The Scriptorium Daily

Month: September 2011

  • Tirso de Molina's Tragic Rake

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    by

    Robert Llizo
    in ,

    Everyone has his or her notion of what constitutes a relaxing evening. For me, among other things, it is an occasional trip to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles to watch and experience an operatic performance. This weekend, neither time nor finances permitted such a venture, so I got a DVD version of Mozart’s…

  • "And Show Them to Thy Blood"

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    by

    Fred Sanders
    in

    Psalm 68 is not just a run-of-the-mill imprecatory psalm. It combines “smite my enemy” prayers with the “God is a warrior” motif, and the result is a vision of God’s wrath and judgment that sounds more like Beowulf or Conan the Barbarian than any other part of the Bible. I say this advisedly, because back…

  • Reveryone & Sour Faith

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    by

    Fred Sanders
    in

    I do love the ESV translation, and all its digital manifestations have helped it take over my Bible study. But here’s a tweak to recommend: the in-line references at the ESV website are too big and too dark. The extra letters keep catching my eye, resulting in the formation of crazy words. Sounds like Scooby…

  • Canon Within the Canon

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    by

    Fred Sanders
    in

    No Christian should ever have a least favorite book of the Bible. All Scripture is God-breathed, and the whole Bible in all its parts is good for teaching, training, and equipping us. But it is perfectly permissible, and even desirable, to have a favorite book of the Bible. It could be the book that first…

  • Does God Have to…?

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    by

    Matt Jenson
    in

    I’ve spent much of this week talking with students about Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man). We don’t lecture in the Torrey Honors Institute; we discuss. To start off a class, we try and develop a crafty question, one that immediately sets the students before an issue at the heart of the text…

  • See This Sculpture? The Sculptor Didn't.

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    The caption under it says “Violin Player by Clara Crampton (The artist has been blind since birth.) You need not rely on the eyes alone.” It’s an illustration on page 7 of The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides (first published 1941). Nicolaides’ Natural Way was nigh canonical at the college where I studied…

  • "Get to Work!" -Charles Wesley

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    Here is a hymn Charles Wesley wrote about work. Like nearly all Wesley hymns, it’s tightly woven together with Scripture-allusion. It has simpler diction than many of Wesley’s hymns, because it was written for children. Actually, it was written for the orphans in the orphanage founded by George Whitefield in Georgia, for them to sing…

  • Forgiven and Born Again: Two Things at Once

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    Fred Sanders
    in

    It’s one thing to be forgiven, and another thing to be born again. Both happen at once, but they are distinct from each other. They have to be distinguished clearly, in order to be united perfectly. It’s hard to know whether it’s more important to distinguish them, or to insist that they go together. John…

  • The Voice of the Raven

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    by

    Fred Sanders
    in

    Just after three pm on February 3, 1691, a little boy was whittling on a piece of wood outside his house, when a raven landed on the steeple of the nearby church and said to him, “Look into Colossians 3:15.” The raven said this three times. So the boy, obedient lad that he was, went…

  • Charles Coulombe on "The Decline and Fall of the Anglo Empire"

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    by

    Robert Llizo
    in ,

    Mr. Coulombe’s latest offering on Taki’s Magazine takes as its starting point the recent bill signed into law by our “undead” governor and moves on to explore a more fundamental issue about illegal immigration: the culture of “self-indulgence and sloth” espoused by the Anglo elite. In the words of the new Archbishop of Los Angeles:…

  • Peter of Damascus: Making the Old New Again

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    Greg Peters
    in

    The anonymous preacher of Ecclesiastes once said, “Of making many books there is no end…” and I bet he’s right. As long as there are readers there will always be books, and not just old books but new ones too. Sometimes, however, new books are about old topics, thus helping to make something old new again.…

  • Eager to Please: A Virtue or a Vice?

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    by

    Fred Sanders
    in

    In Colossians 1:10, Paul prays that the Colossians would be able to “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him.” The underlying Greek sentence is a little rougher, reading something like this: “to walk worthy of the Lord in all pleasing.” Most responsible translations do something to smooth that out, because…