A Thinking Reed

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

Books

  • Economics for community

    As I mentioned previously, Daly and Cobb’s central concern is that the abstractions of economics leave out aspects of reality that are crucial to understanding the world and shaping the economy in a way that nourishes community and is sustainable in the long run. Following A.N. Whitehead, they refer to the phenomenon of treating an Read more

  • Checking in

    Still on vacation – currently staying with some friends outside of the City of Angels. Boy, the California livin’ seems easy when the sun’s shining and the breeze is blowing. A little warm for my blood, but there you are. Tomorrow we fly back to Boston and then have exactly one week to pack before Read more

  • Economics as if people (and other living things) mattered

    I’m in Indianapolis visiting family, and one of the things I like to do whenever I’m here is make a trip to Half Price Books. Yesterday I picked up a copy of For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future by World Bank economist Herman Daly and process Read more

  • Modest natural theology and epistemic pluralism

    At the suggestion of Andy and Thomas I started reading some John Polkinghorne, the physicist and Anglican priest, this weekend. I picked up his Belief in God in an Age of Science, the only title of his they had at our library. It’s a collection of lectures Polkinghorne gave at Yale in 1996, with some Read more

  • Religious myths

    I got my hands on a copy of Keith Ward’s Is Religion Dangerous? courtesy of our local library and have been enjoying it very much. In the introduction alone Ward takes on several myths about the study of religion that tend to be propagated by its cultured despisers: 1. “Religion” is a univocal term. Ward Read more

  • Lewis on the “true myth” of Redemption

    No doubt readers are getting a bit tired of this, but the Lewis letters are so bloggable. Maybe because, at least as they appear in the book, they’re almost like blog-entries themselves. In the fall of 1931 Lewis is on the verge of embracing Christianity. In September he’d had an important conversation with Hugo Dyson Read more

  • C. S. Lewis on the Bible

    A couple more nuggets from Lewis’s letters: To “Mrs Ashton”, November 8, 1952: It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual Read more

  • Is religion dangerous?

    Saw an ad for this in the new First Things: Keith Ward (see here) has written a response of sorts to the “new atheist” crowd. I imagine it’s the usual kind of irenic, thoughtful stuff Ward is known for. I’ve often thought that the whole issue of whether “religion” is on the whole good or Read more

  • C. S. Lewis on Barthians

    I was reading selections last night from a volume of C.S. Lewis’ letters and came across an interesting (and rather amusing) one to his brother on February 18, 1940. Apparently Lewis had recently encountered a group of zealous students of this newfangled theologian Karl Barth: Did you fondly believe – I did – that where Read more

  • Mitchell’s 8 Ways

    I took the red-eye home last night from the meeting I was attending in SF and so took most of today off from work to catch up on sleep and stuff around the house. I also started reading a fascinating book called 8 Ways to Run the Country by Brian Patrick Mitchell. Mitchell, the Washington Read more