The Scriptorium Daily

Month: August 2007

  • Counseling with Boethius

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    Greg Peters
    in ,

    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

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    Fred Sanders
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    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

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    Paul Spears
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    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

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    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?

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    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about it anyway, especially the fact that Mother Teresa (1910-1997) was long racked with doubt and a sense that God had withdrawn from her life.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)

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    Fred Sanders
    in ,

    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

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    Greg Peters
    in

    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

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    Fred Sanders
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    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

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    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…

  • Principles Poll Badly

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    Paul Spears
    in ,

    Imagine a world where slavery is still a normal part of our daily lives. What if the North under Abraham Lincoln’s presidency assented to the demands of the Southern states and allowed for both the continuation of slavery and the creation of new slave states? If Lincoln was the kind of man who was moved…

  • Fifty Love Songs to the Bible (G. Campbell Morgan’s Hymnal)

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    People claim to believe all kinds of things, but if you want to find out what they really believe, see what they can sing about. As I’ve tried to identify what the great evangelical tradition has believed about Scripture, I have found plenty of arguments, manifestos, controversies, and declarations. But I also found a hymnal…

  • How Did Jesus Train?

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    by

    Scriptorium Admin
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    Jesus lived and acted as a human being filled with the Holy Spirit in dependence on His Father’s leading. Throughout His incarnation, he voluntarily refrained from employing his divine nature (Philippians 2:5-11). He thereby becomes a real example for us to follow. Accordingly, Paul can say without blinking an eye, “Follow me as I follow…