The Scriptorium Daily

Author: Fred Sanders

  • Happy Birthday, Edwin Abbott

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (December 20) is the birthday of Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838-1926), the English scholar remembered now as the author of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. A pleasant, short, and stimulating work, Flatland is a great little mental workout that helps you imagine the jump from lower dimensions to higher. It’s the story of a…

  • Happy Birthday Tycho Brahe

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (December 14) is the birthday of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). Who, you ask? Tycho! Lord of the Island of Hven! Builder of the Uraniborg! Captain of the paths of the planets at the turning of the ages! Brahe was a Danish astronomer who made precise and systematic measurements of celestial motions in the crucial years…

  • Deep Things Here, Deep Things There

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    Fred Sanders
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    Here’s an update on a few more reviews and discussions of Deep Things of God around the web. Jason Sexton in the brand new Themelios provides a nice, long review of the book, calling the book a feast, an unusually bold work, and something that should be “read by every undergraduate student in any evangelical…

  • G. Campbell Morgan

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    Fred Sanders
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    George Campbell Morgan (born this day, December 9, in 1863) used to be more famous than he is now. Best known as the pastor of Westminster Chapel in London, he also worked in the United States with Dwight L. Moody’s many projects, and taught widely in Bible Institutes. One contemporary called him “the hardest working…

  • Huck Finn, Only Huckier

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today was the funeral of a friend of mine who died last week. I worked with him in the 1980’s at a canoe rental in Missouri. His name was Mark, and it’s no insult to say that he was an odd bird. I’m not going to attempt to say the most important things about him,…

  • Richard Baxter on Meditation

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (December 8 ) is the anniversary of the death of Richard Baxter (1615–1691), the Puritan theologian who whose work The Reformed Pastor is a perennially useful classic on soul care, and whose Aphorisms on Justification caused controversy in his own time and consternation to this day. His popular 1650 book The Saint’s Everlasting Rest…

  • Thomas Aquinas' Big Pile of Straw

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (December 6) is the day in 1273 when Thomas Aquinas stopped writing. He had certainly written plenty by then. He was not yet fifty years old, but had written about a hundred works: Commentaries on Scripture, collections of patristic commentaries, sermons, philosophical treatises, explorations of disputed subjects, commentaries on Aristotle and Proclus and Boethius,…

  • Happy Birthday, Christina Rossetti

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (December 5) is the birthday of Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). Rossetti is remembered these days for the Christmas lyric “In the Bleak Midwinter,” the long, strange, poem Goblin Market which launched a thousand knowing dissertations, and charming, harmless children’s verse like “Hurt no living thing:Ladybird, nor butterfly.” But Rossetti also wrote a devotional commentary on…

  • Happy Birthday, John Cotton

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (December 4) is the birthday of John Cotton (1585-1652), a Puritan pastor with a ministry in both Bostons: The Boston in Lincolnshire, England, and later the Boston in New England. He was an accomplished Cambridge University man (graduate of Trinity, fellow of Emmanuel) whose theological opinions were consistently moving in a more Puritan direction…

  • Mary Baker Eddy Seems to Have Died

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (December 3) is the day in 1910 when Mary Baker Eddy, who taught that evil is an illusion and death is a failure of the imagination, died. To everybody else, this kind of thing seemed rather like a refutation of her own teaching, but to her followers in the church of so-called Christian so-called…

  • Ruusbroec: Tipsy on the Trinity

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    Fred Sanders
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    Today (December 2) is the anniversary of the death of Jan van Ruusbroec, also called John of Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), a 14th-century Flemish mystical writer whose work is often considered a high point of medieval Christian mysticism. In a 1984 lecture in Kentucky, Louis Dupre called him “Western Christianity’s most articulate interpreter of the trinitarian mystical…

  • Christmas Playlists

    Christmas Playlists

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    Fred Sanders
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    For several years, my wife and I have had a tradition of sharing our favorite Christmas music with friends. It started as actual mix tapes in the mid 90s, but has been CDs since then. We have a pretty good collection of Christmas music, and of course we have excellent taste! Here are a few…