A Thinking Reed

  • Best of the week

    I end up sharing a lot of links on Twitter, so I thought it might be worth collecting what I think were the stand-out pieces of the week. (“Stand-out” doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with every word, just that these were the most interesting or thought-provoking items I came across). Anyway, here goes: –Elizabeth Stoker,…

  • Living Colour, “Leave It Alone”

  • Mazzy Star, “Blue Flower”

    Amazon was having an MP3 sale, and I went back and scooped up the rest of the Mazzy Star catalog. This is a great cut from their debut album, She Hangs Brightly.

  • The Rosary as contemplative prayer for everybody

    In his book The Word Is Very Near You: A Guide to Praying with Scripture, Martin L. Smith, a spiritual director and formerly the superior of the (Episcopal) Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Mass., considers various ways of using the Bible in prayer. These include Ignatian-style meditation, where we imaginatively place ourselves…

  • The biblical case for same-sex relationships isn’t new

    It’s great that some theologically conservative evangelicals are making the “biblical” case against Christianity’s historic anti-gay position. There are certainly many people–and not just in evangelical churches–who feel in good faith that they can’t accept a revision of the traditional view without sacrificing their trust in the Bible or other bedrock convictions. But at the…

  • B. A. Gerrish’s “Saving and Secular Faith”

    The concept of faith is obviously of great importance in Christianity, but there’s not necessarily agreement on what it means. Faith has been defined as intellectual assent to certain propositions (such as those taught by the church or contained in the Bible). But it has also been interpreted in a more “existential” sense as “trust.”…

  • The Kinks, “Victoria”

  • The love from above

    Man can love himself in terms of self-acceptance only if he is certain that he is accepted. Otherwise his self-acceptance is self-complacency and arbitrariness. Only in the light and in the power of the ‘love from above’ can he love himself. This implies the answer to the question of man’s justice towards himself. He can…

  • The evangelical liberalism of Georgia Harkness

    A common story about 20th century American theology is that liberalism dominated in the early decades, but gradually vanished in the face of more conservative or orthodox alternatives. Theological modernism and the Social Gospel movement seemed to be the wave of the future, but they were swept away by the winds of Barthian neo-orthodoxy blowing…

  • Another year (almost) over. . .

    Since it’s unlikely I’ll do much substantive blogging over the next couple of weeks, I want to wish you, dear readers, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Also, thanks to everyone who still reads this humble blog! 2013 hasn’t exactly been a banner year for my blogging, productivity-wise (or quality-wise you might add).…