Category: Literature
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How to Read TWO Books (Erasmus Addlepate)
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…
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How to Use a Book Instead of Receiving It
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…
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Torrey Cambridge 2017: Great Booklist in a Great Place
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:…
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T&T Clark Companion to the Atonement
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…
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Doctrine Leaping Out of Its Chains: Review of Young’s “Construing the Cross”
Young, Frances M. Construing the Cross: Type, Sign, Symbol, Word, Action. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2015. Frances M. Young’s Construing the Cross is no mere exercise by a young scholar with an idea, research leave and a bibliography. Rather, this is the product of a mature and measured lifetime of study, a small window looking…
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Silent No More: CS Lewis’ Cosmological Theory of the Atonement
According to C.S. Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy, our home is “Thulcandra—the silent planet,” for “it alone is outside the heaven, and no message comes from it.” That is to say, no message came from our planet, until Ransom was kidnapped, and brought to Malacandra (or Mars). At a certain point in the story, Ransom learns that Oyarsa,…
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The Flowering Crown
This post was featured on Biola’s Center for Christianity, Culture and the Arts’ Lent Project on Easter Sunday, March 27, 2016. The crown of the thorns is a symbol of cruelty and oppression—but a poetic one. The rightful king of creation enters his realm, only to find himself crowned with the very thorns that choke…
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The Chamber of Victory: Harry Potter and the Atonement, Part II
The Chamber of Secrets picks up where The Sorcerer’s Stone left off, continuing its provocative and creative exploration of salvation. There are angry demands for punishment (144; and the dismissal thereof (330)), an “heir” which will purge the school of unclean Mudblood filth (151, 224), freedom for “the lowly, the enslaved” Dobby (177, 337-8), the…
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Why Read? By Eva Brann
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 Biola. There’s reading and then there’s reading. There’s the kind…
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Reading Strategies
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 serve them both now and in the years to come.…
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An Interview with Adam Johnson on the Atonement
Adam Johnson has made it his mission to think through the atonement, to look at it from as many angles as possible, to explore and expound the glories of God’s work in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ to reconcile to himself all things. He’s written some great books—God’s Being in Reconciliation: The Theological…
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An Introduction to Karl Barth
I am an unabashed fan of Karl Barth. I often tell my students that for my money, he is the best theologian in the history of the church. Yes, I am aware that this statement communicates more about me than about him (discussions about who is the best athlete, musician, or theologian are generally less…