Featured Essay
Thomas Traherne was born in England in 1637, educated at Oxford and ordained an Anglican priest. During his short life he served as a parish priest and as a private chaplain. He died in 1674 at only 37 years old. During his lifetime he published only one work, the Roman Forgeries but just after his death Christian Ethicks appeared and in the past three and a half centuries othe...
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Asking a good question is not hard, doing so on purpose is difficult.
A good question comes to me when I see beauty. Beauty makes me wonder and marvel. Beauty attracts and so leads naturally to questions and to motivation to answer those questions. If the object of beauty is worthy or a person, then those questions will continue for the life of my relationship with the belov...
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Featured Essay
There is nothing so innocent that our culture cannot use it to hurt us.
As a parent of two daughters, I know their inclination to dress up and play at being a princess can be used to harm them.
This truth can make a parent cranky and cause him to fear harm where harm is not likely to come. This is even true of the Disney films and the Disney princess. The films are far fr...
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Featured Essay
In his visionary book Finding Common Ground, Tim Downs noted that "because Christians tend to be answer people, we're not especially skilled at asking good questions; questions that aren't simplistic, leading, or downright insulting." Ouch.
In Biola's Torrey Honors Institute, we're answer people, but we teach socratically. That means our primary job as teachers is to ask que...
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Featured Essay
College students are encouraged to live a balanced life and then each department demands one hundred percent effort. This hypocrisy is not intentional, but a result of departmental myopia. Most professors can only see the importance of their own area.
I once had a colleague tell me that the rigorous general education of Torrey had lowered his students GPA by three or four pe...
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Featured Essay
Counter-intuitive as it may seem, education is a college student's job. You don't get a salary, you don't get health or retirement benefits or paid vacation, but it is still your job, and a peculiar one at that. You do not make things or sell things. You neither maintain nor fix things. You are a what Paul Spears called an "intellectual craftsman". The materials for your la...
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Featured Essay
You should assume as a matter of course that at least once in your college career you will behold the blue screen of death or that your laptop will be either stolen or dropped down the fire escape or forgotten in Starbucks and that it will occur in the days before you must turn in a huge project that will determine your entire grade. I personally have contracted CPU-freezing...
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This week John Starke at The Gospel Coalition Blog ran a series of brief interviews about reading habits. They asked Carl Trueman, Bradley Green, and me to say a few words about what we read, how we pick books, what we're reading, and so on.
Here's my key advice:
The most important advice I can give about reading is to make decisions in advance about what you want from t...
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Shaun Williams runs Williams Great Books Tutorials here in southern California. That means she leads young people through classic texts, the kind of books that have instructed, challenged, and baffled generations of the greatest adult minds in history. And somehow, it works! These are books that you can learn from all through your life, and Shaun leads students into a very ea...
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Featured Essay
To My Freshmen:
Okay, so that may be premature. We’ve only just met, after all. Five months ago you were a sea of undifferentiated faces only loosely attached to names (but great names—names like Bustos and Magness, Tonti and Duarte, Mendelson, Zilka, and Van Vlear). To call you ‘my’ freshmen presupposes a kind of possession that runs against the grain of, well, bein...
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Once upon a time, somebody asked C. S. Lewis to choose a list of the best books ever written, and he declined.
He said he wasn't qualified. He also said it was a bad idea to make a list of greatest books. And finally, he insisted that if you did make such a list, you certainly shouldn't try to use it to educate anybody.
For those of us who teach and study in a great boo...
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This January I'll be teaching an intensive class on the Trinity as part of Biola's innovative IRIS program. It'll be a three-week class that I'll be co-teaching with nine other Biola profs, intentionally stirring together as many academic disciplines as we can fit into one experience of general education.
The 200 students who register for IRIS will get to spend time with di...
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