A Thinking Reed

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

Theology & Faith

  • Meat-eating and Benedict’s rule

    Here’s another tid-bit from that Christian Century article on food that I blogged about last week: Benedict saw lack of dietary discipline as a sign not of strength but of weakness. In particular, he restricted meat to children, the sick and the elderly. By eating meat unnecessarily, healthy adult members of his community would enjoy 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

  • Sermon questions left hanging

    Today was our first attempt at church-going since the baby was born. We made it about half-way through before she started to fuss, and we’re still skittish enough about our baby-comforting skills that we decided to abscond. What I did manage to catch from the part of the sermon I heard–it was Trinity Sunday–was a Read more

  • The trouble with tradition

    Lutheran theologian Robert Benne laments the ELCA’s departure from the “Great Tradition” of marginalizing gay people and its descent into the dreaded “liberal Protestantism.” The problem, it seems, is that the ELCA hasn’t given sufficient weight to the opinions of white male pastors and theologians. One thing I’ve noticed is that whenever someone makes an Read more

  • Natural theology or theology of nature?

    Following up a bit on this post… In his book Religion and Science, which is based on his Gifford Lectures, Ian Barbour distinguishes between natural theology and the theology of nature. Natural theology tries to prove God’s existence by appealing to some feature of the created order. Barbour denies that natural theology can achieve its Read more

  • Science, faith, and the “God hypothesis”

    Kim Fabricius has another set of provocative theological propositions at Faith & Theology–these ones on what he calls the “God hypothesis.” By this he means the attempt, by various religious thinkers, to take on the “new atheists” on their own turf and argue for God’s existence on “scientific” grounds. As usual, Fabricius definitely scores some Read more

  • Creation Sunday

    The ELCA and other churches have adopted the tradition of observing the Sunday closest to Earth Day as “Creation Sunday” (or Care of Creation Sunday). To some this no doubt seems like another in a long line of mainline capitulations to political correctness. The reality, though, is that care for God’s creation should be a Read more

  • McLaren and the mainline

    A while ago I posted about the controversy over Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity. I noted that it seemed McLaren and his critics were recapitulating a battle waged over a century ago between Christian modernists and fundamentalists. This review of McLaren’s book in the Christian Century seems to confirm that hunch: The central Read more

  • McLaren’s “heresy”

    I’ve never read anything by Brian McLaren, but the dust-up in some evangelical circles about his new book A New Kind of Christianity is interesting for what it reveals about the presuppositions of at least significant swaths of American evangelicalism. Nothing McLaren says, at least going by the summary offered in the story linked above, Read more

  • Good Friday reading

    I recommend Christopher‘s meditation at the Episcopal Cafe. Read more