Author: Fred Sanders
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Quoth Francis & Francis: Speak Up!
In his first mass as Roman pontiff, Pope Francis delivered a short sermon in the Sistine Chapel in the presence of the cardinals. The sermon was in Italian rather than Latin, and even the Italian was kind of chatty in places (“non parliamo di Croce. Questo non c’entra,” he has the hapless Peter say: “Let’s not…
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Razumikhin Haddock
The character Razumikhin in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is one of the most personable figures in the book. Intelligent, loyal, resourceful, and generally pleasant, he’s one of the few people you can imagine looking forward to spending a few days with in St. Petersburg. But when he gets mad, he swears like Captain Haddock from…
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George Steiner Learns to Read Greek
Just a few pages into George Steiner’s 1999 autobiographical work Errata: An Examined Life, he tells a story about how he started learning Greek at age 5. No, “Greek at 5” isn’t the amazing part. The amazing part, to me, is that he grew up knowing French, German, and English equally well. “I have no…
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Chris Mitchell Interview: "To Relate our Learning of the Faith to our Learning of the World"
Biola’s Torrey Honors Institute has just announced the hiring of Dr. Chris Mitchell, who will begin teaching at Torrey next fall. As one of the members of the search committee that selected Chris, I’ve had the chance to get to know him over the past few months, and I am excited about adding him to…
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The Cow is Happy; Not So the Fish
Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact was a Roman Catholic comic book that ran every two weeks from 1946 to 1972, and contained a little bit of everything. Here are two panels from a Lent feature. Treasure Chest generated so much content that it was bound to be uneven. This particular story is striking, I…
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Pictographic Catechism from the Andes
It’s not exactly a comic book, but there is an old catechism that certainly makes an interesting use of sequential images for the purposes of teaching Christian doctrine. The Huntington Free Library in the Bronx published a facsimile edition of a “pictographic Quechua catechism” that is a wonderful and engaging little booklet. Here is the page…
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Evangelism with Dempfey and Theo
This is a gospel tract I designed, an evangelism tool. Well, it’s not so much an evangelism tool as a “how to think well about evangelism” tool, not to be used in presenting the gospel but instead to be used as a spur to think through the dynamics of evangelism. It was originally printed as…
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What Stephen Saw, We Hear
At the very beginning of the Christian church, before it was ever called “Christian” or often called “church,” it was a large group of new believers in Jesus gathered in Jerusalem, figuring things out as they went along. They were learning how to be disciples of a Lord who, having ascended into heaven, could no…
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Cats Superbowl Party
Downstairs: A well-dressed reveler arrives, as previous guests doff exo-togs at a handy hat rack. Climbing a ladder to the second floor, partiers pile up on at least two chairs to watch the big game. I count at least a dozen there. Snacks are on the third floor, and the board groans under these lavish…
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Three Vintage Posts on Hebrews
As I launch into a semester of teaching Hebrews and a year of hearing it preached, I wanted to exhume these 3 Scriptorium posts I wrote in late 2010, the last time I taught a class on the book. By the way, the little title logo I made for this series takes the first page…
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When to Read Hebrews
(Reposted from 2010) Hebrews is a book of the Bible for people in hard times. Should you read it now, or later? In terms of the book’s actual background, we don’t know much for certain about the situation of those who first heard these words. There are dark suggestions of hardship in a few verses of chapter…
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Hebrews Out Loud
The book of Hebrews seems to have been written for the ear. Or, if that claim is true, perhaps it should be made in this form: the sermon to the Hebrews was designed to be spoken aloud. The author of Hebrews frequently uses words that indicate he is thinking of the sermon as oral speech…