A Thinking Reed

  • St. Vincent, “Digital Witness”

    This comes from her new album, which I’m loving.

  • On pseudo-radical antigay arguments

    This and this both seem to me to run aground on the same basic reality: gay people exist, and no amount of quasi-Foucaultian “deconstruction” is going to change that. Even if you could dispense with the concepts of hetero/homosexuality, there would still be people who are exclusively, and more-or-less unalterably, attracted to members of the…

  • Echo and the Bunnymen, “The Killing Moon”

    I’ve had this song stuck in my head since I heard it playing at my local coffee shop the other day.

  • The shrinking of imaginative identification

    At this point in my life I have probably had a broader experience of the American population than is usual. I have been to divinity schools, and I have been to prisons. In the First Epistle of Peter we are told to honor everyone, and I have never been in a situation where I felt…

  • Free De La Soul albums for Valentine’s Day

    Legendary hip-hop group De La Soul is offering free downloads of some of their classic albums today. See here: http://www.wearedelasoul.com/ I’m not nearly as familiar with their catalog as I should be, so I’m taking this opportunity to fix that. 🙂

  • “Deep time” and religious belief

    Keith Ward reviews what sounds like a pretty interesting book on “deep time” and the possible future evolution of religious beliefs. The acceptance of deep time — of the fact that the universe has existed for billions of years and that it will continue to exist for billions of years — could, if inwardly digested,…

  • You can’t separate politics from morality

    To me, the most interesting part of this Dahlia Lithwick article on the recent wave of left-of-center protests in North Carolina is this: One of the first speakers of the morning opened with a booming, Southern, “Shabbat Shalom, y’all.” An imam spoke eloquently of civil rights. An astute 11-year-old friend observed that when so many…

  • Stone Temple Pilots, “Lady Picture Show”

    I think the music of STP, critically reviled as they were at the time, has aged pretty well. Particularly once they stopped trying to be a Pearl Jam clone and focused on writing catchy pop-rock.

  • Science, faith, and cognitive dissonance

    Slate‘s William Saletan wrote a post about the much-publicized debate between creationist crackpot Ken Ham and Bill “the Science Guy” Nye in which he argued that, while creationism is a “delusion,” it’s largely harmless because people can compartmentalize their wacky theological beliefs and function perfectly well in modern society. They can even work successfully in…

  • Do we need another Jesus movie?

    Probably not, but we’re getting one anyway. Here’s the trailer for Son of God, due out this month: Apart from some snazzy modern special effects, this looks depressingly by-the-numbers, right down to the very Caucasian-looking Jesus. My favorite film versions of the story of Jesus are still Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth and…