A Thinking Reed

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

Religion and society

  • All truth is God’s truth

    I liked this post from Rachel Held Evans in which she rebuts critics who say that those who propose revisions to traditional church teachings are merely trying to “conform to the world.” She points out that many of the calls for change on matters like gender roles, the relationship between science and the Bible, and Read more

  • Is the welfare state Christian?

    There’s been some back-and-forth in the comments to this post about whether Christianity is really compatible with social democracy (or we might just as accurately say welfare-state liberalism). Does Christian ethics require provision for the poor to take place at the local level and/or through private organizations rather than being carried out by the federal Read more

  • The liberality of John Calvin

    The Lord commands us to do “good unto all men,” universally, a great part of whom, estimated according to their own merits, are very undeserving; but here the Scripture assists us with an excellent rule, when it inculcates, that we must not regard the intrinsic merit of men, but must consider the image of God Read more

  • Notable links from the week, with a smattering of commentary

    Buzzfeed(!) profiles pioneering Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson. I blogged about Johnson’s book She Who Is back in 2009–see here, here, here, and here. Nadia Bolz Weber preached a good Ash Wednesday sermon. Rep. Paul Ryan thinks free school lunches are bad for kids’ souls. I take this a bit personally since I got free Read more

  • The shrinking of imaginative identification

    At this point in my life I have probably had a broader experience of the American population than is usual. I have been to divinity schools, and I have been to prisons. In the First Epistle of Peter we are told to honor everyone, and I have never been in a situation where I felt Read more

  • You can’t separate politics from morality

    To me, the most interesting part of this Dahlia Lithwick article on the recent wave of left-of-center protests in North Carolina is this: One of the first speakers of the morning opened with a booming, Southern, “Shabbat Shalom, y’all.” An imam spoke eloquently of civil rights. An astute 11-year-old friend observed that when so many Read more

  • Best of the week

    I end up sharing a lot of links on Twitter, so I thought it might be worth collecting what I think were the stand-out pieces of the week. (“Stand-out” doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with every word, just that these were the most interesting or thought-provoking items I came across). Anyway, here goes: –Elizabeth Stoker, Read more

  • 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

  • “It gets better”–Christian style

    A group called (somewhat ham-fistedly IMO) the “Not All Like That (NALT) Christians Project” has started a campaign inspired by Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” video series. According to the group’s website, the purpose of the campaign is to “give LGBT-affirming Christians a means of proclaiming to the world—and especially to young gay people—their belief Read more

  • A liberal revival?

    According to the New York Times, after a period when it was more fashionable to study relatively marginalized religious movements like evangelicalism and Mormonism, historians are turning their attention back to liberal mainline Protestantism. One of the more surprising arguments, made by David Hollinger, is that the legacy of the mainline may be deeper and Read more