this epic with an entire suite of artistic approaches. His first attempt at communicating the power of Marguerite Henry’s Brighty of the Grand Canyon makes the Grand Canyon itself the star of the…
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Life in the Fundamentalist Word (Philip Mauro)
It’s not news to anybody that the evangelical tradition has a high doctrine of Scripture, but a lot of contemporary evangelicals seem to have forgotten what originally generated this commitment to Scripture: the characteristic evangelical experience of God’s power and authority in the text of the Bible. In fact, one of the cherished affirmations of…
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“That God Himself May Through His Word Speak” (Adolph Saphir)
I know it disagrees with conventional wisdom, but I am persuaded that evangelical Christianity has always had a recognizable way of approaching the Bible, and that this approach has been tacitly trinitarian. To demonstrate this, I could cite a number of contemporary theologians who are proudly developing their accounts of Scripture in an increasingly trinitarian…
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Scripture as the Voice of the Triune God
Evangelical Christians are the most thoroughly trinitarian Christians in the history of the church. The characteristic beliefs, commitments, practices, and presuppositions of evangelicalism were all generated by an applied trinitarian theology which took more seriously than ever before the involvement of Father, Son, and Spirit in the Christian life. Nothing we as evangelicals do makes…
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Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned From Brighty of the Grand Canyon
Marguerite Henry wrote a whole Horseshoe Library set of books about horses, but it is her book about a Donkey that has been a major topic of discussion around my house this summer. Henry’s 1953 book Brighty of the Grand Canyon was a great companion for us before, during, and after a family vacation to…