Category: Culture
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“G. K. Chesterton, We Love You!” – Brazil
There’s something funny about professors who teach old books being involved in new media. That’s what Scriptorium Daily is, of course — people talking about old stuff in a new venue. It’s funny because of what conventional wisdom leads us to believe – that the more old books we read, the more inclined we are…
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Wanted: Humility
Well, another school year is starting here at the Torrey Honors Institute, which means there are about 375 students roaming the halls again. It’s good to see the returning students, hear what they did over the summer (if anything!) and start getting to know the freshmen. Already in only three days of classes, I have…
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Communion on the Moon Day!
Today (July 20) is the anniversary of the communion service on the moon, in 1969. Buzz Aldrin, an elder in the Presbyterian Church of Webster, Texas, had planned ahead for it, obviously, or he wouldn’t have had the elements of bread and wine with him in the lunar module. Beyond that, though, Presbyterian theology recognizes…
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“Despotic Tyranny Ruined my Life!”
There’s been a controversy this summer over university placement exams in the UK. Apparently the high school students taking the top-level history exam, having been assigned a topic to study and prepare for, were asked on the test day to write an essay analyzing a source text. The question they were asked about the text…
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Why I Don’t Pray for Celebrities
I don’t pray for celebrities because they aren’t real people. Celebrity deaths come in threes, they say, and recently Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson have died. There have been obituaries and retrospectives, and some scrambling to figure out how we are supposed to feel about these deaths of people we never met but…
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California Literary Regionalism?
What is California literature? For a class about California in the great books tradition, I had to pick a half-dozen of the best books for students to read and discuss. Which raises the question, what counts as California literature? The most helpful discussion I’ve read on the subject is not exactly up to date, but…
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Going to California with an Aching in my Heart
This month, I’m leading a class of Biola students who will try to understand California. We are undertaking a theological interpretation of California with the goal of knowing how to live wisely as Christians in this territory. There’s no guaranteed right way to do this, and we only have three weeks together. But this is…
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The Pirates of Praise-ance?
His name has to be paired with Gilbert before most people will recognize him, because he is best known as the composer of the music for those Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas like Mikado, H. M. S. Pinafore, and Pirates of Penzance. But Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (born this day, May 13, 1842; died 1900)…
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Gifted or Determined?
People in general are not born with amazing intellectual or physical giftedness. I continually have to remind myself of this. Most individuals have to work very hard to attain the level of excellence that we admire. Our culture reinforces this belief about natural abilities with language of giftedness–as if some “talent fairy” is throwing around…
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Karl Barth Sinks With The Titanic
On April 14, 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg. In the early hours of the next morning the great ship sank, and everybody was talking about it. Pastors were talking about it. One pastor, in Safenwil, Switzerland, said to his congregation, “I would like to encourage you to reflect on it.” He was the 26-year…
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Happy Birthday to Haydn
Joseph Haydn was born on March 31, 1732, in Austria. He died on May 31, 1809. There’s plenty of Haydn music to choose from, much of it exquisitely good for casual listening: concertos, string quartets, piano trios, symphonies, etc. But if you want to move to the slightly more ambitious side of Haydn’s works, try…
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It’s a Neighborly Day in this Beauty Wood
Today is the birthday of Fred Rogers (March 20, 1928-2003), whose first name was not Mister, but whose middle name actually was McFeely, and who actually wrote the line, “It’s a neighborly day in this beauty wood.” Mister Rogers cranked out that sweater-wearing, sneakers-changing, trolley-riding show of his for 33 years. It was so slow-paced,…