Category: Blog
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Growth into Great Things (Augustine)
There’s an Augustine quote, widely available on all of the “Swell Quotations” websites, that just seems too good to be true. Here it is: “Really great things, when discussed by little men, can usually make such men grow big.” When a quote is extremely quotable, widely applicable, attributed to somebody famous, but not footnoted, my…
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A Few Questions for You (Commencement 2023)
This was the commencement address I gave to Torrey Honors College’s class of 2023. Torrey is a Socratic Great Books program, where the pedagogical coin of the realm is questions. So I put together an appropriate commencement talk. It’s for a very specific audience, has some in-jokes that were designed to appeal to exactly these…
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Shame in Philippians
This is post 4 of 4 in a series on the emotions in Philippians. It looks forward to the publication of Isaac Blois’ new book in the LNTS series with Bloomsbury T&T Clark: The Role of Emotions in Philippians: Discerning Affections. Join us in this post as Dr. Blois discussions the emotion of shame as…
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“Tell Pale-Hearted Fear it Lies” (Fear in Philippians)
This is post 3 of 4 in a series on the emotions in Philippians. It looks forward to the publication of Isaac Blois’ new book in the LNTS series with Bloomsbury T&T Clark: The Role of Emotions in Philippians: Discerning Affections. Join us in this post as Dr. Blois discussions the emotion of fear as…
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Joy in Philippians
This is post 2 of 4 in a series on the emotions in Philippians. It looks forward to the publication of Isaac Blois’ new book in the LNTS series with Bloomsbury T&T Clark: The Role of Emotions in Philippians: Discerning Affections. Join us in this article as Dr. Blois highlights the need for attending to…
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Discerning Affections in Philippians
This is post 1 of 4 in a series on the emotions in Philippians. It looks forward to the publication of Isaac Blois’ new book in the LNTS series with Bloomsbury T&T Clark: The Role of Emotions in Philippians: Discerning Affections. Join us in this article as Dr. Blois highlights the need for attending to…
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The Rise of the Scholastic Theological Method
This is post 2 of 4 in a series on the monastic theological method. It looks forward to the publication of Greg Peters’ new book: Monastic Theology as Theological Method: The Superiority of the Monastery to the University. Join us in this article as Dr. Peters discusses the object of scholastic thought, noting key and…
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The Christ-Life
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” With these words, Gabriel García Márquez begins his famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It takes more than a hundred pages of telling the mythic saga of the…
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The Superiority of a Monastic Theological Method
This is post 1 of 4 in a series on the monastic theological method. It looks forward to the publication of Greg Peters’ new book: Monastic Theology as Theological Method: The Superiority of the Monastery to the University. Join us in this article as Dr. Peters distills the differences of approach between monastic and scholastic…
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Do You Believe in Jinn? (Torrey Convocation 2022)
I believe questions can be gracious gifts. Last time I gave a convocation talk, I spoke about themost important question any professor ever asked me. Tonight, I want to speak about the firstquestion I ever received from a student. I had just completed my PhD on the history of Christian-Muslim relations and accepted aposition to…
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The Architecture of George Herbert’s Poetry
Introduction George Herbert was born on April 3, 1593, one of ten children. Though his father died when he was only three years old, Herbert’s mother, Magdalen, took responsibility for the education of her children. Moreover, she was decently well-connected, in that she ran a kind of literary and academic salon; that is, she managed…
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Raisin in the Sun: Text and Film
Not long ago, the Torrey Honors College added Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun to our regular curriculum. Any time you drop a twentieth-century text into a Great Books curriculum, you’re taking a gamble: No matter how well the book is regarded, it’s only harvested a measly few decades of reviews, and we prefer…