Essay / Misc.

On ECUSA’s House of Bishops Statement (I)

Read Part 2 here. As an Episcopalian, I have a vested interest in what is going on in the Episcopal Church USA (ECUSA) and take great interest in the statement issued by the House of Bishops on September 25, 2007. This statement is the bishops’

Essay / Misc.

How the Trinity Freed the Slaves (part II)

(Part I was here) A friend sends this photo from the west African country of Benin. The Benin coast is known as a slave coast, and has a fearsome monument known as The Gate of No Return marking the point of departure. A different monument,

Essay / Art

Moby-Dick: Inscrutable Tides

(Spoiler alert: the whale is mean and the captain is crazy.) What a book is Melville’s Moby-Dick! Everyone knows that it’s a whopping leviathan of a novel. There are almost four hundred words just in the titles of the chapters. Melville, rarely subtle, spends more

Essay / Misc.

Quoth the Raven: Peace!

Just after three pm on February 3, 1691, a little boy was whittling on a piece of wood outside his house, when a raven landed on the steeple of the nearby church and said to him, “Look into Colossians 3:15.” The raven said this three

Essay / Misc.

Homer and Bluegrass

No, this is not a review of the great Coen Brothers movie O Brother Where Art Thou, which loosely re-told Homer’s Odyssey in an Americana mode. Instead, it’s a note about the composition of those two ancient Greek epics, Iliad and Odyssey, that bear the

Essay / Misc.

The Theology of Sleep

What in the world is sleep? You might spend as much as a third of your life in this condition, but it’s the third that most people tend to ignore. We greet each other and interact out in the waking world, but every one of

Essay / Art

“Empowered Am I to Sing” This Translation Literal

In 1877, renowned poet Robert Browning published a translation of the play Agamemnon by Aeschylus. Or perhaps “translation” is not quite the right word for it –on the title page, Browning claimed credit not for translating, but transcribing. Since the transcription crossed the language barrier

Essay / Misc.

Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned From Brighty of the Grand Canyon

Marguerite Henry wrote a whole Horseshoe Library set of books about horses, but it is her book about a Donkey that has been a major topic of discussion around my house this summer. Henry’s 1953 book Brighty of the Grand Canyon was a great companion

Essay / Misc.

Words Can’t Express the Emotions of Noses

Sometimes you look around at your dinner guests and think, “Here is a worthy group of cultured individuals. These people will appreciate the finest entertainment I can offer them. They are sophisticated, discerning, and uh, whaddayacallit, real classy.” On these occasions, I go to my

Essay / Misc.

Birthdays and Eternal Life

That we all have to age and grow older is a fact of life, especially in this post-Edenic world. My own birthdays do not cause me much consternation, probably because I do little to acknowledge my own birthday. Sure, I will accept gifts from family

Essay / Misc.

Biola’s Founders

The Summer ’07 issue of Biola Connections is out, and it includes an article I wrote about the founders of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. Biola’s origins could not be more the stuff of legend if we had been founded by John Henry, Paul

Essay / Misc.

Revisioning History in Turkey

Earlier this month I had the privilege of traveling to Turkey and Greece with 45 undergraduate students from the Torrey Honors Institute. First, it was a great trip! What a great opportunity for someone who wrote a doctoral dissertation on a twelfth-century Byzantine author (that’s