The Scriptorium Daily

Month: February 2011

  • What Augustine Confessed

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    by

    Fred Sanders
    in

    For Augustine, writing the Confessions didn’t just mean telling (confessing) all his sins. He took “confession” as the title of his work precisely because it has such a wealth of meanings: It means to speak forth the praise of God (“confess that you are great”); it means to acknowledge something (“confess the Lord Jesus,” see…

  • The Thirteen Centers of Augustine's Confessions

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    by

    Fred Sanders
    in

    Augustine’s Confessons is a uniquely rich book, so deeply felt and so carefully constructed that it beggars description. It exhausts the critical resources of centuries of commentators, and keeps on drawing new admirers who find new things there. Most well-constructed books have one central section, whether it comes early or late, whether it’s a turning-point,…

  • Jews and Arabs in Search of Wisdom: Two Book Reviews

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    by

    Robert Llizo
    in

    Scholars and students who have worked their way through Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s and Oliver Leaman’s masterfully edited work, A History of Islamic Philosophy (Routledge, 2001) will, if they had bother to read the two introductions by Nasr and Leaman respectively, come away with an appreciation for how difficult it was to define the parameters of…

  • Contour of Two-Fisted Gun Monger with Knife Breath

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Since the violence-drenched, action-soaked, gore-marinated trailer, there has been much debate about the details of Two-Fisted Gun Monger with Knife Breath. What does his costume look like? How many guns does he mong? How do the knives come out on his breath? Here is a clearer drawing of him. For this image, Freddy Age Ten…

  • The King's Business Requires Haste

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    by

    Fred Sanders
    in

    Several years ago, I headed up a project that put ten years of the old Biola journal The King’s Business online. That means that anybody interested in Biola’s early history (1910-1920), or conservative Protestantism, or California religion, can read these otherwise hard to find issues firsthand. The site has been down for a while, but…

  • Two-Fisted Gun Monger with Knife Breath!!!

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    by

    Fred Sanders
    in

    Sure, movies are violent these days. But in between the violent bits, there’s always a bunch of dialogue and character development and stuff. What we really need is a movie designed for pure violence. What we need is a character who is designed for nothing but sheer violent mayhem. What we need is a hero…

  • Review of John Jefferson Davis' Worship and the Reality of God

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    Greg Peters
    in

    As an Anglican, what drew me to this book was Davis’ subtitle: An Evangelical Theology of Real Presence. I imagined that the book must be about the Eucharist (and it is) but as it turns out, it is so much more. The book is a kind of tour de force – a primer on pre-modern,…

  • Don Quixote’s Last Laugh

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    Robert Llizo
    in

    One of the most frustrating things about being a professor in a Great Books program is that there are so many books that can, and indeed should, be in any possible curriculum, but given the constraints related to time and space that we have to deal with in the Torrey Honors Institute, some of these…

  • Strong Medicine, Eventually: Boethius

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    My favorite fifth grader recently read the classic book Where the Red Fern Grows, and had the homework assignment of writing a letter to the main character, consoling him for the death of his beloved hound. (Oh, by the way, retroactive spoiler alert there; my bad.) The first draft said something like this: Dear Billy,…

  • Orchestral Evangelists

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    In a class on Matthew’s gospel, my students are learning how to hear the voice of Matthew the evangelist, to understand how he structures his arguments, how he tells his stories, and what his particular theological concerns are as he reports the words and actions of Jesus. After the initial rush of excitement about how…

  • The Good Book Blog

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Talbot School of Theology recently launched a faculty team blog called The Good Book Blog. It’s a well-designed site with more than thirty contributors. That list includes a few Big Important Names, accomplished scholars you didn’t think would ever condescend to appear in the tohuwabohu of the blogosphere. It also includes some profs whose names…

  • The Importance of Church History and the Christian Tradition

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    by

    Greg Peters
    in

    When I’m asked what I teach or what my area of expertise is, I am often unsure of how to respond. I have a Ph.D. in theology but I focused on the medieval period. I teach in a great books program that includes texts in philosophy, theology, history, literature, etc. I often write books and…