Category: Literature
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Roger Lundin (1949-2015)
I remember him larger than life. He was a big man—tall, solidly built, with a voice that boomed and the occasional flair for the dramatic. To this day, nearly twenty years later, the lasting image I have of Roger Lundin finds him crawling across the long wooden table that filled our seminar room to make…
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“Homer is Like Sirens… His Myths are Not There for Fun”
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. Perhaps it would be best if you kept clear of him…
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Basement of the Museum
On the second page of a long book about the plays of Aeschylus, critic Thomas Rosenmeyer explains how he intends to proceed. He wants to help modern non-specialists, readers who are getting their Aeschylus in English, by showing them how to avoid “some of the more common errors of perspective that tend to put the…
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The Metaphysics of Candlelight
Nature’s Distilled Sunlight Have you ever wondered why you loved candlelight? And what is so mesmerizing about the embers of a campfire? It is as though the depths of wisdom were contained in the spectrum of reds, oranges, yellows and blues, glowing and pulsing with life. John Muir, the patron saint of America’s National Park system,…
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The Theologian’s Stone: Atonement In Harry Potter, Book I
“It is a monstrous thing, to slay a unicorn…. Only one who has nothing to lose, and everything to gain, would commit such a crime. The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death, but at a terrible price. You have slain something pure and defenseless to…
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A Review of Vidu’s “Atonement, Law and Justice”
Adonis Vidu, “Atonement, Law and Justice.” Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014. Vidu’s recent book is worth a careful read for two substantial developments. In the first five chapters, Vidu traces the inter-relationship between the atonement (specifically focused on penal substitution) and understandings of law throughout history, starting a fruitful inter-disciplinary discussion. This approach is valuable for several reasons.…
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In Defense of ‘Ramona’ and Other Children’s Classics
I teach classics for a living. As a result, my kids overhear conversations and snippets of conversations about Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and a host of others. But that’s not all they hear, for as someone devoted to the classics, I share this love with them in a steady diet of children’s classics by Beverly Cleary,…
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Wuthering Adoption: Emily Brontë, Christ’s Atonement and Adoption
The families in Wuthering Heights only recover from the adoption of Heathcliff when, like the Israelites after their refusal to enter the Promised Land, everyone of that generation was dead (Num. 14:20-23). But adoption is a beautiful representation of the work of Christ—or even better, it IS the work of Christ—that which God does in…
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Confessing the Generations
(This is in some ways a sequel to my earlier post, “Gospel of Confession”) Perhaps, like me, you have dreaded your turn to tell your conversion story at a church event. I would open my story with an apology: “well, my story really isn’t very interesting….” Unlike some of the more sensational stories that had…
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Because of Fairies
Recently, I spent twelve hours discussing Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with sophomores in the Torrey Honors Institute. (What a job!) I love this play more and more. It’s easy to miss its richness–it’s such a romp! Here’s the thing that struck me in reading the play this time, and it’s a line that I…
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Some Books Just Aren’t Long Enough
Some books just aren’t long enough. I wasn’t more than a hundred pages into The Lord of the Rings by J.R. Tolkien when I began to dread the ending—not because it was so far away, but because it was going to come all too soon. It is a thing of beauty when that imposing doorstop…
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When He Became a Child, the Affection Came
Francis Spufford wrote not long ago of “why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.” The great paradoxes of the faith–incarnation and crucifixion–would seem to resist any attempt to “make sense” of them. But, if one best enters these mysteries bowed low in humility and wide-eyed in wonder, one might yet discern something…