Change: Looking Back and Looking Forward

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I am waxing a bit nostalgic at the moment. Fifteen years have gone by since I first faced a class of eighteen eager and thoughtful young people, wondering who this strange guy in tweed playing second fiddle to the charismatic, magic-producing founder of the Torrey Honors Institute was. In the weeks before my very first [...]

Christmas Playlist 2012

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A Christmas tradition we have in the Sanders family is to make a new mix of music each year, to play in our own house and to give to friends. We’ve posted the playlists here at Scriptorium (see four mixes and four more from previous years). Here’s the 2012 collection: Folk Christmas Mix  We’re taking “folk” in [...]

A.T. Pierson’s Biola Connections

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I was asked recently about the relationship between A. T. Pierson (1837 -1911) and the early years of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. I am not aware of any direct connection –Pierson never worked at BIOLA, for example. But Pierson and Biola’s founders were the same kind of people, devoted to the same things, and [...]

Becoming a Christian

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Little of the growth in my life comes from learning something new. Instead, it comes from learning—really learning—something old. Or it comes from getting inside something I’ve known about for a long time. It comes from re-examining, from walking over the territory yet again, hoping that a fresh look will yield a sense of things [...]

The Need to Work

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Another school year has come and gone and summer is now in full swing. In fact, I write this before I head home to swim with my two sons. Nothing is better in the summer for a university professor than sleeping in, doing some reading and writing and going for a late afternoon swim with [...]

Dr. Johnson’s Cat

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Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the literary giant behind Rasselas and the first truly great English dictionary, had a cat. He actually had several cats over the course of his life, actually, but the only one we have information about is a black cat named Hodge. Johnson’s biographer, Boswell, hated cats, but grudgingly reported on Johnson’s fondness [...]

A Noble Risk:
The Making of a Wheatstone Conference Theme

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Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator.  1 Peter 4:19 No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk [...]

What John Mark Founded

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Today Biola held a special farewell reception for John Mark Reynolds, who is becoming provost of Houston Baptist University after 18 years as director of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola. The Dean of Humanities emceed the university-wide event, at which the president gave Reynolds a genuine Jim Rice homerun baseball that he caught himself [...]

Metathon 2012 – Dante’s Inferno

Dr. Geier: “It’s interesting that Satan’s uninteresting.”

Illustration de Gustave Doré de Satan vu par Dante Alighieri dans son La Divine Comédie.

The Metathon ended Sunday night, complete with its traditional climactic cake. Lots of us stayed up an hour or two after eating to follow loose conversational threads from the last few days (“So what did you mean that knowledge is an image?”) or to play with our newly-minted inside jokes. It’s amazing the sort of work [...]

Metathon 2012 – Dante’s Inferno

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Photo credit: Shannon Leith. Check out her website. She’s incredible. After about a decade of close readings, late-night discussions, pizza, cake, and camaraderie, the Torrey Metathon is in the last year of its current iteration, and we’re going out in style–with Dante for company. If you’ve never been to a Metathon, the formula’s pretty simple: get [...]