A Thinking Reed

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

Theology & Faith

  • Christianity and the roots of anti-animal sentiment

    Over at the blog Year of Plenty, Craig Goodwin reviews Laura Hobgood-Oster’s recent book The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals. It’s a generally positive review, but at the end Goodwin takes issue with some of Hobgood-Oster’s explanations for our troubled relationship with the animal world: The references and historical background offered on Read more

  • Ward and Lewis on post-mortem repentance and the possibility of universal redemption

    …it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the gospel to suppose that, though violence is prohibited in this age, it will be perfectly acceptable in the age to come. The German writer Friedrich Nietzsche called this resentissement, the desire for delayed revenge, the belief that we might have to suffer persecution now, but God will take Read more

  • It’s books all the way down

    A short addendum on Craig Hill’s In God’s Time: One thing that always makes me happy is when a good book leads me to really want to read other books by citing them. In this case, Hill’s book made me want to track down copies of John A.T. Robinson’s (yes, that John A.T. Robinson) In Read more

  • Making all things new

    During my vacation I finished Craig Hill’s In God’s Time and wanted to offer some concluding thoughts on it. (See previous posts here and here.) Hill, wisely in my view, declines to meet the popular “end times” view of conservative dispensationalism on its own turf by countering one proof-text with another. He recognizes that different Read more

  • Peter Singer and Christian ethics conference–audio available

    I posted the other week on a conference on dialogue between Peter Singer and Christian ethics. I wanted to note that audio of the sessions is available here. I haven’t listened to any of the sessions yet, but the topics suggest that they’ll be very interesting: –Utilitarians and Christians –Animals and the environment –Utilitarianism, Christian Read more

  • Friday Links

    –Marvin on the Presbyterian Church’s decision to allow congregations to call non-celibate gay and lesbian pastors. –Libraries are part of the social safety net. –“I hated vegans too, but now I am one.” –On anti-Semites and philo-Semites. –Mark Bittman asks, “Why bother with meat?” –Jesus and eco-theology. –Jeremy discusses Herbert McCabe and Gerhard Forde on Read more

  • The problem and necessity of eschatology

    (See my previous post on Craig Hill’s In God’s Time.) Hill goes on to identify some of the obstacles to a retrieval of eschatology for non-fundamentalist Christians. While he recognizes that significant work has been done in recent theology to put eschatology back at the center of the faith (he cites Moltmann and Pannenberg among Read more

  • God wins

    No, this isn’t a riff on Rob Bell’s latest book. The expression is Craig Hill’s two-word summary of what eschatology is all about in his book In God’s Time: The Bible and the Future (published in 2002). Hill is a professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary, and his book is an attempt to Read more

  • Friday links

    –Ta-Nehisi Coates on Moby-Dick. –Amy-Jill Levine: “A Critique of Recent Christian Statements on Israel” –From Jeremy at Don’t Be Hasty: Why the church can’t take the place of the welfare state. –A discussion of “summer spirituality” with Fr. James Martin, S.J., author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything. –A review of Keith Ward’s recent Read more

  • Peter Singer, utilitarianism, Christianity, and climate change

    Here’s an interesting post from Mark Vernon, an English journalist and author (and former priest in the Church of England), reporting on a recent conference at Oxford University on the engagement of Christian ethics with the thought of Peter Singer. According to Vernon, Singer discussed problems that his brand of utilitarianism (“preference utilitarianism”–the view that Read more