A Thinking Reed

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

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  • Thanks, Elizabeth Warren

    I’ve leaned toward Elizabeth Warren for most of the current primary campaign. Almost exactly a year ago, I placed her at the top of my preliminary candidate rankings. I cheered her on (and gave her a modest amount of money) as she ascended to near-front-runner status, driven not just by her famous “plans” but by Read more

  • Church for earthlings

    Ecclesiology–or the doctrine of the church–is, for my money, one of the duller areas of Christian theology. And when it doesn’t engage in excessive navel-gazing and hair-splitting, it can be a source of ugly Christian triumphalism. In recent theology, the “ecclesial turn” has often upheld “the church” as the cure-all for everything that supposedly ails Read more

  • Von Balthasar’s hopeful almost-universalism

    In Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”?, Hans Urs Von Balthasar takes as his starting point that the Bible contains “irreconcilable” statements on the ultimate destiny of humanity. There are passages that hold out the threat of everlasting punishment, but there are others that speak hopefully about the ultimate reconciliation or restoration of Read more

  • Models of God and the Christian life

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately–partly inspired by my recent reading of Schleiermacher and my re-reading of Paul Tillich–about how the way we “model” God affects our understanding of the Christian life. As is well known, Tillich defined God as “the Ground of Being” or “being-itself.” These, he said, were the only non-literal terms applicable Read more

  • Problems of omnipotence, omniscience, and temporality

    In his book Pascal’s Fire, Keith Ward writes: …ultimate mind is the actual basis of all possible states. It is the only being that must be actual, if anything at all is possible. It is thus uniquely self-existent, not deriving its existence from any other being. Its nature is necessarily what it is–there are no Read more

  • The Life You Can Save 2

    In part 2 of The Life You Can Save, Singer considers some of the psychological obstacles to giving more, as well as some ways they might be overcome. Chapter 4 reviews some research that provides a measure of insight into our reluctance to give to strangers living in extreme poverty. For instance, people are less Read more

  • Faith and economics

    A conservative evangelical questions his uncritical embrace of laissez-faire economics. When you think about it, the marriage between evangelicalism and free market capitalism is downright odd, and, as far as I can tell, largely confined to the U.S. (British evangelicals, for instance, seem quite a bit more left-wing on economics than their American counterparts). I’m Read more

  • Evolution, creation, and human uniqueness

    There’s an account making the rounds of a recent debate between atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett and Christian theist Alvin Plantinga. One of the issues that comes up is the compatibility between Christianity (or theism more generally) and evolution, a perennial topic of interest here at ATR. Dennett seems to see them as incompatible. Plantinga not Read more

  • Is marriage sacred?

    In arguments about gay marriage you sometimes hear suggestions that we should have a strictly civil version of marriage (or union) for the public realm that applies to gay and straight people alike, while leaving “sacred” marriage to religious bodies. This may or may not be a good idea, but what I wonder is whether Read more

  • Saturday metal – freezing cold pre-Inaugural edition

    Some very cool animation in this video from French enviro-metallers Gojira: All The Tears Read more