Author: Fred Sanders
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Barth’s “Almost Hypnotic Elegance”
In chapter 3 of his helpful 1996 book Truth & Power: The Place of Scripture in the Christian Life, J. I. Packer takes a few paragraphs to evaluate the effect of Karl Barth’s theology on biblical interpretation in the twentieth century. “Barth’s work over half a century has certainly renewed in some quarters a sense…
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Why Professors Blog
Professors are people with full-time jobs teaching students, researching subjects, and publishing their findings. Why would they add to this schedule something that is not a part of their job description: blogging? The question is not merely, ahem, academic. There are plenty of professors who have been blogging for as long as there have been…
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The Color Line Through This Century
Even though it’s a big political week and I’ve been consuming much more news and political analysis than is healthy, I happened to be thinking about something else on Monday. I was browsing century-old Los Angeles Times stories for a project, and found this intriguing little report on an incident of racial unrest in L.A.…
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Edward Knippers, Theologizing in Paint
The folks over at Theology Forum are hosting a blog exhibition this week on the work of Edward Knippers, an important American painter. On Monday they posted several pictures along with a statement by the artist. Not all artists are able to write about their own work in a helpful way –some of them should…
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Two Ways to Study Great Books: Torrey Honors Institute
Everything that we post here at the Scriptorium Daily is an overflow from the learning community we have in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola. The faculty members who contribute to this blog all teach in our great books program. All the faculty teach all the books, so we’re always stepping on each other’s toes,…
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Are We Seven?
First: A classic early poem by William Wordsworth. Then: Four visual analyses of the evidence. We Are Seven A little child, dear brother Jem, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death? I met a little cottage girl: She was eight years old, she said;…
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The Coming of the Book
What are the major events in the history of salvation, according to Christianity? If you made a little diagram with stick figures, what would you have to include? The choosing of Abraham, of course. The giving of the law, and the whole Mosaic ministry of God redeeming his people from Egypt and making them his…
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Vocabulary Quiz on The Horse and His Boy
A few years ago, I taught the Chronicles of Narnia as part of a college course. I always feel odd teaching a class on books that people read for fun, books with a very high entertainment value. Isn’t that what people outside the academy assume we’re doing on campus: giving college credit for watching cartoons…
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Lyra Fidelium
Samuel J. Stone (1839-1900) was an Anglican clergyman and poet whose claim to fame is that he wrote the hymn, The Church’s One Foundation. But that’s just the hit single off a great album. That hymn is from an interesting collection that Stone wrote in 1866 entitled Lyra Fidelium: Twelve Hymns on the Twelve Articles…
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The Election in Classical Context: Victor Davis Hanson at Biola
Here is audio from Victor Davis Hanson’s recent speech at Biola. Following the news day by day can kind of beat up your mind, especially right now with the election, the war, and the financial crisis. These are all big stories that don’t fit daily updates very well. Every now and then it’s nice to…
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Craig Hazen Reviews Religulous
Craig Hazen, the director of Biola University’s graduate program in Christian apologetics, has written an insightful review of the Bill Maher movie Religulous. It’s a documentary I won’t be seeing, not because I’m afraid to face criticism of what I believe, but because I’ve already seen more than enough of Bill Maher’s comedy. His style…