The Scriptorium Daily

Category: Culture

  • Luther the Word-Wielder

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    Matt Jenson
    in ,

    Thank God for shorthand. Without it, the ready wit of Martin Luther would be lost to us. Some argue that Luther’s were the loose lips which sank the great ship; others hear him as a voice crying the wilderness who merely called a spade a spade. But he sure did have a way with words.…

  • The Heresy of Cool

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    Matt Jenson
    in ,

    Coolness is heretical. Or at least the pursuit of it is. This is because an inverse relationship exists between our attempts at being cool and our faith in Jesus Christ. The one struts, confident in his ability to do and say all the right things. The other limps, just as confident in his ineptitude, his…

  • (How) Do Women Sin?

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    Matt Jenson
    in ,

    Back in 1960, Valerie Saiving Goldstein wrote a short article called “The Human Situation: A Feminine View” in which she made a simple assertion: men and women sin differently. In her own words: The temptations of woman as woman are not the same as the temptations of man as man, and the specifically feminine forms…

  • Fairness, Chocolate Cake and Neurosurgery

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    Paul Spears
    in ,

    That’s not fair! When you live in a house with children you come to realize that the concept of fair/unfair is the lens through which they view most of the world. For example, when there is only one piece of chocolate cake in the house and two children you have a problem. Some parents have…

  • Why Was Mother Teresa Sad?

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    Next month, a book of Mother Teresa’s personal letters will be released. Almost nobody’s read it, but everybody’s talking about it anyway, especially the fact that Mother Teresa (1910-1997) was long racked with doubt and a sense that God had withdrawn from her life. According to a surprisingly good article in Time, the book apparently…

  • On Great Artistic Ages (Like the Athens of Aeschylus)

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    How did Aeschylus do it? His plays are so powerful and engaging that he will never lose his place in the front ranks of dramatists. We only have seven of his plays extant —a tenth of what he produced— but even if we had only one, we would recognize in it the hand of a…

  • Principles Poll Badly

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    Paul Spears
    in ,

    Imagine a world where slavery is still a normal part of our daily lives. What if the North under Abraham Lincoln’s presidency assented to the demands of the Southern states and allowed for both the continuation of slavery and the creation of new slave states? If Lincoln was the kind of man who was moved…

  • Harry Potter is Dreadful and Vulgar

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    Paul Spears
    in

    Everyone has something to say about Harry Potter. It is such a major phenomenon that people can’t keep themselves from talking about it, but in truth Harry Potter is dreadful and vulgar—and that is not a bad thing. My first encounter with Harry Potter books began seven years ago because of the firestorm of controversy…

  • On Division in the Church

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    Matt Jenson
    in ,

    While his Christology leaves much to be desired, the grandfather of liberal Protestant theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) has some great thoughts on ecclesiology. Consider the following: [T]here are frequently also efforts at union which do not originate in the Spirit of the Church, and the success of which cannot therefore be regarded as a gain,…

  • The Emerging Church: Evangelical Poster-Boy or Whipping-Boy?

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    Matt Jenson
    in ,

    It seems that the emerging church (hate to use that singular, but it’s convenient) scratches a couple of different itches amongst evangelicals. On the one hand, it is hailed as a fresh expression of evangelicalism’s ever-outgoing nature. It is contextualization for the sake of conversion. On the other hand, it represents the (further) watering down…

  • Reading Books: Quantity or Quality?

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    Greg Peters
    in

    Well, Harry Potter has once again hit the stores, to the rowdy “Hurrah!” of millions of devotees (one of whom blogs frequently about the boy wizard on this website). I imagine that Amazon.com employees have really racked up the overtime this week while the US economy has likely stayed steady given that profits from Potter…

  • Emergent Allergies: Bigger is Better

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    Matt Jenson
    in ,

    If anything, for emerging churches, smaller is better. But why? Like any renewal movement in the church, the emerging church movement hearkens back to the good ol’ days of Acts 2. These were days of community, economic simplicity and radical discipleship, days when the church was the church and the world was the world. But,…