A Thinking Reed

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

H.R. Niebuhr

  • Christianity is not inherently right-wing

    To those of us of a more moderate or liberal disposition, the tendency of conservative Christians to identify right-wing politics with Christianity per se is a source of no small irritation. Today at Salon, Elizabeth Stoker and Matt Bruenig point out that the American Christian Right’s approach to wealth and poverty is an outlier when Read more

  • Romney, the “God vote,” and American henotheism

    The Washington Post‘s Sally Quinn must have a low opinion of religious people. That’s the only way I can explain her assertion that, because he dropped a platitudinous reference to “the Creator” during last night’s debate, Mitt Romney has captured the “God vote.” Weirdly, Quinn admits that President Obama often talks about his own Christian Read more

  • In the midst of a great revolution

    One of the interesting things about H.R. Niebuhr is that he is often trying to walk the middle ground between a liberal or “natural” theology based on reason or experience and a Barthian “revelational positivism” that limits our knowledge of God to what is revealed. For Niebuhr, philosophical reasoning, religious experience, psychology, and history all Read more

  • H.R. Niebuhr on revelation, ethics, and nature

    For Niebuhr, revelation is not a revelation of divinely inspired propositions–as some theories of biblical inerrancy would have it. Instead, it is a fundamentally personal encounter–a revelation of God’s self. In this encounter, we don’t apprehend an object; it is more accurate to say that we are apprehended by–in judgment and love–the ultimate Subject. But Read more

  • H.R. Niebuhr’s principles

    In the preface to his The Meaning of Revelation, H. Richard Niebuhr outlines three convictions that he says underlie his argument: –self-defense is the most prevalent source of error in all thinking and perhaps especially in theology and ethics; –the greatest source of evil in life is the absolutizing of the relative, which in Christianity Read more