Elliot at Claw of the Conciliator seems poised to return to at least semi-regular blogging (or so we can hope!). The other day he had a good post on Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood, the second book in what I believe is supposed to be a projected trilogy about a world of bioengineering and environmental degradation have run amok. I recently read both YOTF and its predecessor Oryx and Crake and enjoyed them both immensely. As Elliot points out, Atwood deals with some very interesting religious and philoosphical issues in these books, including putting the story of a sect of radical eco-Christians at the center of the second book.
Category: Blogs and bloggers
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If you’re looking for substantive blogging
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Links for Friday
– Derek on the church and (in)fallibility and communing the unbaptized
– Animal advocacy and pragmatism
– This is your brain on gadgets
– BLS has been writing a fascinating series of posts on the church and A.A.
– The thought of Paul Ramsey
– The AV Club’s June round up of all things metal
– The New York Times bans the word “tweet”
– The Karate Kid remake: surprisingly good?
– The A-Team movie: not that good
UPDATE: Had to add this: Tyler Cowen points out that the Netherlands has a animal-rights-based political party, the Party for the Animals (website here, but it’s in Dutch).
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Administrative note
I’ve been giving the blogroll a long-overdue pruning and updating. A few sites have been removed that, while not officially inactive, haven’t been updated in a looong time (usually 6 months or more). But I’m always happy to re-link any blog that becomes active again. This all, of course, assumes that people still find blogrolls useful in these days of RSS feeds, Twitter, etc.
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The gift of self-forgetfulness
Blog-friend Jeremy, formerly of The Kibitzer, Eating Words, and other sundry ventures, is blogging again at Don’t Be Hasty. Today he has a great post on the Lutheran understanding of sin as being “curved in” on oneself. This understanding of the human condition–and the corresponding understanding of justification by faith–is a big part of what attracted me to the Lutheran tradition.
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Whither amateur theo-blogging?
Readers may have noticed something of a drop-off in theology blogging in these parts recently. Partly, this is just because my interest in things waxes and wanes, and I’ve found that my attention has alighted on other subjects lately.
I’ve also been considering the question of what niche the “amateur” theology blog is trying to fill. In the past several years, blogs by pastors, theologians, theology grad students, and other “religious professionals” have proliferated. It’s increasingly difficult for the layperson to engage on a substantive level in the increasingly sophisitcated blogospheric debates about, say, the finer points of Karl Barth’s views on election.
Since starting this blog I’ve always had in the back of my mind the idea from C.S. Lewis that there’s some value in the equivalent of “schoolboys comparing notes” on theology, as distinguished from the authoritative dissemination of specialized scholarly knowledge. Theology, almost by definition, is something that all lay Christians should take some interest in because, at its broadest, it’s simply the attempt to understand one’s faith and relate it both to our knowledge about the world and how we live our lives. No thoughtful person of faith can avoid doing that to some extent.
The lay person who lacks the time, inclination, training, or ability to delve into the thickets of scholarly argumentation will always be at something of a disadvantage compared to the professionals. Perhaps, though, the amateur theo-blogger has the advantage that he or she is attempting to apply theology to life outside the academic cloister–to kick the tires and see if theological concepts can do some work in the “real” world. Hopefully there’s some value in that.
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Jean Kazez’s philosophy and animal ethics blog
I just came across the solo blog of philospher Jean Kazez, whose posts at Talking Philosophy I’ve always enjoyed greatly. Prof. Kazez also has a new book on animal ethics that looks to be well worth reading.
Germane to some recent discussions here, she has two posts on the vegetarianism vs. veganism debate that are worth your time.
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We interrupt this hiatus
OK, folks–I’m not sure how sustainable this hiatus is. Even when I’m not “officially” blogging I still find myself jotting down notes on various things I’m reading or thinking about. Maybe I need to take more drastic measures, like chucking my laptop out the window.
I’ve also started playing around with Twitter. Not sure what I think about that yet either, but if you have a hankering for some ATR-style content, you can follow my “tweets” here: http://twitter.com/thinking_reed
UPDATE: Added the Twitter widget to the right-hand column.
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Into that good night (for now)
Hard as it is for me to believe, I’ve been blogging for over five years straight, since I started my first blogspot blog back in July 2004. (All the archives from that have since been imported over here.) That’s three cities, two jobs, a handful of churches, various political mutations, and heaven knows how many heavy metal videos ago.
Lately, though, it’s tough to shake the feeling that I’m phoning it in and/or writing things I’ve written before. I had only the vaguest idea of what I hoped to get out of blogging in the first place (organizing my thoughts? connecting with other people?), but I’m starting to think that the the experience has been sucked dry. Or maybe it’s just a temporary drought. Who knows?
Either way, I think I’ve earned a little time off, especially since no one’s paying me to do this. It’s surprising it took this long for it to happen, but lately the blog feels more like an obligation than a hobby. Not sure how much time off, but at least until I feel like I have something to say beyond chiming in on the latest political dust-up or re-hashing the same arguments about theology or animal rights or whatever for the umpteenth time.
Regardless, I hope you, dear reader, have gotten some enjoyment out of this blog. Thanks, as ever, for stopping by, and thanks to all the folks who have linked, commented, or otherwise supported this blog over the years.
–The Management
A Thinking Reed 