A Thinking Reed

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

Church matters

  • Low-cost, middle-class transgressions

    From an article on worship at the Christian Cenutry‘s website: Instead of fretting about style, however, perhaps we should be more concerned about scale. Worship by definition should guide us to a larger place, should direct our gaze away from ourselves and toward the most vast, holy and mysterious of all horizons. But for all Read more

  • On not being the elder brother

    Jeremy has an excellent post about how he has come to hold an affirming stance on the morality of same-sex relationships. He manages the feat of clearly and directly stating what he believes, while at the same time being irenic and charitable toward those he disagrees with. His conclusion: I believe we are seeing the Read more

  • Some links for the weekend

    – Peter Singer on balancing concern for the environment with efforts to lift people out of poverty. – Kevin Drum on the difference between liberals and libertarians. – Bob Herbert on Sargent Shriver: “one of America’s great good men.” – Peter Berger’s blog at The American Interest. (Here’s a piece on recent developments in American Read more

  • A note on Christ and culture

    Derek has a convincing piece at Episcopal Cafe arguing that it’s simplistic to see “liberals” (specifically, those who support things like women’s ordination and same-sex marriage) as simply going with the cultural flow while “conservatives” are upholding timeless standards of biblical morality. Using H. R. Niebuhr’s typology from his classic Christ and Culture, he points Read more

  • The man show

    This is a bit of an easy target, but “Man Church” is at least interesting for what it supposes men want church to be like: Man Church is church the way a man expects it to be done. No singing, short sermon, time to talk with other guys, no women present, and coffee and donuts. Read more

  • “Graceful simplicity” in worship

    Interesting post on Justin Martyr’s account of an early Eucharist (via Connexions). I’m not completely sold on the principle that whatever the early church did was better, but I do think there’s a case to be made for occasionally pruning the liturgy to let the gospel show forth more clearly (a sound Reformational principle). I’d Read more

  • The rise of the more-Catholic-than-thou Protestant

    This was a character who was (blessedly) unknown to me prior to the advent of the theo-blogosphere: the guy (and it’s almost invariably a guy) who is constantly berating his fellow Protestants for not being “catholic” enough. That is, not being in touch with the larger Church and the Great Tradition, being antinomian, relativistic, individualistic, Read more

  • McLaren and the mainline

    A while ago I posted about the controversy over Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity. I noted that it seemed McLaren and his critics were recapitulating a battle waged over a century ago between Christian modernists and fundamentalists. This review of McLaren’s book in the Christian Century seems to confirm that hunch: The central Read more

  • A cure for Roman fever?

    At the risk of seeming un-ecumenical, don’t the ongoing revelations of child abuse in the Catholic Church and the alleged complicity of Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict seem like kind of a big deal? First and foremost, of course, it’s a big deal for the victims of abuse and their families. But doesn’t it also highlight the Read more

  • What are they saying about sex?

    Following up on the Countryman series, I have to wonder: Where is the serious Christian teaching on premarital sex? Or the purpose of sexuality more generally? He sketches out some principles, but I don’t know that our churches (i.e., mainline Protestant one) are really teaching much in the way of a substantive sexual ethic. It Read more