A Thinking Reed

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

Books

  • Friday links

    – The new(ish) blog Women in Theology has been quite active lately, with recent posts on John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas garnering a lot of discussion. – Scu at Critical Animal writes on books that have changed the way he thinks. And here’s the post that inspired his post. – Jeremy recently had a good Read more

  • The great refusal: against the theology of glory

    I recently started reading Douglas John Hall’s The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World, which is an application of the “theology of the cross” (see previous post) to the main topics of Christian theology. Hall begins with an introductory chapter that tries to identify just what the theology of the cross–as understood Read more

  • Second thoughts on John Dominic Crossan

    I had put J. D. Crossan in a kind of mental “bad liberal” box and so had mostly avoided reading him. (By which I mean I thought of him as someone whose project was strictly one of “debunking” traditional Christian claims.) But then I read Crossan and Marcus Borg’s The First Paul and liked it Read more

  • Companions on the way

    I meant to link earlier to Jeremy’s helpful post on Elizabeth Johnson’s book on the saints, Friends of God and Prophets. Johnson argues for a reformed, “companion” model of the communion of saints, as contrasted with the more traditional “patronage” model. According to Johnson (per Jeremy’s summary; I haven’t read the book), just this kind Read more

  • A better hope

    In continuing to circle around the question of eschatology and look at it from different angles, I went back to Clark Williamson’s Way of Blessing, Way of Life. I wrote a short post on his eschatology here, but I thought it might be worth looking at it more in-depth. This is partly because I think Read more

  • Salt on Melville

    Henry S. Salt, who I believe I mentioned in a recent post, was a 19th-century humanitarian reformer involved in causes ranging from socialism to pacifism to animal rights. Salt wrote a number of books, including books on social reform, animal rights, and vegetarianism, as well as studies of Thoreau and Shelley. (When Gandhi was living Read more

  • Whose Jesus? Which eschatology?

    (With apologies to Alasdair MacIntyre.) I’m still reading Marcus Borg’s Jesus. In the scholarly arena, Borg is probably best known as a proponent of the “non-eschatological” or “non-apocalyptic” Jesus, and he addresses this controversy in chapter 9 of this book. In Jesus, Borg offers a refinement of terminology. Instead of “non-eschatological” or “non-apocalyptic,” he now Read more

  • Faith and factuality revisited

    When I was reading Marcus Borg’s Heart of Christianity, I expressed some dissatisfaction with his treatment of the Bible. I felt like he wasn’t clear enough about the relationship between the meaning of the text and the question of its historical truth. Recently I picked up Borg’s newer book on Jesus, and I’m happier with Read more

  • The thorn in the flesh and the “weakness gospel”

    I’m reading Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s book The First Paul, and it’s really good so far. I may have more to blog about the overall themes later, but for now I just wanted to note one interesting tidbit. There has been a lot of speculation about the “thorn in the flesh” that Paul Read more

  • Spoiler alert!

    This trailer for the 1956 John Huston/Gregory Peck film version of Moby-Dick gives an awful lot away. Maybe they were assuming most people had read the book? I haven’t seen it yet, but the New York Times liked it quite a bit. Read more