Author: Fred Sanders
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For St. Patrick: Two Cheers for Trinity Analogies
My life is all about teaching the doctrine of the Trinity. And everywhere I go, the first question people ask me about the Trinity is “what’s a good analogy for the Trinity?” I usually make a sour face before I can catch myself, because in my opinion, the most important things to say about the…
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Insight Beyond the Average
“To become an artist, one must become a total person. The broader the base of general education, the more able the artist is to cope with the environment. I believe, too, that gratitude for life itself is basic to the development of insight beyond the average.” Millard Sheets (1907-1989) Quoted in Lovoos and Penney, Millard…
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Cat Draws Boy
Freddy Age Six draws a drawing of a cat sitting upright at a table, drawing a drawing of something I know not what (je ne sais claws). The table not only supports the cat’s work tools (box of crayons to his left, box of juice to his right, page in front of him), but it…
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Dostoyevsky Plays With Live Ammo
What’s remarkable about The Brothers Karamazov is the way Dostoyevsky put truly dangerous stuff into the book. He was trying to write a book that would help people, help a civilization. Dostoyevsky seems to have thought of his vocation as somewhat prophetic, and he trained his sensitive artistic eye on the grim shadows gathering around…
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“Fact, Faith, Feeling” as Ancient Wisdom
F. B. Meyer (1847 — 1929) was a well-known Baptist pastor back around the turn of the twentieth century, but less famous today. Like so many of the great evangelicals of a hundred years ago, he combined in his life things that we have sadly learned to think of as incompatible: a classical education, a…
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Little Pony
Gesture is everything in this whimsical depiction of a pony. What moment has the artist captured? The pony throws back her head and shakes her mane with such spirit that it is hard to believe her front hooves are solidly planted on the ground. It would be pressing the four-year-old artist’s gestural bravura too literally…
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Cheese Poet
“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese,” quipped G. K. Chesterton circa 1910. But Chesterton lied. For by that time, James McIntyre (1827-1906), The Cheese Poet, had already lived an entire artistic career devoted to turophilia, the love of cheese. I could say more, but it would be best to let…
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Evangelism: The Very Idea!
In a 1998 article in Pro Ecclesia, Richard J. Mouw undertook a defense of “Evangelism: The Very Idea!” (Pro Ecclesia VII.2 (1998), 172-185). He begins by saying, “It has never been difficult to find people who take offense at the very idea of evangelism. The Christian community has always been criticized by those who have…
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Haman Out, Mordecai In
Last weekend was Purim on the Jewish calendar, and while I’m way too goy to have a real megillah, I did open my Bible and read the book of Esther. Down through the ages, Esther hasn’t drawn a lot of attention from Christian commentators, but there is an extensive literature of Jewish commentary on it.…
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Trinitarian Evangelism: Sending, Filling, Following
An insight on the role of the Trinity in evangelism, from John Teter’s book Get the Word Out. Teter devotes the final three chapters to showing that “God is not distant in any dimension of our evangelism experience. He goes before us, he is behind us and he is even inside of us. We are…
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Attentive Cat, Mouse with Cheese
This cat (by an artist age 6.5) is all circles, curves, and friendliness. See how he extends his paws outward generously from his body. The only sharp corners on him are the points of his fuzzy ears. No claws on those teddy-bear paws, and no fangs in that sweet muzzle. But conspicuously absent from the…
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Is the New York Times Smarter than a Fifth Grader?
A colleague tipped me off to this howler at the New York Times. Under a picture of a crowd at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Times prints the caption: Worshipers at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Jesus is traditionally believed to be buried. But a new documentary says he might have…