Category: Blog
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Faith is Nothing
Faith is nothing. Really, it is. In fact, one way to ensure missing the gospel is to think faith is something. But it’s not. It’s really nothing at all. Faith is a negative concept that opens up space to speak about something else. It has what John Webster calls a ‘rhetoric of indication’, one which…
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Why Ephesians is the Greatest (Thomas Goodwin)
The puritan Thomas Goodwin (1600-1679) wrote a breathtaking commentary on Ephesians: about a thousand dense pages that only cover up through chapter two, verse 11. Before launching into his exposition, Goodwin offers a few remarks about just how great the epistle to the Ephesians is. He quotes Jerome’s comment that Ephesians is “like the heart…
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Passing the Time
Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886) wrote a wise book on The Study of Words in 1851. Trench is excited about words, and keen to spread that excitement to his readers. “Words are living powers, are the vesture, yea, even the body, which thoughts weave for themselves,” he says on the first page of this long love-letter…
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Happy Vikings Go Exploring
Vikings: “They’re cool,” says Freddy Age Seven warily, “but they’re not good.” These Vikings, though, are happy enough adventurers. Their tiny boat has a grin of its own as it rocks through the spiky waves. Rows of oars dip down into the sea and a strange, boxy, union-jacky flag structure surmounts the truncated mast. Loot,…
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Worst Coleridge Poem Ever!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the greatest minds ever to write in English. But aside from the justly famous Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he didn’t manage to finish very many extended poems. That mind should have produced an English epic, but instead he produced Wordsworth –no small contribution to English letters. And aside…
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Cowboy Psalm: Turn ’em ta Tumbleweeds
Psalm 83 depicts a dreadful scene: the enemies of God’s people devising schemes to wipe them out of existence. Against this background, the Psalmist prays for deliverance, asking God to do to these enemies the kind of things he did through champions in the book of Judges. One line is especially striking. I grew up…
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Why We Should Read Lesser-Known Books, or, the Anselm I Never Knew
Anselm was born in 1033 in Aosta, Italy and while young was put under the tutelage of a relative who was a professional teacher. This man kept Anselm confined to the house so that he would study more diligently so that when Anselm returned home he was frightened by both his family and neighbors to…
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Coleridge the Wind Harp
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was evidently fascinated by Aeolian harps, string instruments played by the wind without human intervention. Just as novelties they are fascinating instruments, no doubt, but Coleridge saw in them an emblem of poetry itself. In fact, in one of his early poems, 1795’s The Eolian Harp, Coleridge takes the wind harp as…
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Genevieve Foster and the World of Columbus
Genevieve Foster is the author of a number of histories for young readers, published in the forties and fifties. Foster is a great story-teller who knows how to include all the information you’d expect in a kids’ history, but who also reads widely enough to gather up some surprises from primary text and older histories.…
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Cramming for the French Test
Back in 1995, I found myself in a situation that is common for graduate students: needing to demonstrate basic reading knowledge of a modern language in case I should need it in my future research. The kind of knowledge required isn’t exactly what you’d call learning the language, certainly not with any fluency. But it…