Category: Uncategorized
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Colossians in Cambridge (Torrey Cambridge 2024)
This July, professors Paul Spears and Fred Sanders are taking a group of Torrey students to Cambridge, England to read Colossians with all our might for three weeks. Every July since 2010, a few dozen students from Torrey Honors College have done this special summer course in Cambridge. We cycle through Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians…
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“Invest Me With a Graduate’s Gown” (Kit Smart)
This summer a group of Torrey Honors College students will be travelling to Cambridge, England for a three-week course in Great Books by local authors. One such local author on our list is Christopher Smart (1722-1771; Pembroke College BA 1744). We’ll read and discuss his long, later poems Song to David and Jubilate Agno. But…
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The Best Half of Augustine’s City of God
Everybody should read Augustine’s City of God. (Go ahead; I’ll wait. All done? Great.) To do our part toward that end, we assign it as mandatory first-year reading in the Torrey Honors College. But “vast is the work, and arduous,” as its author noted, so our tradition is to cut the page count by half,…
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Five Tips for Reading Homer’s Iliad
The first book we read in Torrey Honors College is Homer’s Iliad. Incoming students have to read it before the first day of class, before they’ve met their professors or their cohort. Here are five strategies for reading the book well, understanding it deeply, and getting through it efficiently.
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“Faculty Favorites Outside Our Curriculum”
Here’s a fun list from some profs in the Torrey Honors College: Books we love so much we would each include them in our regular curriculum (if we could all agree on them and on what to cut to make room for them). This list was compiled and edited by Hannah Williamson for the admissions…
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Polanus: Tales from the Classroom
Ten hours of discussion of the actual text wasn’t enough for us, so Ryan Hurd and I are inviting some guests to come talk with us about the trinitarian theology of Amandus Polanus. This week we asked Dr. Tyler Wittman to talk with us about using Polanus’ Eighteen Axioms on the Trinity to teach the…
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Best Picture Books Ever!
by Danielle Hitchen Story books are an integral part of forming a child’s moral imagination, therefore good story books are integral part of forming it well. As a child reads, she has a chance to go on adventures, face dilemmas, and explore new terrain all from the comfort of a cozy chair. The safety of…
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Trauma and the Trinitarian “God of All Comfort” (Review)
In the latest issue of the Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care, I co-authored a book review with Chris Gibson, a PhD student at Gateway Seminary. Chris and I have been working on the doctrine of divine impassibility and how it relates to human suffering. So when we saw Scott Harrower’s book, God of…
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Biblia Pauperum (Ascension)
There’s a particular type of late medieval document that we call a Biblia Pauperum. We call it that because at some point in the nineteenth century scholars started calling it that, but “Bible of the Poor” is not very descriptive: there’s nothing about these books that suggests the intended audience is either especially poor or…
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The Joy of Psalmtooning
Psalmtooning? Well, I haven’t heard that word in about ten years. But I made it up, and I used to do it all the time back when my kids were little. Psalmtooning is a form of Bible study that encourages children to use their natural love of cartooning to draw out the meaning from Scripture.…
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Why It’s Hard to Trace “Trajectories and Continuities” (Muller)
In Richard Muller’s volume on the doctrine of God (vol. 3 of his Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics series), he sets himself the task of reconnecting some broken links in the history of theology, links without which the doctrine of God cannot be grasped. It is a complex task, and no wonder that it takes thousands of…
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How It’s Supposed to End
When you make a plan to kill a public person, the kind of public person who is animated by a powerful inner force, you’d better make sure to kill him. But even if you succeed there’s that powerful inner force to deal with: what if, by killing him, you just let it out? The problem…