Featured Essay / Culture
A friend and I had a conversation about a situation of systemic and personal abuse she was suffering, which turned into correspondence between us. With permission, I have polished up my exchange with Lori (a pseudonym), as a reflection on what it means for a victim to properly love a…
Essay / Culture
This speech was originally given on March 3, 2016, by Professor Eva Brann of St. John’s College (Annapolis), as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series at the Torrey Honors Institute. The following is an excerpt. A link to her full speech is available on Open
Essay / Culture
Online classes and online universities are all the rage. They boast an impressive set of virtues and opportunities. Among them: Take classes in your pajamas (or less)! Why relocate? Learn at your own pace. Keep your day job. Pay less. A lot less (but read
Essay / Education
A note here on how Karl Barth viewed his teaching in the late 1940s in Basle. Barth was deep into writing Church Dogmatics III, and as usual he was developing the voluminous text of the Dogmatics out of the four hours of lectures he was
Essay / Culture
To some of our students, we faculty probably present a daunting picture of excellence. After all, we are professors at one of the most distinguished private Christian universities—we excel in our fields, publish scholarly works about topics they may have never even heard of, are
Essay / Education
Our students read thousands of pages per semester—a daunting task threatening to compromise and undermine their health and well being if they are not careful. The key to doing all this reading, I would like to suggest, is setting up patterns and disciplines which will
Essay / Education
I was surprised when they opened class in prayer. I had flown out to LA to interview for a job at Biola University, and the public display of piety took me off guard a bit. It shouldn’t have. Prayer and theological study belong together. Some
Essay / Education
Read Part 1 here. At the core of the Christian faith is the belief that God did not rest content with using any effective means to save us from our sin, and creation from its ruin. Rather, God made himself the means of our salvation.
Essay / Education
Here’s the deal. I’ve arranged for a whole lot of experts on the doctrine of Scripture to be in one place at one time this January, presenting papers and having public conversations about it. So if you’re a theology professor in southern California, you should
Essay / Education
Read Part 2 here. There is great momentum toward the vocation of theologian pastor—a pastor who cares deeply about studying theology in a careful and sustained way. I hope there is similar momentum in the opposite direction, toward pastoral theologians. Lord knows we need them!
Essay / Education
. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. –2 Timothy 3:14-15
Essay / Education
Bishop Eustathius of Thessalonica (1115-1195) wrote a long, Greek commentary on the Iliad, which he introduced with this commendation of Homer. He thinks everybody should read Homer, but his strategy seems to be making the poet seem deep, dark, and dangerous: Homer is like Sirens.
Essay / Education
A student gave me a beautiful reminder of the heart of a liberal arts education last semester. And it wasn’t because she got good grades. In fact, her grades were pretty poor. Having done the vast majority of the work for the semester, she found