A Thinking Reed

  • Food for the faithful

    Bls points us to an article from the Post on how religious believers are reflecting their faith in their food choices. I think the idea of having a church garden that supplies all the food for a seasonal picnic is fantastic. Not least because it resulted in an all-veggie potluck, about the opposite of most…

  • The Groaning of Creation 2: The Only Way?

    Before moving on, it’s worth spending a post on what Southgate calls the “only way” or the “best way” argument, which is, in his view, “the starting point for any evolutionary theodicy that does not allow itself to be lured down the blind alleys–such as a spurious appeal to fallenness–that I explored in Chapter 2”…

  • The Groaning of Creation 1: Intro

    I’ve been reading a very cool book by Christopher Southgate called The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. This short book hits on several topics that I’ve discussed here: the relation between evolutionary and theological accounts of nature, the understanding of sin and redemption in the context of an evolutionary universe,…

  • “Existence is a vulgar absurdity”

    Your daily dose of sports-themed existentialism, from The Onion.

  • Paging “values voters”

    John offers a timely reminder of the importance of torture as a moral issue and the need for religious voters in particular to hold politicians’ feet to the fire here. National Religious Campaign Against Torture

  • Who’s good for small towns?

    In light of all the talk about “small town” values, Patrick Deneen gets some interesting perspective from a couple of his commenters.

  • The experience question

    See Brandon and, also, Ivan Eland.

  • Housekeeping

    I’ve added a few new links to the blogroll, and removed a couple of others (mostly in cases where there has been no activity for several months or more; I will happily re-link should they become active again). In these days of RSS feeds, I’m not entirely sure what the proper function of a blogroll…

  • What the–?

    Is this for real? Good golly.

  • Myths we live by

    There’s been a lot of loose talk from both parties about “energy independence,” so I thought it’d be worth linking to this piece from Paul “The End of Oil” Roberts that appeared in Mother Jones a couple of months back: The Seven Myths of Energy Independence.