The Scriptorium Daily

Author: Melissa Schubert

  • Faithful Remembering: A Baccalaureate Reflection

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    Melissa Schubert
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    I had the pleasure of speaking last week at Biola University’s Baccalaureate service. Graduating seniors and their friends and families gathered for a worship service, and I offered them them the following words for reflection: As we gather tonight, I hope to help you reflect on what it might mean for you to remember this…

  • Only the Lonely

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    Melissa Schubert
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    I happened to be re-reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment the same weekend that we hosted a recruiting event for the Torrey Honors Institute. As I spent time reflecting on my membership in this learning community, I noticed the stark contrast of the radical isolation that Raskolnikov suffers. Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov is an intellectual and an idealist,…

  • April: An Argument in Poems

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    Melissa Schubert
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    April is the cruellest month. So begins, famously, T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, a prophetic and incisive poem (albeit abstruse and alienating), capturing in word and image some of the losses and decadences that marked the modern world. April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out the of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire,…

  • Behold Your King: Reflections on a Palm Sunday

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    Melissa Schubert
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    Christians remember on Palm Sunday the triumphal entry of Christ to Jerusalem–the King of Glory riding to the ostensible seat of his political and religious power, received as victor and Lord with shouts of Hosannas. But there is a great deal about the scene that–at least as it hits my imagination–speaks of Christ’s humility: riding…

  • High Table: Luther

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    Melissa Schubert
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    Our reading assignment: Martin Luther’s “Theses for the Heidelberg Disputation,” “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” and “The Freedom of the Christian” from Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings. Faculty training at the Torrey Honors Institute puts our pedagogy to the test. We call our semesterly training meetings “High Tables.” Nothing as lofty as it sounds, we read…

  • The Prodigal Holiday

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    Melissa Schubert
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    I will be bringing (among other things) dessert number four to our Thanksgiving feast. I may make a pear tart. It’s strategic, making a light and fruity dessert number four. How else should I expect it to be eaten, after the turkey, stuffing, potatoes, and a big fat et cetera, in competition with whatever chocolate…

  • Housekeeping

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    Melissa Schubert
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    Like her biblical namesake, the Ruth of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) is a sojourner among strangers. The almost misleading title of the novel suggests that the novel will be concerned with the daily habits that constitute and stabilize domestic life. Instead, the novel’s protagonists inhabit their house without feeling at home. Similarly, they live in…

  • By the Book

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    Melissa Schubert
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    “The B-I-B-L-E” doesn’t really pack the same punch for adults as it does for the pre-K Sunday school crowd. But gussied up in the dignity of an Elizabethan homily, the admonition to read my Bible once again demands my attention. “A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading of Holy Scripture” is the first sermon of over…

  • When Faces Called Flowers Float Out of the Ground

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    Melissa Schubert
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    I’ve been doing a whole lot of reading this summer. When I come up from my books for air I go outside to garden. And, while you readers are likely a bookish lot with whom I could share many bookish observations, I’d rather share with you some thoughts that my gardening has occasioned. Here are…

  • To Judge the Quick and the Dead

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    Melissa Schubert
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    I usually keep quiet my liking for musical theater. But this summer I discovered that what I took to be my uniquely under-refined taste is actually common in my eccentric community. On a sailboat moored along the Turkish Coast of the Aegean Sea, I sang along to the Wicked soundtrack with nearly twenty students who…

  • Nothing to Praise

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    Melissa Schubert
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    If you’ve never encountered the poetry of Richard Wilbur, one of the most distinguished living Christian poets in the U. S., you might consider picking up his recently published Collected Poems 1943-2004. While much of twentieth century poetry contemplates the anxieties of our age or confesses the tumult of the individual psyche, Wilbur’s lyrics are…

  • Seriously, Homer?

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    Melissa Schubert
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    Every year our freshmen begin their college education reading Homer’s Iliad. And every year our freshmen stumble upon the same sophisticated “insights” about the ancient poem. They posit that Homer, or some poet before him, able neither to explain nor to master the wine-dark sea, deified the visible phenomena as Poseidon, Ocean, nymphs, and so…