Category: Blog
-
So Many Good Books: Wesley’s Christian Library
John Wesley lived by the Bible and claimed to be a man of one book (homo unius libri). But his single-minded focus on Scripture did not result from failing to read other books. It was something he achieved on the far side of wide reading and much learning. Wesley knew how to learn from Christians…
-
Covered Wagon
Moseyin’ along in the wild west, this stick-figure settler encourages his stick-figure horse to keep it movin’. The stick figure wheels keep turnin’ over, bumpin’ along on the long line of holes in the printer paper, I mean territory. The stick-figure sky is bright blue, and the settler sings out, “My heart’s as big as…
-
WWJD: How Could Jesus Do Miracles?
My conversion to Christianity occurred in November 1968. I was a junior at the University of Missouri, chaos was violently spreading across American college campuses, and it was in the early stages of the Jesus Movement. I came to Christ through the ministry of Campus Crusade and, upon my conversion, I became a pretty radical…
-
Counseling with Boethius
During my graduate school years, I was fortunate to have worked on the pastoral staff at three different churches. They were all great experiences with different challenges and expectations. One element that was common to each position, however, was the need to engage at times in some form of pastoral counseling, bringing consolation to those…
-
John Wesley’s Mom Whoops Aristotle
Susanna Wesley’s (1669-1742) claim to fame is that her boys John and Charles grew up to lead a world-changing international revival movement. Her complete works have been published in a single volume. She was a full-time home-schooling mom, and didn’t write very much by scholarly standards. But what she put on paper is ample evidence…
-
Fairness, Chocolate Cake and Neurosurgery
That’s not fair! When you live in a house with children you come to realize that the concept of fair/unfair is the lens through which they view most of the world. For example, when there is only one piece of chocolate cake in the house and two children you have a problem. Some parents have…
-
Susanna Wesley vs. Thomas a Kempis
Imagine what it must have been like to be the mother of John and Charles Wesley. Susanna Wesley (1669-1742) managed the task somehow, but I’m not sure how. Charles was such a busy fellow that, having decided to be a hymn-writer, he produced over 5,000 hymns. And as for John, he was driven for years…
-
Why Was Mother Teresa Sad?
Next month, a book of Mother Teresa’s personal letters will be released. Almost nobody’s read it, but everybody’s talking about it anyway, especially the fact that Mother Teresa (1910-1997) was long racked with doubt and a sense that God had withdrawn from her life. According to a surprisingly good article in Time, the book apparently…
-
On Great Artistic Ages (Like the Athens of Aeschylus)
How did Aeschylus do it? His plays are so powerful and engaging that he will never lose his place in the front ranks of dramatists. We only have seven of his plays extant —a tenth of what he produced— but even if we had only one, we would recognize in it the hand of a…
-
Bringing Europe to Christ, Again
On June 23 of this year, Pope Benedict XVI addressed a number of professors and rectors of European universities. In his address, the pope reminded those present that “Europe is presently experiencing a certain social instability and diffidence in the face of traditional values, yet her distinguished history and her established academic institutions have much…
-
“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 from Greek to English, though, we have to call it…
-
Heavy Surf
As John Ruskin says in his 1857 work The Elements of Drawing, “Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colours variously shaded.” To the eye of a painter, everything is color-patch bumping into color-patch. At the thin edge where…