A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Bible

  • Wrestling with the Bible

    Via Lynn, a post written from a Jewish perspective on interpreting the Torah/Bible: Those of us who study seriously, and those of us who do not reject the plain facts of history, are forced to acknowledge that the Bible as we know it is a complicated amalgamation of texts, edited and organized by imperfect human Read more

  • November/December reading notes

    Also known as the lazy man’s book review, or capsule reflections on books I might not get around to posting on at greater length: Ecology at the Heart of Faith by Denis Edwards and Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology by H. Paul Santmire A Catholic (Edwards) and a Lutheran (Santmire) Read more

  • Blogs of Christmas past

    Since content will likely be light this coming week, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to offer up some representative posts from the previous four Decembers since I started blogging, as a kind of retrospective. (Note: some of these originally appeared on my first blog, “Verbum Ipsum,” but have been imported to WP; Read more

  • Violence and hermeneutics

    Marvin reflects on the place of texts in the Bible that seem to implicate God in violence, with a little help from St. Augustine. I’m not sure God insists that we be pacifists; I’m even less sure that God is a pacifist (as Marvin acknowledges and Miroslav Volf argues). But there are still passages in Read more

  • School of prayer

    Christianity Today has a piece on praying the Psalms, making the point that prayer is “learning to desire the things God wants to give, and then asking him for them,” and that the Psalms are an excellent–if not the best–way to do this. Praying the Psalms is something I don’t do nearly as much as Read more

  • Chronicles of woe

    So, I’ve been working on one of those read-through-the-entire-Bible plans off and on for a while now. It’s actually pretty good because it alternates, roughly, half of an OT book with half of a NT book, which breaks things up nicely. However, I cheated a while back and skipped ahead to Romans, which means that Read more

  • Inerrancy

    I liked this post from Elizaphanian. Read more

  • The war of the Lamb

    Graham begins what promises to be a stimulating series on “nonviolent eschatology.” Read more

  • Alison on sin, wrath and the “deathlessness” of God

    I’ve been reading James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes, and he has an interesting take on the relation between forgiveness, sin, and the wrath of God. Alison, as readers may know, is a follower of Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic violence and uses it as a key to understand Read more

  • The strangeness of the Bible

    I really liked this review article in Books & Culture of a new book about the Bible and sex. So often we treat the Bible as little more than window-dressing for our preconceived moral or political agendas that we often lose sight at the sheer weirdness of the text. The Bible rarely provides ready-made moral Read more