A Thinking Reed

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

Books

  • Edwards on providence

    If God acts in a non-interventionist way as Denis Edwards suggests–acting through “secondary causes” and allowing natural processes and created beings their own proper autonomy–then what about events that theology has traditionally viewed as special divine actions that bypass the normal order of things? Let’s look at two cases: God’s providential ordering of all things Read more

  • Denis Edwards’ theology of divine action

    In his new book How God Acts, Australian Catholic theologian Denis Edwards offers an account of divine action that is conscious of the picture of the world offered by modern science, but takes its lead both from the Christian revelation of God in Christ, the insights of Karl Rahner, and a modified Thomist metaphysics. The Read more

  • Countryman: Principles for a Christian sexual ethic

    We saw earlier that Countryman argues that we can’t, because of the vast gulf that separates our social world from those of the Bible, simply apply “the Biblical ethic” to contemporary concerns. But does that mean that the Bible has nothing to say to us regarding sexual ethics? By no means! First, as already mentioned, Read more

  • Countryman on modern individualism

    One of the main reasons we can’t simply apply the “Biblical” sexual ethic (or ethics!) to our contemporary world, argues Countryman in Dirt, Greed & Sex (see the previous post), is that we have gone from a family-centered society to an individual-centered one. The property ethic that governed sexual relations in the ancient world existed Read more

  • Dirt, Greed & Sex

    Having been stuck at home for the better part of a week, I’ve had ample time to catch up on my reading. One book I finally got around to was L. William Countryman’s Dirt, Greed & Sex, a study of the sexual ethics of the New Testament. Countryman–a professor of New Testament and an Episcopalian–focuses Read more

  • “Speciesism”: a red herring?

    There have been some great comments on the “veganism versus vegetarianism” post below, which you should check out if you’re interested. But I thought I’d shift gears and look at some of the other arguments in Tzachi Zamir’s book. A major concern of Zamir’s is arguing that “speciesism” is a red herring in arguments over Read more

  • Vegan versus vegetarian utopia

    In his book Ethics and the Beast, Tzachi Zamir makes an interesting “speciesist” case for animal liberation. But for the purposes of this post I want to focus on his argument in favor of moral vegetarianism, and against veganism. That he makes this argument is surprising since most liberationists, I think it’s safe to say, Read more

  • Baillie on the problem of the historical Jesus

    In light of some of the reading I’ve doing lately on the historical Jesus, I decided to re-visit D.M. Baillie’s God Was In Christ, which was published around the middle of the last century and addressed the then-current controversy about the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It holds up Read more

  • Marcus Borg’s non-eschatological Jesus

    I found Dale Allison’s book on the historical Jesus stimulating enough that I thought I should get another perspective. I had read Marcus Borg’s Jesus: A New Vision several years ago, but didn’t really remember much of it. So I thought it might be worth re-visiting. Though he comes to different conclusions than Allison (Borg Read more

  • Of wolf and man

    I “tweeted” recently that I head read and really enjoyed Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf. Rowlands, the eponymous philosopher, has written a bunch of books, including an excellent introduction to animal rights. TPATW defies easy summary, but it’s part-memoir and part-philosophical rumination arising from Rowlands’ experience living with a companion wolf named Brenin Read more