A Thinking Reed

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

Theology & Faith

  • Atonement as the restoration of human nature in Athanasius (and Anselm)

    Fr. Aidan Kimel (who theo-blog veterans may remember as Al Kimel, an Epsicopal priest who used to run the blog Pontifications before converting to Catholicism–and now apparently to Eastern Orthodoxy) has been doing a series on St. Athanasius’s “On the Incarnation.” The latest installment looks at Athanasius’s understanding of the Atonement as the healing of Read more

  • Rob Bell’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About God”

    I think the book suffered a bit from not being as tightly focused as “Love Wins.” The earlier book could assume a fair bit of common ground, as it was tackling what is mainly an intra-Christian debate, but here Bell’s target audience seems to more explicitly be the skeptic, the seeker, and the “spiritual but Read more

  • Idealism in twenty minutes

    Keith Ward gives a concise overview and defense of metaphysical idealism: This lecture is essentially a summary of the argument from his 2010 book More Than Matter. The basic claim is that mind or consciousness is a fundamental component or aspect of reality, and it can’t be reduced to or explained exhaustively in material terms. Read more

  • Gary Dorrien’s social gospel

    At the heart of modern capitalist economics is the idea of infinite accumulation. At the heart of Christian social teaching, however, is a strong conception of distributive justice and the related notion that there is such a thing as having enough. The prevailing American preoccupation with piling up money and material possessions is spiritually deadening. Read more

  • Technology, love, and paying attention

    I really enjoyed this post from Michael Sacasas at his blog “The Frailest Thing.” He argues that it’s not smartphones (or any other attention-grabbing gadget) per se that make it hard for us to pay attention to the people we encounter–it’s us. It is sometimes a battle even to be attentive to another person or Read more

  • The Nonviolent God

    One of my worries about J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement was that I didn’t think a determined critic would be persuaded by his case for seeing God as essentially nonviolent. He offers some suggestive interpretations of various New Testament passages, but there’s no developed theology of the divine nature or an overarching argument for Read more

  • Cautious optimism about the new pope

    Look, I’m a Protestant, so no pope is ever going to satisfy me. And I totally get that progressive Catholics would be upset by the same-old, same-old on women’s rights, LGBT rights, and other issues about which the Catholic hierarchy remains steadfastly conservative. But there are reasons for cautious optimism about Pope Francis (né Cardinal Read more

  • “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer?”

    In this month’s Christian Century, Anglican theologian Charles Hefling offers a take on the Atonement that’s very close to where I find myself on this nowadays. He rehearses the well-known points that the church has never dogmatically codified a particular theory of the Atonement but has cultivated a variety of models. He also gives a Read more

  • Why the ministry of women needs no defense

    British evangelical theologian Steve Holmes explains why he will no longer defend the ministry of women in the church. (Not exactly what you might think.) I can’t say that this has ever been a “live” issue for me. At nearly every church I’ve been involved with as an adult, women’s ministry was a given. For Read more

  • Gerald O’Collins on original sin

    I’ve been thinking about original sin a little more, partly because we’re having our son baptized next month, and we met last week with our pastor to discuss the theology of baptism, as well as some of the practical details. (She observed that most of the parents who seem to have a problem with the Read more