One of our semesters at Torrey Honors Institute is called On Learning and Knowledge, and it is an excellent thematic investigation of epistemology, philosophy of education, and even pedagogy, among other things. Our juniors in this course read Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Frederick Douglass and John Henry Newman, along with Descartes, Pascal, Locke, [...]
I am fairly certain that John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University has been on the required reading list of the Torrey Honors Institute since I began working here eight years ago. Given how we teach in Torrey, however, I had never had the opportunity to lead sessions on the text. So, back in [...]
The book of Hebrews is the grand finale of the first semester in the Torrey Honors Institute. After the freshman fall, the curriculums for Torrey’s two houses take their separate ways: the Morgan House following a roughly chronological path to bring them up to the twentieth century in senior spring and the Johnson House dwelling [...]
Just a few pages into George Steiner’s 1999 autobiographical work Errata: An Examined Life, he tells a story about how he started learning Greek at age 5. No, “Greek at 5″ isn’t the amazing part. The amazing part, to me, is that he grew up knowing French, German, and English equally well. “I have no [...]
Biola’s Torrey Honors Institute has just announced the hiring of Dr. Chris Mitchell, who will begin teaching at Torrey next fall. As one of the members of the search committee that selected Chris, I’ve had the chance to get to know him over the past few months, and I am excited about adding him to [...]
I happened to be re-reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment the same weekend that we hosted a recruiting event for the Torrey Honors Institute. As I spent time reflecting on my membership in this learning community, I noticed the stark contrast of the radical isolation that Raskolnikov suffers. Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov is an intellectual and an idealist, [...]
The Winter 2013 issue of Biola Magazine is out (here for the website, here for the pdf), and its cover story is about the university’s new initiative to give away loads of educational content. Check out the Open Biola site to see how much they’ve managed to put online already: lectures, articles, and entire courses. I call Open [...]
Over at the blog of the American Society of Church History, Torrey’s Dr. Greg Peters reflects on some lesser-known writings of John Henry Newman. Newman’s most famous book about learning was his Idea of a University, but he also explored the ideals of Benedictine monasticism as a model for meaningful education. Peters reports on some [...]
In the Torrey Honors Institute we read Western classics; then we sit in a circle and talk about them. This peculiar form of education (and the list of classic books) can be traced back to the General Honors course offered at Colombia University beginning in the fall semester of 1920. It’s remarkable how many of [...]
I teach classes at the best Bible Institute in Los Angeles. I also work at Biola University, but that’s different. Biola was founded as a Bible Institute, way back in 1908. The founders of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles knew all about colleges (Lyman Stewart supported many colleges financially) and seminaries (R.A. Torrey was [...]
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