A Thinking Reed

  • Back from the land of Peyton

    I’m back from spending a very enjoyable Christmas with my in-laws in Indianapolis, where, if there’s a war on Christmas, it’s being waged on behalf of Colts fever; the amount of Colts gear and paraphernalia on display threatened to overwhelm anything Christmas-themed. Blogging to resume at its usual erratic pace shortly.

  • Pre-Christmas odds and ends

    The ATR household is off to visit family for the better part of the next week, so blogging will be light–well, even lighter than usual. Here’s a sampling of what I’ve been reading ’round the Web lately: Christopher has several posts on l’affaire Rick Warren that are, as usual, very much worth your time. (See…

  • November/December reading notes

    Also known as the lazy man’s book review, or capsule reflections on books I might not get around to posting on at greater length: Ecology at the Heart of Faith by Denis Edwards and Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology by H. Paul Santmire A Catholic (Edwards) and a Lutheran (Santmire)…

  • The dark side, indeed

    I had a vague recollection of this from my childhood, but Andrew Sullivan posted a link to this clip the other day and I was reminded how truly, truly awful 1978’s Star Wars Holiday Special (amazingly, featuring the majority of the film’s cast, not to mention the likes of Bea Arthur, Art Carney, and Harvey…

  • Blogs of Christmas past

    Since content will likely be light this coming week, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to offer up some representative posts from the previous four Decembers since I started blogging, as a kind of retrospective. (Note: some of these originally appeared on my first blog, “Verbum Ipsum,” but have been imported to WP;…

  • Of wolf and man

    Thanks to Jeremy for tipping me off to this review by John Gray of philosopher Mark Rowland’s new book The Philosopher and the Wolf. Rowlands lived with a wolf he adopted for many years and learned lessons from him about what it meant to be happy and to be human. He also makes the provocative…

  • Rick rolled

    Quick: name the people who gave the invocations at the last five presidential inaugurations. Four…? Three…? Anyone…? Bueller…? Bueller…? This is something that everyone will forget about on January 21st. Just because a lot of pundits and bloggers are talking about it doesn’t make it hugely important. That said, I don’t think it’ll come as…

  • Friday Metal: Top 8 of ’08

    Is it time to start the inevitable “best of” lists already? Well, I know that you all have been waiting with baited breath for my top heavy metal albums of 2008. I make no claim that these are “the best” in any objective sense, just that they’re the ones I listened to and enjoyed the…

  • Milton and Christian liberty

    Theo Hobson argues that John Milton was a great (and underrated) theorist of a distinctly Christian liberalism. He was a strong proponent of a secular state, but also of a Protestant ethos throughout society: So was he an early “secular liberal”? Not in the dominant contemporary sense, which assumes that politics should be post-religious. He…

  • Ape revolt!

    This piece is both incredible and infuriating. Incredible because it describes in detail how intelligent the orangutans are in devising increasingly sophisticated ways to escape from their jailers (oops-“keepers”) at the San Diego Zoo. Infuriating, well, because such obviously intelligent and social creatures are being held captive against their demonstrated preferences. Really, what is the…