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 the Torrey faculty. Any academic program always hopes to hire professors who will be a good fit, but when you hire somebody who’s further along... Read more
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, and he is, most of all, very alone. He is alone for many reasons: his schooling separated him (geographically, at first) from his family; his... Read more
Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact was a Roman Catholic comic book that ran every two weeks from 1946 to 1972, and contained a little bit of everything. Here are two panels from a Lent feature. Treasure Chest generated so much content that it was bound to be uneven. This particular story is striking, I think because it lurches back and forth between okay and awful so quickly. I find the punchline “I’m giving up back-biting” to be maximally awkward,... Read more
It’s not exactly a comic book, but there is an old catechism that certainly makes an interesting use of sequential images for the purposes of teaching Christian doctrine. The Huntington Free Library in the Bronx published a facsimile edition of a “pictographic Quechua catechism” that is a wonderful and engaging little booklet. Here is the page that corresponds to the Apostles’ Creed: You do have to stare pretty hard at these little stick figures (click through for enlargement), but admit it:... Read more
This is a gospel tract I designed, an evangelism tool. Well, it’s not so much an evangelism tool as a “how to think well about evangelism” tool, not to be used in presenting the gospel but instead to be used as a spur to think through the dynamics of evangelism. It was originally printed as a two-sided little booklet that you could start reading at either end. The two stories collided in the middle and came to a common resolution.... Read more
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 longer be literally followed from place to dusty place. Jesus’ original disciples from the Galilee ministry were now the official apostles of the dangerous Jerusalem... Read more
Downstairs: A well-dressed reveler arrives, as previous guests doff exo-togs at a handy hat rack. Climbing a ladder to the second floor, partiers pile up on at least two chairs to watch the big game. I count at least a dozen there. Snacks are on the third floor, and the board groans under these lavish provisions. An attic room is provided for the kittens who would rather scuffle than spectate. Read more
As I launch into a semester of teaching Hebrews and a year of hearing it preached, I wanted to exhume these 3 Scriptorium posts I wrote in late 2010, the last time I taught a class on the book. By the way, the little title logo I made for this series takes the first page of Hebrews from the manuscript p46 as its anchor. Most Helpful Books on Hebrews: Not quite a straightforward “best commentaries” list, but this assortment of... Read more
(Reposted from 2010) Hebrews is a book of the Bible for people in hard times. Should you read it now, or later? In terms of the book’s actual background, we don’t know much for certain about the situation of those who first heard these words. There are dark suggestions of hardship in a few verses of chapter 10: You endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For... Read more
The book of Hebrews seems to have been written for the ear. Or, if that claim is true, perhaps it should be made in this form: the sermon to the Hebrews was designed to be spoken aloud. The author of Hebrews frequently uses words that indicate he is thinking of the sermon as oral speech rather than written text (2:5, 5:11, 6:9, 8:1, 9:5, 11:32). He doesn’t use expressions like like “as I wrote about earlier,” but “as I was... Read more
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