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 session, John Mark Reynolds was working his customary magic, deeply engaging the students in an adventure of Socratic inquiry, and I was wondering how I... Read more
Rob Bell’s new book just came out. In its title, borrowed from one of Raymond Carver’s short story collections, Bell promises to lay bare What We Talk About When We Talk About God. Carver’s quietly aching scenes of love, or perhaps more of the reality of failed and blocked and misconstrued gestures towards intimacy that pass for and fall short of love, lie at the intersection of reportage, elegy and hope. Love is hard, small, elusive, we learn. The idea behind... Read more
One thing I learned late, growing up in my evangelical Christian community, was the rhythm of the church calendar. It always struck me as a little odd, when I was a kid, that we would interrupt our regularly scheduled sermon series on a Pauline epistle for a three-day celebration of our Lord’s death and resurrection. When Christmas preparations began in September (especially for choir kids like me), why did Easter seem to be relegated to such an emphatic second place?... Read more
This is a cartoon that was circulated in grad school. I’ve seen it published a few times but don’t know who to credit it to. The captions sound like some sort of Teutonic Latin: “Theologischer Atomphysiker” means “theological atomic physicist,” while “multiplikatoren” and “simplifikatoren” are “multipliers” and “simplifiers.” Then the punch line is in English: I may be misremembering, but I think I’ve also seen this with a German punchline. The cartoon seems to have originated in discussions of the... Read more
The cartoon adventures of St. Patrick, from a 1947 comic book called Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact. This four-page adventure by George F. Foley tells the saint’s story in a way designed to hold the interest of a young Roman Catholic audience in the USA at midcentury. Treasure Chest is on my list of Top Five Christian Comics ever, not so much because it was well crafted, but because of the sheer volume of faith-based cartooning that saw print there.... Read more
In his first mass as Roman pontiff, Pope Francis delivered a short sermon in the Sistine Chapel in the presence of the cardinals. The sermon was in Italian rather than Latin, and even the Italian was kind of chatty in places (“non parliamo di Croce. Questo non c’entra,” he has the hapless Peter say: “Let’s not talk of the cross; that has nothing to do with it.”). And did I mention the homily was short? After eight years of Benedict XVI,... Read more
I spend most of my time working with undergraduate students, directing them academically through the Torrey Honors Institute or offering life and/or pastoral advice as they learn to navigate the oftentimes difficult and uncertain terrain of adulthood. I love what I do and I would not trade it for any other job. What I have noticed, however, in the nearly eight years that I have been teaching at Biola University and working with these undergraduates is that they tend to... Read more
The character Razumikhin in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is one of the most personable figures in the book. Intelligent, loyal, resourceful, and generally pleasant, he’s one of the few people you can imagine looking forward to spending a few days with in St. Petersburg. But when he gets mad, he swears like Captain Haddock from the Tintin comics. I don’t just mean that he swears like a sailor; I mean that like Haddock he has a pattern of shouting bizarre... Read more
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 on a different theme each semester. In the first semester, however, the two curriculums have a significant amount of overlap. Both houses begin with the... Read more
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 recollection,” he says, “of any first or bedrock language… My upbringing was totally trilingual, and the background always polyglot. My radiant Mama would habitually begin a... Read more
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