A Thinking Reed

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

Spirituality

  • Participatory soteriology and the shape of Christian life together

    Christopher offers a semi-defense of Pelagius (a semi-Pelagian defense?) and calls for a movement of “Advent asceticism” that sees a particular form of communal obedience not as an attempt to earn heaven, but as a response to Heaven as it has come to live among us in the Incarnation. He notes that much Protestant theology, Read more

  • Pelagius for the rest of us?

    (I tweeted a bit about this earlier, but I thought I might as well write some thoughts into a proper blog post.) As if to confirm our most stereotypical expectations, a proposal is being put before a diocese of the Episcopal Church in Atlanta to “rehabilitate” Pelagius by reversing the Council of Carthage’s (5th century) Read more

  • A side of Calvin we don’t often hear about

    From an interview with novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson: [Calvin] writes very beautifully about the notion that any encounter with another human being is an encounter with an image of God. If it’s someone offending against you, it is someone that God is waiting to forgive for his offense. And so it’s a sort of Read more

  • Bultmann, modernity, mythology, and Pentecostalism

    Here’s an interesting piece from sociologist of religion and lay theologian (I believe he’s Lutheran) Peter Berger on the relevance of Rudolf Bultmann for today. Berger notes that Bultmann was right that the worldview of the New Testament is thoroughly “mythological” in that it portrays a world suffused with and permeated by supernatural forces (God, Read more

  • I want to be a Pentecostal too

    Marvin offers a review of Allan Anderson’s book on global pentecostalism that really makes me want to read it. The essence of charismatic Christianity, according to Anderson (according to Marvin) isn’t speaking in tongues or some of the other trappings usually associated with pentecostalism, but rather “A shared conviction that the Holy Spirit can and Read more

  • Stendahl on glossolalia

    Krister Stendahl has a really interesting essay in Paul among Jews and Gentiles called “Glossolalia—The New Testament Evidence.” He argues that what we usually call “speaking in tongues” was a widespread part of early Christian expeience that was later damped down by the institutional church. He maintains that glossolalia as discussed in Paul’s letters were Read more

  • Attention must be paid

    There have been a couple of articles recently on the “slow reading” movement, one in Newsweek and one in the Guardain. Actually, “movement” may be a bit strong; it seems to be more of an impulse, or a reaction against our 24-7 ultra-connected, multitasking, information-saturated lives. (Where “we” are a relatively small minority of affluent Read more

  • Huxley on distractions

    I’ve been spending what free time I have this summer dipping into the works of Aldous Huxley, both his fiction (Island, Eyeless In Gaza) and non-fiction (Brave New World Revisited). I’m currently working my way through a collection of essays called Huxley and God, which, as the title suggests, deals broadly with religion. Huxley is Read more

  • “Graceful simplicity” in worship

    Interesting post on Justin Martyr’s account of an early Eucharist (via Connexions). I’m not completely sold on the principle that whatever the early church did was better, but I do think there’s a case to be made for occasionally pruning the liturgy to let the gospel show forth more clearly (a sound Reformational principle). I’d Read more

  • Food rules for Christians

    I think it was Stanley Hauerwas who said, with typical pungency, that no religion can be interesting if it doesn’t tell you what to do with your pots and pans or your genitals. By at least part of that criteria, Exeter University theologian David Grumett seems to be trying to make Christianity interesting again. In Read more