A Thinking Reed

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

Theology & Faith

  • Dirt, Greed & Sex

    Having been stuck at home for the better part of a week, I’ve had ample time to catch up on my reading. One book I finally got around to was L. William Countryman’s Dirt, Greed & Sex, a study of the sexual ethics of the New Testament. Countryman–a professor of New Testament and an Episcopalian–focuses Read more

  • Whither amateur theo-blogging?

    Readers may have noticed something of a drop-off in theology blogging in these parts recently. Partly, this is just because my interest in things waxes and wanes, and I’ve found that my attention has alighted on other subjects lately. I’ve also been considering the question of what niche the “amateur” theology blog is trying to Read more

  • McCarraher on Christianity and politics

    Here’s a very interesting interview with lefty Catholic intellectual Eugene McCarraher (via). He has a lot to say about the Manhattan Declaration, Radical Orthodoxy (the line about the cult of Wendell Berry–ouch!), Herbert McCabe, and socialism. Read more

  • You can’t go home again, but you can’t leave either

    A gay Christian writes about returning to his fundamentalist Baptist roots to share his story–rather than debate “issues.” Read more

  • Beyond “traditionalism vs. liberalism”

    Nice piece from Harvard Divinity School professor Mark Jordan attempting to complicate the simplistic “traditional Christianity vs. liberalism” narrative that almost inevitably appears in reporting about religious controversies: What we are living through is not a fight between a pristine Christianity and the encroaching world, but a divide within Christianity over what exactly should count Read more

  • The fundamentalist hangover

    It occurred to me that there may be something more personal driving some of the points I tried to make in the previous post. I’ve enountered a fair number of people who were raised in very conservative or fundamentalist churches, and who had bad experiences in some cases. For some of these folks, encountering the Read more

  • On not exactly identifying as a “progressive Christian”

    I’ve noticed a trend recently of Christians in mainline chruches, often self-identifying as “progressives,” developing an alternative “canon” of books, Sunday school curricula, approved authors, etc. parallel to those of their conservative counterparts, but which offers an interpretation of Chrisitianity more to their liking. Anyone who’s hung around moderate-to-liberal mainline churches will recognize some of Read more

  • Baillie on the problem of the historical Jesus

    In light of some of the reading I’ve doing lately on the historical Jesus, I decided to re-visit D.M. Baillie’s God Was In Christ, which was published around the middle of the last century and addressed the then-current controversy about the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It holds up Read more

  • Needed: better friends

    Salon has an article this morning written by a “closeted” Christian in New York who’s afraid that her liberal, atheist Brooklynite friends will look down on her if they find out she’s a church-goer (which, presumably they now will unless she’s writing pseudonymously). I can sympathize with not wanting to be identifiedid with conservative strands Read more

  • Marcus Borg’s non-eschatological Jesus

    I found Dale Allison’s book on the historical Jesus stimulating enough that I thought I should get another perspective. I had read Marcus Borg’s Jesus: A New Vision several years ago, but didn’t really remember much of it. So I thought it might be worth re-visiting. Though he comes to different conclusions than Allison (Borg Read more