A Thinking Reed

  • The Clash, “The Equaliser”

  • Getting by without infallibility

    An exaggerated or inaccurate view of Scripture is not a high view of Scripture, it is just a wrong view of Scripture. A high view of Scripture takes the Bible seriously, while also taking its historical context and the humanity of its authors seriously. A high view of Scripture is held by those who actually…

  • Buyer’s remorse, reader’s guilt

    When I was young–particularly when I was in college and grad school–I had a lot of time to read. Hours upon hours if I wanted to. What I didn’t have was a lot of money to buy books. And these were the pre-Amazon days when it wasn’t easy to come by any book they didn’t…

  • Black Sabbath, “Warning”

    “Sabbath’s genius was finding the hidden malevolence in the blues, and then bludgeoning the listener over the head with it.” (source)

  • Midnight Oil, “Outbreak of Love”

    I was listening to this album earlier, and this song struck me as fitting for today.

  • Beastie Boys, “So What’Cha Want”

  • Is the welfare state Christian?

    There’s been some back-and-forth in the comments to this post about whether Christianity is really compatible with social democracy (or we might just as accurately say welfare-state liberalism). Does Christian ethics require provision for the poor to take place at the local level and/or through private organizations rather than being carried out by the federal…

  • “Jesus’ wife” revisited

    It looks like the so-called Gospel of Jesus’ Wife papyrus fragment has been shown to be authentic–meaning that it comes from a legitimately ancient document, and may represent a tradition going back to a fairly early point in Christian history: A wide range of scientific testing indicates that a papyrus fragment containing the words, “Jesus…

  • The liberality of John Calvin

    The Lord commands us to do “good unto all men,” universally, a great part of whom, estimated according to their own merits, are very undeserving; but here the Scripture assists us with an excellent rule, when it inculcates, that we must not regard the intrinsic merit of men, but must consider the image of God…

  • The case for American social democracy–4: final thoughts

    (Previous posts: here, here, and here.) My summary can’t do justice to Kenworthy’s book, largely because it leaves out the impressive array of data he uses to buttress his arguments. I’m hardly a data-wonk, but in most cases the evidence he presents is clear and fairly persuasive in showing how the policies he favors can…