A Thinking Reed

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

Church matters

  • Burke v. Madison

    Whether, like Burke, one believes that anarchy is the great threat to liberty and social peace, or, like Madison, that tyranny poses the greatest threat to liberty, goes a long way toward determining if one is a conservative or a liberal. –John McGowan, American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time, p. 105 McGowan here is Read more

  • Clergy and theological/liturgical experimentation

    Derek has a good post on those he calls spiritual adventurers/seekers in the Episcopal Church, in the context of debates about messing around with the liturgy. As Derek points out, the liturgy (including, I’d emphasize, the creeds) provides guard rails for the life of the church. A priest or pastor who ignores these for the Read more

  • Sexuality, status confessionis, and the ELCA

    I see that Carl Braaten has issued yet another jeremiad against the ELCA. This one is in response to the recently-issued draft social statement on sexuality and the accompanying recommendations. There’s not much new there, with one important exception. Braaten has now decided that the controversy over the full inclusion of LGBT people in the Read more

  • Blogs of Christmas past

    Since content will likely be light this coming week, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to offer up some representative posts from the previous four Decembers since I started blogging, as a kind of retrospective. (Note: some of these originally appeared on my first blog, “Verbum Ipsum,” but have been imported to WP; Read more

  • Disappearing act

    Apparently there was some controversy about the remains of John Henry Newman. The Catholic Church wanted to exhume the remains of the soon-to-be-sainted cardinal (and famous convert from Anglicanism) and display them for veneration. But Newman had explicitly requested burial next to his longtime friend Father Ambrose St John, which is further complicated by the Read more

  • Lutherans to repeat Anglican follies?

    Oh great. Is the Lutheran World Federation about to go the way of the Anglican Communion? In my experience, Lutherans are less keen on centralized ecclesiology than (some) Anglicans, so maybe we can avoid an analogous meltdown and keep cooperating, like with the good work of Lutheran World Relief, under the loose confederation that seems Read more

  • Ecclesiastical pet peeve

    When the “prayers of the people” sound more like political hectoring. Read more

  • What kind of religious “center”?

    Bill McKibben reviews two books on Christianity: one by Harvard preacher Peter Gomes, and the other a book from the Barna Institute, the Gallup of evangelical Protestantism, reporting on young people’s perceptions of Christianity. Gomes is an interesting guy: a black, old-school New England conservative, Anglophile Baptist minister who happens to be gay. He’s widely Read more

  • Lutherans and lay presidency

    The case for it. LutherPunk and Fr. Chris comment. I think there are good reasons to have only ordained persons presiding at the Lord’s Supper. However, in extreme cases I don’t see any insuperable theological objection to a lay person doing it. There’s a remark of Luther (perhaps apocryphal) that in emergencies “even” a woman Read more

  • Items of interest from the JLE

    From this month’s Journal of Lutheran Ethics: First, an article on the neglect of spiritual practices in the ELCA and how, if the church doesn’t offer pathways to intimacy with God, people will seek them elsewhere. I can definitely sympathize with this. As someone who (re)turned to Christian faith as a young(ish) adult I was Read more