A Thinking Reed

  • Why libertarians are not “social liberals”

    Politico ran a story today from conservative writer Kevin Williamson on why Senator Rand Paul’s brand of libertarian-inflected conservatism will have trouble appealing to voters. I don’t know about the politics, but Williamson makes an interesting point about the difference between libertarians and social liberals. Libertarians are sometimes described as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,”…

  • Two recent books on Christian liberalism

    Christopher H. Evans’ Liberalism without Illusions: Renewing an American Christian Tradition (2010) provides a brief history and qualified commendation of the American tradition of liberal Christianity. He discusses the roots of liberalism in the 19th century, its flowering in the Social Gospel movement, and its continuing diffusion and influence throughout the 20th century. As the…

  • Notable links from the week, with a smattering of commentary

    Buzzfeed(!) profiles pioneering Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson. I blogged about Johnson’s book She Who Is back in 2009–see here, here, here, and here. Nadia Bolz Weber preached a good Ash Wednesday sermon. Rep. Paul Ryan thinks free school lunches are bad for kids’ souls. I take this a bit personally since I got free…

  • 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…