Author: Fred Sanders
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“We See These Things:” Drawing with Dale Leys
My drawing teacher, Dale Leys, has recently been the subject of a forty-year, three-gallery retrospective exhibit. And while I couldn’t go to Kentucky to see the shows, I was thrilled to see that Kentucky’s public television channel, KET, aired a 30-minute documentary about his work (see below). I’ve had some great teachers since college, but…
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Why to Read Nietzsche
God was dead, to begin with. If you want to understand the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), you have to start where he started, with the premise that there is no God, and that Christian monotheism had all been a big mistake. As far as Nietzsche was concerned, the best thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century…
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Prescriptions for Protestants
This week’s Future of Protestantism discussion was serious fun, a big success, and, I think, a helpful exploration of some crucial issues confronting the churches today. Though it was sparked by an online disagreement, Tuesday’s event was not a debate. It was more like three medical doctors looking at the same ailment and disagreeing about its…
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The Examined Life of Socrates
“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates. In fact, it might be the most famous thing he ever said. If you wanted a Socrates T-shirt, button, or bumper sticker, this is the phrase that would go on it. Socrates wasn’t good at sound bites. His preferred philosophical style was the interrogation, and he…
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The Life of Jesus in Paintings at the Getty
The Getty Center in Los Angeles is not really the best place to go if you want to see Christian art. Except for the remarkable collection of illuminated manuscripts, the Getty’s collection just isn’t built around the themes and images of the Christian visual tradition –it started as a collection of French furniture and antiquities,…
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No Trinitarian Sidehug
John 1:18 calls Jesus “the one who is in the bosom of the Father.” You can check out a lot of different translations at Biblehub here (the Greek is ho on eis ton kolpon tou patros). It’s a funny phrase, “in the bosom.” And by funny, I partly mean that it produces snickers from the youth group,…
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What’s a Good Question?
In his visionary book Finding Common Ground, Tim Downs noted that “because Christians tend to be answer people, we’re not especially skilled at asking good questions; questions that aren’t simplistic, leading, or downright insulting.” Ouch. In Biola’s Torrey Honors Institute, we’re answer people, but we teach socratically. That means our primary job as teachers is…
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Born This Way (so Raise Your Glass, All You Fireworks)
Three hit songs in the last few months have pushed the same message: You are awesome. You’re awesome just the way you are, even –no, especially– if you don’t fit in. The three songs are “Firework” by Katy Perry, “Raise Your Glass” by Pink, and “Born this Way” by Lady Gaga. I don’t know who…
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Dante, Illustrated by Boccaccio
I did not know this existed until today. I knew that Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), author of the Decameron, admired Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). I knew Boccaccio had written a short Life of Dante, and I even knew that Boccaccio had studied Dante’s work intensely and lectured on his poetry. But I didn’t know that Boccaccio had written…
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What You Can Learn from Calvin and Hobbes about the Message and the Medium
Anybody who has a message that they care about communicating should pay attention to the great lesson taught by Calvin and Hobbes: The lesson is that not every message can be communicated in every medium. Yes, I mean Bill Watterson’s comic strip about the tiger and his boy, not the theologian and the philosopher. The…
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Layers and Layers of Biblical Witness
I recently ran across a helpful list of layered biblical passages; passages that are themselves summaries, or theologically-informed overviews, of previous sections of Scripture. Some of them you can recognize from a glance at the chapter and verse; others you’ll need to look up. Here’s the list w/links and memory-jogging snippets: Deuteronomy 6:20-25 What to tell…
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Gnostic on Purpose (Austin Farrer)
Anglican theologian Austin Farrer (1904-1968) was brilliant and/but/because idiosyncratic. The book A Hawk Among Sparrows: A Biography of Austin Farrer by Philip Curtis (London: SPCK, 1985) documents a volatile early phase of his thinking that is instructively peculiar. During this phase, Farrer played with a few ideas that he never directly published about, so Curtis’ detailed intellectual…