Of the Inklings, C.S. Lewis has had the greatest impact on generations of Christian scholars. Inside of the Torrey leadership, I would guess he is the author with the greatest shared impact on all of us.
He certainly changed my life. I am a Christian in great part because of the role his works had in shaping my imagination. I am the kind of Christian I am, because Lewis wrot...
Read More...
Joe Carter is a great writer, a good man, and a fine American. He could beat me up without noticing the effort.
He is Red Bull in the blogosphere to my Skim Milk.
He is, in all probability, more influential than Senator Tom Coburn.
He is an omnivorous reader with the sense to enjoy both pop and "high" culture. On a good day, Joe Carter shows why blogging should be take...
Read More...
Featured Essay
Notice the question mark in the blog title. If I had ended with an exclamation point, this little essay would most likely be a warning for all of you never to try this. I did go through the “what was I thinking!” stage. But I am not there anymore. Indeed, I think many more thoughtful Christians should be experimenting with the fiction genre.
My new book, Five Sacred ...
Read More...
George Steiner published a book back in 1959 called Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism. Like all of Steiner's books, this first publication of his ranges over a lot of territory and sheds light all around. As with most of Steiner's books, I had to read only the parts I could understand, skipping some sections in which he seemed to be saying interesting thin...
Read More...
Robert Fagles, a translator of much that we read in Torrey, has died.
Fagles was an awe inspiring scholar of enduring importance. His greatness came as a translator of works from classical languages into English.
Like all such works, his translations were a mixed blessing and Torrey has phased out some of them. Using his work was always a tough call as the only transla...
Read More...
Some temptations are to eat chocolate during Lent: bad but not sinful. Other siren calls are to mock small kittens which is always wicked and where even the thought should lead to immediate pastoral help. But there are a few temptations that are merely calls to amusement that will, almost certainly lead to your embarrassment, but also potentially to your intellectual growth.
...
Read More...
Charles Williams was a close friend of C.S. Lewis and in the words of my esteemed colleague (and close friend) Fred Sanders "preternaturally eerie." My goal is eventually to become the preternaturally eerie friend of Fred Sanders so here is my personal list of the essential Charles Williams.
Charles Williams is an uneven writer. Often he is nearly great and other times he is...
Read More...
Featured Essay
If you’ve never encountered the poetry of Richard Wilbur, one of the most distinguished living Christian poets in the U. S., you might consider picking up his recently published Collected Poems 1943-2004. While much of twentieth century poetry contemplates the anxieties of our age or confesses the tumult of the individual psyche, Wilbur’s lyrics are often marked by a deligh...
Read More...
In the preface to Bernard Knox's book Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles' Tragic Hero and His Time, he tells this story:
As an undergraduate at Cambridge I had been awestruck by a statement of Walter Headlam, a brilliant Cambridge scholar whose career was cut short by his early death at the age of forty-eight in 1908. He claimed that when embarking on the elucidation of a Greek ...
Read More...
I don't read very much contemporary poetry; I admit that I like my poets dead and classic. But one poet I do try to keep up with is Mark Jarman, who teaches at Vanderbilt and is somehow associated with a movement called the New Formalism. I don't know what's New or Formal about it, or if it's really an Ism, but I enjoy and profit from a lot of the stuff Jarman the poet write...
Read More...
On February 7-9, Azusa Pacific is hosting a conference on the Inklings and Christian Community. Three plenary speakers are scheduled, and a selection of shorter papers will also be presented there, probably in parallel sessions.
The website says it's free, so if you're near Azusa, come on by. Two members of the Scriptorium team will be on hand: I will be presenting a p...
Read More...
Every year our freshmen begin their college education reading Homer’s Iliad. And every year our freshmen stumble upon the same sophisticated “insights” about the ancient poem. They posit that Homer, or some poet before him, able neither to explain nor to master the wine-dark sea, deified the visible phenomena as Poseidon, Ocean, nymphs, and so on. They suggest that the ...
Read More...
