The Scriptorium Daily

Category: Literature

  • First Lines of Theology Books

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    Joan Didion once said that the first line of a book is the decisive part. “What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.” Didion was talking…

  • The Dazzling Dusk

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    There are a few lines from a poem by Coventry Patmore that stick in my mind for their remarkable, evocative power. I first read them in a 1939 anthology by Walter de la Mare called Behold This Dreamer, a rambling collection of prose and poetry about “Reverie, Night, Sleep, Dream, Love-Dreams, Nightmare, Death, the Unconscious, the…

  • Mysteries to Themselves

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    The fallen angels in Paradise Lost are of course shockingly wrongheaded in their estimation of God: Lucifer and company, while in heaven, thought they could beat God in a fight, and some of them continue to think so even after they find themselves greatly diminished and in hell. It’s hard to imagine what metric they could…

  • Classic Texts on the Atonement

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    Adam Johnson
    in ,

    Every now and then someone asks me for a list of my favorite books on the doctrine of the atonement. This is my list of favorite classics, to be followed by a list of contemporary works. Athanasius, On the Incarnation: for my money, this is the best intro text to the doctrine of the atonement…

  • Time

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    Jamie Campbell
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    We are all past, present, and future. While our lives may be bound in the present, what constitutes our “who” has come before, and will be. I am myself, my mother’s child, my child’s mother. The intricacy and interdependency of human lives and human relationships are as complex as time itself, and authors who manage…

  • Razumikhin Haddock

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    The character Razumikhin in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is one of the most personable figures in the book. Intelligent, loyal, resourceful, and generally pleasant, he’s one of the few people you can imagine looking forward to spending a few days with in St. Petersburg. But when he gets mad, he swears like Captain Haddock from…

  • Hebrews: The Mind-blowing Finale

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    Joe Henderson
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    The book of Hebrews is the grand finale of the first semester in the Torrey Honors Institute. After the freshman fall, the curriculums for Torrey’s two houses take their separate ways: the Morgan House following a roughly chronological path to bring them up to the twentieth century in senior spring and the Johnson House dwelling…

  • Only the Lonely

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    Melissa Schubert
    in ,

    I happened to be re-reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment the same weekend that we hosted a recruiting event for the Torrey Honors Institute. As I spent time reflecting on my membership in this learning community, I noticed the stark contrast of the radical isolation that Raskolnikov suffers. Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov is an intellectual and an idealist,…

  • Progress for the Sake of…

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    Janelle Aijian
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    As I was driving around LA the other day listening to NPR, two stories run back-to-back caught my attention. The first was a story about the recent Nobel-prize winners John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka, who have uncovered a means for turning any cell into a stem cell from which an organ or even a…

  • Some Poetry with Your Haircut, Sir?

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    Robert Llizo
    in ,

    I like vintage barber shops. Ever since I was a boy, they have been part of my life (of course, in those days, they were simply known as regular, run-of-the-mill barber shops). My father would take me to a Cuban barber who had a faint resemblance to Floyd, the barber in the “Andy Griffiths Show.”…

  • Bayard: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Pierre Bayard’s 2007 book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is a real page turner. The best I can tell, it’s an elaborate joke in which the authorial voice is a kind of fictional character. This character –I’ll call him Bayard while remaining agnostic about how he relates to the historical Bayard who…

  • O Tell Us, Poet, What You Do

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    A favorite Rilke poem: O tell us, poet, what you do. –I praise. Yes, but the deadly and the monstrous phase, how do you take it, how resist? –I praise. But the anonymous, the nameless maze, how summon it, how call it, poet? –I praise. What right is yours, in all these varied ways, under…