A Thinking Reed

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

Evangelicalism

  • Friday links

    –On Christianity, the Holocaust, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. –Recent posts on what’s apparently now being referred to as the “new universalism” from James K.A. Smith, Halden Doerge, and David Congdon. –Does having a monarchy lead to greater equality? –Redeeming the “L word.” –Appreciating both N.T. Wright’s and Marcus Borg’s views of the Resurrection. –Why liberals should Read more

  • Friday Links

    I spent the day hanging out with my family, so these are coming a little late… –Why Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal is neither brave nor serious. –Free-range meat isn’t necessarily “natural.” –A case for universalism from the Scottish evangelical preacher and biblical scholar William Barclay. –A review of a recent book called What’s the Read more

  • Friday Links

    –Iowa’s House approved a bill to make it illegal to film the goings on in factory farms; it still has to pass the Senate. –The great Midwestern backlash. –What is the difference between liberals and libertarians? –Rejecting death-centered Christianity. –The fondness some secular liberals have for fundamentalism. –More than half of Americans now favor legal Read more

  • Universalism and the gospel

    “Although an earthly mother may possibly allow her child to perish, our heavenly Mother Jesus can never allow us who are his children to perish.” –Julian of Norwich I don’t know much about Rob Bell. It seems he’s kind of a big deal in the emerging/emergent church movement (or “conversation” as some folks prefer to Read more

  • McLaren’s “heresy”

    I’ve never read anything by Brian McLaren, but the dust-up in some evangelical circles about his new book A New Kind of Christianity is interesting for what it reveals about the presuppositions of at least significant swaths of American evangelicalism. Nothing McLaren says, at least going by the summary offered in the story linked above, Read more

  • Pro-life and pro-Obama

    Interesting post from Frank Schaeffer (son of the famed evangelical guru Francis Schaeffer). Schaeffer’s piece does have a whiff of the Obama-as-messiah meme, though, with its insistence that Obama can lead us to a “spiritual rebirth, a turning away from the false value of consumerism and utilitarianism that have trumped every aspect of human life. 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

  • The smiling God

    I don’t usually write about Joel Osteen and his ilk because a. evangelicalism isn’t really my milieu and b. it seems a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But if you like that sort of thing, Slate‘s review of Osteen’s new book is worth checking out. Read more

  • Another view

    I don’t have anything interesting to say about Mitt Romney’s religion speech, but, as it happens, yesterday I was hanging out with an out-of-town Mormon friend. I asked him what he thought of Romney’s speech. He didn’t like it because he doesn’t think Mormonism should strive to be mainstream. He said he has never thought Read more

  • Huckabee vs. torture

    It’s a depressing sign of the times when you feel like you should praise a politician who wants to hold America to a higher standard than, say, the Inquisition or the Khmer Rouge. Still, it’s good to see Mike Huckabee joining John McCain (and Ron Paul) as a Republican against torture: After the Iowa poll Read more