A Thinking Reed

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

Spirituality

  • Give thanks

    It’s good for you (scientifically proven!). Of course, it’s also meet, right and our bounden duty, in case you needed another reason. Read more

  • Things I miss about being a (fellow traveling) Anglo-Catholic

    Marian feast days! We do have a small icon of the BVM and Christ child in the side chapel at our current (Lutheran) church, and our recent Vicar had a closet devotion to her, I suspect. (She agreed when I once mentioned my fondness for the doctrine of the Assumption.) But that’s about as far Read more

  • “The love of God in Christ Jesus” – but do we believe it?

    Today in church we heard a passage from Romans that contains one of my favorite couple of verses in the entire Bible (I imagine I’m not alone in this): For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, Read more

  • The religion of animals

    Thanks to Jeremy for tipping me off to this very interesting article about animals and religion from the Martin Marty Center. One of the issues it raises is the upsurge of interest in the “religiosity” of animals: There are ancient precedents for the claim that nonhuman animals have a religious sensibility. Pliny the Elder (23-79 Read more

  • Thoughts for Good Friday

    “Christ’s death on the cross and his descent into Hell … reassure us that we can never wander so far astray as to be outside the humanity with which Christ has identified.” – William Placher “Jesus came to forgive sin unconditionally for God. Our sin, our unbelief, consists precisely in the fact that we cannot Read more

  • Ash Wednesday ruminations

    I managed to make it to church this afternoon for the service of Communion and the Imposition of Ashes. And it occurred to me that the cyclical nature of the liturgical year is a good way of driving home the Lutheran insight that we’re always beginning anew and always utterly dependent on God’s grace. In Read more

  • Catch-all blog update post

    Sorry about the dearth of posting: a confluence of extreme busyness, travel, and computer issues has put a cramp in my blogging style. Although one perk is that I’ve been forced to detach from the various teapot-sized tempests roilling the blogosphere, which is always a benefit of time away from the computer. We’re in Indiana Read more

  • Mary through Syrian eyes

    Neat article at Commonweal on the theological insights from recently translated ancient Syrian Christian hymns and antiphonal poems. Read more

  • “Commitment with detachment”

    I liked this article by Carol Zaleski at The Christian Century. She adivses Christians to take a political “time out,” not in abstaining from politics, but in abstaining from obsessing about politics: Some conservative wags like to say that liberalism is a mental disease. But the mental disease isn’t liberalism and it isn’t conservatism, it’s Read more

  • Christ’s ambiguous reign and living in hope

    Yesterday, of course, was Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the liturgical year before we head into Advent. The pastor at our church delivered an excellent sermon on the different aspects of Christ’s kingship and how we can become aware of them in our lives. Jesus reigns over all things, but he reigns Read more