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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  • Intolerable

    I was doing some online research on website development for a project I’m working on and came across this statement: It’s an established fact that Internet users today are increasingly impatient and intolerable. Indeed! Read more

  • At the risk of becoming a one-note blog…

    I don’t really want to be in the position where I feel like I have to blog about everything that appears in the media on animal rights, especially since the same arguments tend to get repeated over and over again. But since this piece appeared in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section, it might be Read more

  • A yankee’s lament

    I am so not cut out for these DC summers. It’s supposed to be 99 today. In frickin’ June. Seriously. Read more

  • Radical faith and creation

    As my previous post may have suggested, I’ve been dipping into the greatest hits of H. Richard Niebuhr (Reinhold’s younger brother and no mean theologian himself). Right now I’m finishing up his Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, which I had read as an undergrad, and I remember it making an impression on me at the Read more

  • Bell’s Amber Ale

    I was in the mood to try something new the other day, and the guy at my local liquor store recommended this to me. It’s quite good. Brewed in Michigan, it’s got a nice hoppy flavor, but sweet and complex. Too many American microbrews these days seem to be trying to out-hop each other. Read more

  • Clinton and Iraq

    Michael at Levellers expresses some well-justified outrage at Bill Clinton’s recent attempts to whitewash history and portray himself as an early opponent of the Iraq war. But as I mentioned in a comment to Michael’s post, not only did Clinton not oppose the war, his Iraq policy made it much more likely than it otherwise Read more

  • Christ’s ambiguous reign and living in hope

    Yesterday, of course, was Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the liturgical year before we head into Advent. The pastor at our church delivered an excellent sermon on the different aspects of Christ’s kingship and how we can become aware of them in our lives. Jesus reigns over all things, but he reigns Read more

  • The political Christian

    American Christians tend to be a bit schizophrenic about politics. They swing from utopian optimism (“Christianizing the social order,” “restoring America as a Christian nation”) to extreme pessimism when the inevitable disillusion sets in about the limits of what politics can accomplish. This recent post at the Christian Century blog by David Heim offers a Read more

  • Alison on sin, wrath and the “deathlessness” of God

    I’ve been reading James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes, and he has an interesting take on the relation between forgiveness, sin, and the wrath of God. Alison, as readers may know, is a follower of Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic violence and uses it as a key to understand Read more

  • About 80% Lutheran

    Here are my results from the Eucharistic Theology quiz that’s been going around: You scored as a Luther You are Martin Luther. You’ll stick with the words of Scripture, and defend this with earthy expressions. You believe this is a necessary consequence of an orthodox Christology. You believe that the bread and wine are the Read more