The Scriptorium Daily

Category: Literature

  • Let Us Now Praise Study Bibles

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    by

    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    The ESV Study Bible is soon to be released, and from the plentiful pre-release materials that I’ve seen online, this promises to be a great resource. The editors seem to have crammed a lot of helpful things into a single volume, including background info, maps where you need them, and essays that I wouldn’t normally…

  • Housekeeping

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    Melissa Schubert
    in ,

    Like her biblical namesake, the Ruth of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) is a sojourner among strangers. The almost misleading title of the novel suggests that the novel will be concerned with the daily habits that constitute and stabilize domestic life. Instead, the novel’s protagonists inhabit their house without feeling at home. Similarly, they live in…

  • Such Pride is Praise: Spenser’s Amoretti #5

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    RVDELY thou wrongest my deare harts desire, In finding fault with her too portly pride: the thing which I doo most in her admire, is of the world vnworthy most enuide. For in those lofty lookes is close implide, scorn of base things, & sdeigne of foule dishonor: thretning rash eies which gaze on her…

  • New Love to Entertain (Spenser’s Amoretti #4)

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    NEW yeare forth looking out of Ianus gate, Doth seeme to promise hope of new delight: and bidding th’ old Adieu, his passed date bids all old thoughts to die in dumpish spright. And calling forth out of sad Winters night, fresh loue, that long hath slept in cheerlesse bower: wils him awake, and soone…

  • Sovereign Beauty (Spenser’s Amoretti #3)

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    THE souerayne beauty which I doo admyre, witnesse the world how worthy to be prayzed: the light wherof hath kindled heauenly fyre, in my fraile spirit by her from basenesse raysed. That being now with her huge brightnesse dazed, base thing I can no more endure to view: but looking still on her I stand…

  • By the Book

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    Melissa Schubert
    in ,

    “The B-I-B-L-E” doesn’t really pack the same punch for adults as it does for the pre-K Sunday school crowd. But gussied up in the dignity of an Elizabethan homily, the admonition to read my Bible once again demands my attention. “A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading of Holy Scripture” is the first sermon of over…

  • Unquiet Thought (Spenser’s Amoretti #2)

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    VNQUIET thought, whom at the first I bred, Of th’ inward bale of my loue pined hart: and sithens haue with sighes and sorrowes fed, till greater then my wombe thou woxen art. Breake forth at length out of the inner part, in which thou lurkest lyke to vipers brood: and seeke some succour both…

  • Leaves, Lines, and Rymes (Spenser’s Amoretti #1)

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    HAPPY ye leaues when as those lilly hands, which hold my life in their dead doing might shall handle you and hold in loues soft bands, lyke captiues trembling at the victors sight. And happy lines, on which with starry light, those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look and reade the sorrowes of my dying…

  • Kit Smart: Crazy Praise

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    Christoper Smart (1722–71) , known to companions as Kit, was a learned poet who wrote plenty of poems which are mostly unreadable now by anybody outside the guild of English literature studies: Ode to the Earl of Northumberland, To Ethelinda, and Lines After Horace —that sort of thing. He edited a magazine and got into…

  • Literary Nicknames

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    When a nickname really fits somebody, it catches on and comes to mind easily. But when somebody doesn’t have a good nickname, it’s no good forcing things. I was recently leafing through a fun book, Asa Don Dickinson’s 1931 list of classics called The Thousand Best Books (see it here). Dickinson was a world-class bibliofanatic,…

  • Michael Ward Has Found the Secret of Narnia

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    George MacDonald once wrote, “It is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It…

  • To Judge the Quick and the Dead

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    Melissa Schubert
    in

    I usually keep quiet my liking for musical theater. But this summer I discovered that what I took to be my uniquely under-refined taste is actually common in my eccentric community. On a sailboat moored along the Turkish Coast of the Aegean Sea, I sang along to the Wicked soundtrack with nearly twenty students who…