The Scriptorium Daily

Category: Blog

  • Twelve Days of Christmas Jollification

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    by

    Robert Llizo
    in ,

    For many, the famous English carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is lost on them. This became clear to me one rather cold evening on January 2 of last year, when I was at the checkout stand at a CVS drug store. After I made my purchase, the kind clerk wished me a “Happy New…

  • Phantastic Imagination

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Freddy Age Six provides an illustration for George MacDonald’s Phantastes, the truly bizarre Faerie Romance of 1858. The main character, improbably named Anodos, leaps smiling from his bed to find the floor of his room divided by a creek, complete with fish swimming in it. All of that creek-in-the-bedroom stuff is in the book, except…

  • Look Here, Martian Grubs

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    This is your planet. Not the one with the rocky islands floating on a sloshy sea, but the nice, solid, red one. Kltpzyzxm, you listen to me! Sit up at your learning stump and read aloud from your info-slab. How do you expect to make it out of larva grade if you don’t even know…

  • "Nothing God Says Shall Be Impossible"

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    In the story of Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary, there’s a bit of wordplay that doesn’t show up well in English. It’s a little Greek punning between the angel and the virgin. He says to her, “the child to be born will be called holy –the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her…

  • Evangelical Retreats and the Local Church

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    Greg Peters
    in

    Over the past twenty years (or perhaps more) it has become common for American evangelicals to go “on retreat.” In the mid-nineteenth century if an evangelical Christian went to a monastery or retreat house they would be suspected of being Roman Catholic. Retreats were what monks, nuns and priests did, not what Protestants were expected…

  • Thanks, Franky. Addicted to Mediocrity, Thirty Years Later

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    Peter David Gross
    in , ,

    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 shadow. At the time, he thought he liked standing there;…

  • Gollum Diagrams a Sentence

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    When your main line of dialogue is “my precious,” it’s not easy to diagram your sentences. But Gollum will try. And Freddy Age Eleven will take a break from his English homework to illustrate it. Crumpled papers litter the floor, with “papers about to be crumpled” on their way. Meanwhile, the page taped to the…

  • Remembering the Honored Dead

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    Robert Llizo
    in

    They went with songs to the battle, they were young. Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow. They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted, They fell with their faces to the foe. They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the…

  • Advent and the Four Last Things

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    Robert Llizo
    in

    My good friend and colleague Greg Peters’ sermon for the First Sunday of Advent inspired me to write a piece about the most quintessential aspect of the season of Advent that at first may strike one as morbid: the four “last things”: death, judgment, hell and heaven. When December comes around, we already see evidences…

  • Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent

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    Greg Peters
    in

    After the long “green season” Advent is finally upon us! Today marks the beginning of that season in the church year when we anticipate and await the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In the words of the apostle Paul that we read this morning, we “wait for the revealing of our Lord…

  • Excerpts & Essays: The Great Books Reader

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    Fred Sanders
    in , , , ,

    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 all the classic authors and modern writers in the volume,…

  • Behold the Cat Card

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    The artist known as Phoebe Age Nine has been working on this piece for a while. Every few days her friends, fans, and gallery agent have been asking, “Is the Cat Card done yet?” The terse but unworried answer has been, “Not yet. There’s still space on it.” We were beginning to worry that the…