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
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
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 / Literature
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
Essay / Literature
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.
Essay / Culture
“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
Essay / Literature
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
Essay / Culture
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
Essay / Literature
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,
Essay / Culture
(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
Essay / Culture
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
Essay / Literature
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.
Essay / Literature
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