Featured Essay / Literature
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…
Essay / Literature
Samuel Johnson is one of the acknowledged masters of English prose, a fixed star of style. As you might expect from the author of a dictionary, Johnson was master of a vast vocabulary, concatenating his words into characteristically long sentences. Those sentences! They are complex periodic
Essay / Education
Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator. 1 Peter 4:19 No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but
Essay / Literature
I’ve pondered before how odd it is that there is no Narnian nativity, no incarnation of Aslan in the fantasy world of C.S. Lewis. Lewis has his Christ-figure die and rise again, create heaven and earth, and return in judgement, but he carefully avoids depicting
Essay / Art
Does it make sense to thank someone for something they may have disowned? A lot has happened since Frank Schaeffer published Addicted to Mediocrity thirty years ago. He was going by the more diminutive “Franky” then, signifying, maybe, how staunchly he stood in his dad’s
Essay / Culture
Here’s a 656-page grand tour of some of the greatest moments in Western civilization: The Great Books Reader, edited by John Mark Reynolds. I highly recommend it. Then again, since I contributed to it, work with or for many of the contributors, and already like
Essay / Literature
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?—T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock…
Essay / Literature
Today, August 15, marks the 1,233rd anniversary of the Battle of Roncesvalles, a pitch battle fought by a contingent of Charlemagne’s army led by Roland, the prefect of the Breton March, against a Basque attack on the Roncesvalles pass while Roland’s men were on the
Essay / Literature
Richard Hays (from his 2001 intro to the 2nd ed. of Faith of Jesus Christ) gives some great advice on how to read Paul: “Paul, the missionary preacher, is at least as much a poet as he is a theologian.” And Hays doesn’t just mean
Essay / Literature
One of the most frustrating things about being a professor in a Great Books program is that there are so many books that can, and indeed should, be in any possible curriculum, but given the constraints related to time and space that we have to
Essay / Education
Andrew Faris over at Someone Tell Me The Story recently posted a short interview he did with me on the subject of writing. Along the way I ranted about the current state of theological writing, recommended a few resources, and said ridiculous things like “ignore
Essay / Education
I’ve just finished reading the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Our seniors read it in the Torrey Honors Institute as part of a semester of books on America. Douglass’ is one of hundreds of slave narratives, narratives which played a
Essay / Literature
Okay, war is not really swell. But today (October 25) is the anniversary of two battles that live on in our memory because of the martial virtues conspicuously displayed in them. These battles conjured poetry from two of the greatest poets in the history of