A Thinking Reed

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

Science and Religion

  • Some thoughts on Christianity and evolution

    This is a bit late for the Darwin 200th birthday bash, but I thought it might be worth jotting down some thoughts on Christianity and evolution. This post could serve as a kind of summary of things I’ve been thinking and reading about over the last few years, though naturally they’re all subject to revision: Read more

  • More on God and temporality

    In his Gifford Lectures, published as The Faith of a Physicist, John Polkinghorne considers the relation of God to time, calling it one of the “most puzzling, and most pressing, of general questions about God” (p. 59): It is clear that there must be an eternal pole to the divine nature. His steadfast love cannot Read more

  • 2008: The year in book blogging

    I’m not going to provide a best books of the year list, but here’s a sampling of those that got their hooks into me enough to generate some more or less in-depth blogging (needless to say, most of these weren’t published in 2008): Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power “Empire of dysfunction” Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond Read more

  • Keith Ward at the National Cathedral

    It was a gorgeous fall day here in DC, and we decided to enjoy it and take an outing to the Washington National Cathedral this morning for their Sunday forum. The guest, as it happens, was British theologian/philosopher Keith Ward, whose work I admire and have written about frequently here at ATR. The format was Read more

  • More thoughts on omnipotence and creation

    In the previous post I talked about Jay McDaniel’s proposal for a revised account of divine omnipotence and creation based on the suggestion of a primordial chaos that coexists with God, a chaos out of which God creates the world and which limits the divine ability to shape creation. I agree with McDaniel about the Read more

  • Creation and omnipotence: a process perspective

    As a follow-up of sorts to my reading of Christopher Southgate’s The Groaning of Creation, I picked up Jay McDaniel’s Of God and Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life, which Southgate refers to a number of times in his book. McDaniel is a process theologian who has also been influenced by feminist theology, as Read more

  • Groaning of Creation: Index of posts

    Thought it might be helpful to have links to all my posts on Christopher Southgate’s book on animal theodicy, The Groaning of Creation, in one place. 1. Intro 2. The only way? 3. God so loved the world 4. There’s a wideness in God’s mercy 5. Heaven can wait 6. Priests of creation 7. The Read more

  • The Groaning of Creation 9: Concluding thoughts

    As a wrap-up to this series, I thought I’d offer some concluding thoughts on Christopher Southgate’s The Groaning of Creation. Just to briefly review: the problem of animal theodicy as Southgate sees it is that the evolutionary process seems to grind so many sentient creatures under its wheels and to doom so many species to Read more

  • The Groaning of Creation 8: The ethics of the Ark

    Throughout this series we’ve seen two intertwining themes. First, death and suffering are necessary parts of the process–perhaps the only possible process–by which finite selves are brought into existence. Second, however, this process involves the (seemingly) permanent thwarting of many of those selves as well as the disappearance of entire ways of being (species). And Read more

  • The Groaning of Creation 7: The (vegetarian) restaurant at the end of the universe

    We saw in the previous post that Southgate thinks humans should play an active role in “healing” the creation by ameliorating some of the negative effects of the evolutionary process. And we’ve also seen that chief among those effects, in his view, are the problem of animal suffering and the problem of extinction. Turning to Read more