The Scriptorium Daily

Category: Education

  • The Ideal in Pride and Prejudice (Common Room)

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    Fred Sanders
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    Check out this conversation on a Jane Austen novel: it’s a chat among two philosophers and an Old Testament prof, so it gets philosophical and theological (Aristotle and Proverbs are both invoked). But it’s also powerfully good reflection on a book that all three participants obviously love, and love talking with students about year after…

  • Dennis Kinlaw and Christ-Like Love

    Dennis Kinlaw and Christ-Like Love

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    Joe Henderson
    in ,

    Last week during Holy Week, God called home one of his followers, Dennis Kinlaw (June 26, 1922—Monday, April 10). (Read the announcement here.) During the 1970’s and 80’s, Dr. Kinlaw served as the president of Asbury College,  a Christian liberal arts school with roots in the Wesleyan Holiness tradition. Soon after he became president (in…

  • How to Read TWO Books (Erasmus Addlepate)

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    File this under “weird books I have encountered.” Erasmus Addlepate’s 1940 How to Read Two Books: It’s obviously a spoof of Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. You can tell from Addlepate’s supposed other books like How to Get Up int he Morning that he’s mocking the “Let me tell you how this is…

  • How to Use a Book Instead of Receiving It

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    In his 1961 book An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis describes the difference between reading a book to encounter what is in it, and using a book for other reasons. There are lots of other reasons to use a book, some petty and some profound, but the point Lewis is making is that using is…

  • Torrey Cambridge 2017: Great Booklist in a Great Place

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    Fred Sanders
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    Every July, about forty students and three professors from the Torrey Honors Institute take a trip to Cambridge for an intensive four-unit class. It’s Torrey Cambridge, and it’s a blast. The curriculum each summer is anchored in a short book of the New Testament, and includes about ten books by authors with a Cambridge connection:…

  • The Virtue of Tolerance

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    Adam Johnson
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    A virtue, in order to live up to its lofty title, must contain within itself its own proper resources for opposing the vice unique to it. As Aristotle taught us, virtues rarely travel alone; typically they wander the streets accompanied by distorted versions of themselves; the vices that carry the virtue in one extreme direction…

  • A Charge to Maintain Liberal Arts

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    Diane Vincent
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    A few weeks ago Biola had the delight of installing our new Provost and Senior Vice President, Dr. Deborah Taylor. Part of the installation involved a series of charges from faculty who had been invited to articulate some of the key challenges ahead of Dr. Taylor in her new role, from Biblical and missional fidelity…

  • T&T Clark Companion to the Atonement

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    Adam Johnson
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    This week, I submitted the manuscript for the T&T Clark Companion to the Atonement, an edited work with 18 major chapters and 85 shorter essays from scholars around the world, exploring the doctrine of the atonement from a variety of angles. The various essays explore the atonement in its relationship to different doctrines (e.g. atonement…

  • Authority in Mentoring

    Authority in Mentoring

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    Adam Johnson
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    A concerned student recently asked me to use my authority over a friend of theirs (also a student and mentee of mine) to help get them on the right track, for this friend was involved in quite destructive behavior. As we were talking, I was growing increasingly uncomfortable, but when this request finally emerged, something…

  • Race and Crisis and a Sense of History

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    Fred Sanders
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    Late in the Spring semester, life at Biola was disrupted by a shocking event: On the whiteboard wallspace over a dorm room door, somebody converted a cross to a swastika. One of the roommates in that dorm room was an African-American student. The best reporting on the incident came from an article in Biola’s student-run newspaper, The…

  • Friends with Aristotle and Each Other

    Friends with Aristotle and Each Other

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    Here’s an episode of The Common Room, the periodic vidcast of the Torrey Honors Institute, made possible by OpenBiola. What we try to capture and share in Common Room conversations is a little bit of the ongoing dialogue that makes up the daily life of Torrey. Usually we do that by gathering a few tutors…

  • The Hunting Grounds

    The Hunting Grounds

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    Adam Johnson
    in ,

    A recent documentary, The Hunting Ground, explores the tragedy of sexual assault on university and college campuses across the nation. Directed by Oscar-nominated Kirby Dick, maker of The Invisible War, which discusses the epidemic of rape within the military, The Hunting Ground serves as Dick’s startling follow-up into the world of sexual assault. The problem…