A Thinking Reed

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

History

  • Second thoughts on John Dominic Crossan

    I had put J. D. Crossan in a kind of mental “bad liberal” box and so had mostly avoided reading him. (By which I mean I thought of him as someone whose project was strictly one of “debunking” traditional Christian claims.) But then I read Crossan and Marcus Borg’s The First Paul and liked it Read more

  • Jesus and the end: what if he was “wrong”?

    In my post on Marcus Borg’s view of Jesus and eschatology, I asserted that if Jesus did expect an imminent supernatural in-breaking of some sort, then he was wrong, a conclusion that would disconcert many Christians. This might have been too categorical of a statement. In his book The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, Read more

  • Whose Jesus? Which eschatology?

    (With apologies to Alasdair MacIntyre.) I’m still reading Marcus Borg’s Jesus. In the scholarly arena, Borg is probably best known as a proponent of the “non-eschatological” or “non-apocalyptic” Jesus, and he addresses this controversy in chapter 9 of this book. In Jesus, Borg offers a refinement of terminology. Instead of “non-eschatological” or “non-apocalyptic,” he now Read more

  • John Birch redivivus

    In the New Yorker, historian Sean Wilentz notes the parallels between the ideology and tactics of the Glenn Beck-inspired tea party movement and the Cold War-era John Birch Society. The similarities extend even to drawing on some of the same crackpot conspiracy-mongering “scholarship.” What I didn’t realize before reading this is that Woodrow Wilson has Read more

  • The historical Jesus as a norm of Christology

    Over the weekend I read A. Roy Eckardt’s Reclaiming the Jesus of History: Christology Today. The book is more interesting than the title suggests; Eckardt writes in conversation not only with “historical Jesus” studies, but also with feminist theology, theology of religions, liberation theology, and particularly “post-Shoah” theology. His stated goal is to develop a Read more

  • The Crusades, Fox News edition

    This would seem to tell you all you really need to know about Rodney Stark’s God’s Batallions: The Case for the Crusades: Clearly this is not the politically correct version of the Crusades, and that is fine: there is little that was politically correct about the Crusades in the first place. The difficulty I have Read more

  • Independence runs in the family

    This is neat: five of America’s greatest 19th-century writers–Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne–had grandfathers who were involved in the revolution. Read more

  • Emancipation Day

    D.C. observes April 16th as Emancipation Day. From Wikipedia: On that day in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act for the release of certain persons held to service or labor in the District of Columbia. The Act freed about 3,100 enslaved persons in the District of Columbia nine months before President Lincoln Read more

  • The rehabilitation of U.S. Grant

    Interesting review of a new biography of Ulysses S. Grant from historian Sean Wilentz. At the time of his death, and for quite a while thereafter, President Grant was among the most revered men in the nation. But his reputation took a sharp turn downward, in part, according to Wilentz, because of the rising school Read more

  • Baillie on the problem of the historical Jesus

    In light of some of the reading I’ve doing lately on the historical Jesus, I decided to re-visit D.M. Baillie’s God Was In Christ, which was published around the middle of the last century and addressed the then-current controversy about the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It holds up Read more