A Thinking Reed

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

Theology & Faith

  • Faith and factuality revisited

    When I was reading Marcus Borg’s Heart of Christianity, I expressed some dissatisfaction with his treatment of the Bible. I felt like he wasn’t clear enough about the relationship between the meaning of the text and the question of its historical truth. Recently I picked up Borg’s newer book on Jesus, and I’m happier with Read more

  • Chimps, morals, and God

    This Frans de Waal essay and the accompanying video discussion with Robert Wright, on the evolutionary roots of morality, are worth checking out. De Waal’s argument is that moral impulses exist in our non-human animal relatives–particularly our closest relatives, the primates–and that we can see morality emerging along a continuum as a completely “natural” phenomenon. Read more

  • The thorn in the flesh and the “weakness gospel”

    I’m reading Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s book The First Paul, and it’s really good so far. I may have more to blog about the overall themes later, but for now I just wanted to note one interesting tidbit. There has been a lot of speculation about the “thorn in the flesh” that Paul Read more

  • Friday links

    – Chris Hayes: Postcard from Palestine – Endangered red wolves being hunted to extinction – Tea partiers fantasize about a “constitutionally pure” government – Jean Kazez on Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape – On not really believing in heaven – Corporations gain privacy rights as people lose them – Soldiers against torture – A Read more

  • “God loves you beyond your wildest imagining”

    This video from Bishop Gene Robinson has been making the rounds as part of the “It Gets Better” campaign: Bishop Robinson doesn’t tap-dance around anything. He simply says that those who tell gay kids that they’re “intrinsically disordered” or “an abomination” are “flat-out wrong.” I wonder how many young gay or lesbian people have never Read more

  • The historical Jesus as a norm of Christology

    Over the weekend I read A. Roy Eckardt’s Reclaiming the Jesus of History: Christology Today. The book is more interesting than the title suggests; Eckardt writes in conversation not only with “historical Jesus” studies, but also with feminist theology, theology of religions, liberation theology, and particularly “post-Shoah” theology. His stated goal is to develop a Read more

  • Toward a renewed Christian social democracy

    I enjoyed this article by historian-theologian Gary Dorrien on the prospects for a Christian version of social and economic democracy. According to Dorrien, while the dreams of a radical transformation of the economic system seem more distant than ever, they are still incredibly urgent, particularly in the wake of the financial collapse and the looming Read more

  • Religion and animals reading list

    I received an e-mail alerting me to this list of books dealing with animals and religion. I’m not precisely sure why it’s on the site that it is (a site dedicated to online education programs), but it’s a good list. In fact, I’m adding Laura Hobgood-Oster’s The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals–a Read more

  • Five essential theology books

    Michael Westmoreland-White, riffing on this Christian Century article, asks folks to list “five essential theological works” from the past 25 years. (Actually, I think there was a meme on a similar topic circulating the theo-blogosphere a few years back.) Anyway, not being a theologian, or professional churchly type of any sort, I’m not really qualified 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