A Thinking Reed

  • OT bleg

    Any readers have recommendations for secondary material on the Book of Daniel? I’m looking for something a bit more specific than a typical commentary: information on the history of its reception and/or interpretation. Any book- or article-length suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

  • “There ain’t no party like my nana’s tea party”

    One more from FOTC:

  • Friday Metal: Textures, “Awake”

    Just discovered these guys this week. Kind of Meshuggah meets Faith No More (if that makes any sense):

  • One more (at least) on pluralism

    Another thought occurred to me about John Hick’s pluralism hypothesis: that it risks introducing a moralistic distortion into religion. Since, for Hick, religion is primarily a practical rather than a cognitive enterprise (because the Real in itself eludes our cognitive abilities), the criteria by which he judges religion are primarily moral ones. Religions are vehicles…

  • Further thoughts on pluralism

    Thinking a bit more about John Hick’s pluralism, spurred on by some of the excellent comments on the last post, it does seem that my original worry about Hick’s position could be stated in a stronger form. My question was whether it’s necessary to believe in a tradition in a non-pluralist way (i.e., to believe…

  • “The day after my birthday is not my birthday, mum.”

    Been watching season 2 of Flight of the Conchords. This one cracks me up:

  • Religious pluralism revisited

    One common criticism of the pluralistic view of religions–and one that I have found persuasive–is that it presupposes a “god’s eye” vantage point that seems to be ruled out by the theory itself. That is, asserting that all religions provide a partial perspective on the divine, seems to imply that the pluralist can discern clearly…

  • Friday Metal: Shadows Fall, “Still I Rise”

    The video’s kind of cheesy, but the song rules, and the album–which just came out this week–is great:

  • Addendum to previous post

    Something funky happened to that last post, and part of it got cut out. But in the version I originally wrote, I included on my list H. Richard Niebuhr’s Radical Monotheism and Western Culture. I posted a bit about it here.

  • Toward a non-anthropocentric theology

    Jeremy asked if I’d recommend any books on moving away from an anthropocentric theology. This is a question at the intersection of some perennial ATR themes, so I thought I’d post the answer here. The following list makes no pretense to be either authoritative or exhaustive, but these are some books (in no particular order)…