Author: Scriptorium Admin
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The Life in the Blood
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. When I was a boy one of my favorite songs was Power in the Blood: There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder working pow’r In the blood of the Lamb; There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder working pow’r In the precious blood of the Lamb. How true this is! Every Sunday, Holy Communion brings…
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The Three Essentials of Education: Part III
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Read Part I here, and Part II here. Part III — On Books She turned and said with a thoughtful manner, she always had a thoughtful manner, “Books are no longer the literature of our culture. Movies are now way the masses receive truth.” So a seminar speaker, long ago, introduced…
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Help me Lord! Help me find Holiness!
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. One of the glories of Christianity is the way the Holy Spirit has provided for the integration of practical piety, the life of the church, and theology. No place is this more evident than in the issue of repentance. According to Williston Walker, the early Church faced a difficult issue with…
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The New Monasticism?
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Monastaries often get an undeserved bad reputation. Chaucer may have something to do with it or the fact that our culture cannot imagine real community and giving things up. If you believe, as I do, that the culture is in real trouble, then monasticism looks more appealing. There are forms of…
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Keeping Athens at Bay: Historical Case Study
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. How should a Christian relate to philosophy? Earlier, I tried to show that Christianity must account for philosophy, Athens. On the other hand, it cannot reduce divine revelation to human intellectual activity. There is nothing new in this idea. It was the path the church followed to discover some of the…
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We Must Act Part II
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Read Part I here. Athens and Jerusalem Break Apart For centuries, these two cities, Athens and Jerusalem, provided the boundaries for intellectual and cultural growth. They formed one new kingdom. Tensions between the rationalism of Athens and the faith of Jerusalem always existed, but each recognized the contributions made by the…
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We Must Act
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Read Part II here. Private Virtues Are Not Enough The basement room was crowded. Children were shoved up against the wall with the few faithful servants who had followed them into exile. The father and mother requested a chair for their son, who was seriously ill. Just a few years ago,…
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The Pursuit of Happiness
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Virgil forces the reader to visit the place of the dead. Homer did the same. Dante begins his trip that ends in Paradise with a journey through Hell. Plato begins and ends the Republic with visions of a downward journey, the last to the place of the dead. Why do so…
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Heaven In Her Eye
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Milton famously describes Eve as having “heaven in her eye.” As a young adult, I loved that line, because it seemed such a perfect description of the beloved when I found her. She would have heaven in her eye. Her gaze would promise paradise in the raptures of two folk in love.…
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O Death
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. I never liked going to funerals. In my childhood, they were sad affairs and fairly formal. Later they became full of false cheerfulness and endless speeches about the departed. Secular funerals were the worst of all. Such events are full of courage, but not much else. Death is a bad thing…
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Old like Simeon
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Sometimes, some days, I feel very old. It happens when a student talks about classic films from the nineties or when my freshman can only dimly recall the Clinton administration. It makes me a bit sad. It seems like just a few days ago that I was teaching an experimental on-line…
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The Three Essentials for Education: Part II
John Mark Reynolds, 2005. Read Part I here, and Part III here. Part II — Right Questions Find an educational enthusiast and you will meet someone with more faith than a fighting fundamentalist at a tent meeting. Whatever his system, he believes it contains the answers to all of life’s problems. Just do what he…