Category: Christianity

To Fail and Be Forgiven

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Ever since discovering Dorothy Sayers’ delightful gentleman detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, on BBC Radio years ago, she has captured my imagination. Eventually, I found that she was a Christian author contemporary with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. And then when I went to read Dante’s Divine Comedy I was surprised to find that her translation is one of the most famous and well-regarded translations. Not only was she a master of the mystery genre, she was also a remarkable scholar, particularly in a time when it was still difficult for women to achieve the academic success of their male counterparts….

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A Life of Love and Grace

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Inspiration from a Biography of Fred Rogers Growing up in a strictly conservative home, there were strict limits to what our family was allowed to watch on television. We were probably a decade behind the times when we finally upgraded from the boxy old TV set to a new-fangled flatscreen. Our TV time was limited to a few animated cartoons and old (mostly black and white) movies. But there were a few shows on PBS that were also acceptable, including Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which came on every day at 12.30 pm. My mother would comment that this was perfect timing because…

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Book Review: Till We Have Faces

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I was a little apprehensive about teaching C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces in my literature class this year—I am usually nervous about any new texts—but this is proving to be one of my favorite selections of the year. I read the book for the first in 7th or 8th grade, and in retrospect I probably should waited a little longer. I remember being thoroughly baffled by it. It was one of those books I wanted to like and understand, but was just too confusing. One of my original problems was the confusion over names of characters. For a speed reader,…

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Reflections on Paradise Lost

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Despite being a voracious reader, I’ve always been intimidated by Medieval and Renaissance literature. So I had somehow gotten this far in my life without reading Paradise Lost. But in preparation for teaching a British Literature class this fall, I decided it was time to overcome my fear. In the Christian Guide to the Classics series, I discovered that Leland Ryken had written a guide for Paradise Lost which I found invaluable during my reading. It broke the text up into manageable sections and provided a summary of the plot that helped me follow along. Additionally, the questions and ideas that Ryken explored made the book more fascinating…

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Midwesterners Under the Eastern Sun

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Three years ago one of my friends persuaded a group of us “young adults” to go with her to a Young Adults’ Retreat in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. It was a 12 hour drive for a 2 day conference, but it was definitely worth the drive! We heard excellent preaching and were able to fellowship with other young Christians. In the past couple years we’ve recruited 7 people to go on this trip, but due to the timing this year (not being on Memorial Day), there were only 3 of us. However…since I had purchased my first smartphone a few days previously, I…

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What’s in Your Pile?

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  I’ve been thinking about this quote a lot recently. It is such a good reminder about the reality of our lives. Because the truth is, we always have a bad pile and a good pile. Life isn’t perfect, therefore we’ll always have a bad pile. Even when things are going relatively well, we can always think of things that could be better. And that can quickly grow into a pile of bad things. What are we to do? It isn’t like we can actually make our bad pile go away. We can try to whittle it down, but we…

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I Could Be Bounded in a Nutshell

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I recently finished an online course by Futurelearn.com about Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. I wanted to share some reflections on what I learned and what I found most interesting about the course. Although I had read Hamlet a few times prior to this course, I confess that I never really “got” the point. I didn’t see why Hamlet was so upset about his father’s death, and the whole thing just didn’t make sense. But this course helped me understand what it is all about. Hamlet isn’t just about a prince avenging his father’s murder…it is about a young man grappling with the fundamental questions of our existence….

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How Do You Know?

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I’ve been taking this online class,  Intro to Philosophy, which is quite fascinating! The first week dealt with the obvious question, “what is philosophy?” and then the second week was on epistemology. Or, the question, “how do we know what we know?” Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the question of knowledge. The lesson was quite basic and didn’t get into a lot of areas that I would have loved to hear about, but the lectures did confront the question of radical skepticism. As in the first week, when I realized that by the accepted definition of philosophy,…

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