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, [...]
At the very beginning of the Christian church, before it was ever called “Christian” or often called “church,” it was a large group of new believers in Jesus gathered in Jerusalem, figuring things out as they went along. They were learning how to be disciples of a Lord who, having ascended into heaven, could no [...]
In his 1982 essay “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms,” Wendell Berry used poetry and marriage as images of each other. It was hard to tell whether the essay was mainly about poetry or mainly about marriage, because the two were mutually illuminating. Berry moved his analogical eye back and forth between these [...]
Several years ago I preached a sermon on Joshua 9, a chapter my Bible titles, “The Gibeonite Deception.” The story tells how the Israelites, fresh from their initial victories over the Canaanites at Jericho and Ai, were tricked into making covenant with the people from the city of Gibeon. The Gibeonites were Hivites (Josh 9:7), [...]
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was an Italian composer whose music, both secular and sacred, was influential in the transition from Renaissance forms of music to the Baroque period. He is well known for his use and development of two different styles of composition: Renaissance polyphony and the Baroque basso continuo technique (i.e., musical parts that provide [...]
The Commentary on the Sentences of Petrus Lombardus, by Giles of Viterbo. Giles of Viterbo (1469-1532) was the most active and creative theologians who tried to bring together two worlds: the Renaissance and its call to return to the sources of classical antiquity, and the medieval scholastic tradition. Nothing brings out this creative syncretic [...]
I have a near-three-year-old girl who lives within a mile of both sets of grandparents. This means that some aspect of the Disney princess world will infiltrate our lives (yes, ours, not just hers) with or without my consent. The first foray involved mysterious new [...]
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 [...]
As I was driving around LA the other day listening to NPR, two stories run back-to-back caught my attention. The first was a story about the recent Nobel-prize winners John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka, who have uncovered a means for turning any cell into a stem cell from which an organ or even a [...]
I like vintage barber shops. Ever since I was a boy, they have been part of my life (of course, in those days, they were simply known as regular, run-of-the-mill barber shops). My father would take me to a Cuban barber who had a faint resemblance to Floyd, the barber in the “Andy Griffiths Show.” [...]
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