A Thinking Reed

  • Henry Chadwick, RIP

    An esteemed Anglican scholar and ecumenist passes. The obituary by Rowan Williams is here (via Derek). For what it’s worth: I highly recommend his history of the early church and Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition. Highly readable works that wear their (ample) scholarship lightly.

  • Rays of hope

    Marvin has a review of Diana Butler Bass’ Christianity for the Rest of Us, which tries to identify characteristics of thriving mainline congreations (often believed to be a contradiction in terms). Based on Marvin’s post, Bass confirms something that I’ve long thought: that you need to integrate both the “vertical” and “horizontal” dimensions of religion…

  • Friday metal – All hail Scandinavia edition

    I’m not usually one of those people who harps on about how much better and more advanced Europe is than the good ol’ US of A, but when it comes to metal it may well be true. Scandinavia alone has produced a disproportionately large number of metal’s best contemporary bands. (Is there a Lutheran connection…

  • Heaven is not optional

    Austin Farrer was, among other things, a renowned Anglican theologian and a friend of C.S. Lewis. I’ve been reading his book Saving Belief – a kind of primer of sorts Christian theology originally delivered as a series of lectures to undergraduates. In his chapter on “Heaven and Hell” he has this to say about Christians…

  • Dangerous nonsense

    I’d like to register my protest at the now-widespread tendency to refer to the President as “the commander-in-chief” or worse “our commander-in-chief,” full stop. To my ear, the connotations are perilously close to those of the Roman title imperator and it makes the President sound like some kind of warrior-king. As the Constitution makes clear,…

  • Is same-sex marriage a threat to religious freedom?

    In the argument over same-sex marriage, social conservatives have seen a string of defeats. For all intents and purposes, they have lost the argument based on straightforward morality (“gay sex is wrong”) and the argument based on social harm (“it will undermine straight marriage”). But the last-ditch argument that, in the wake of the California…

  • A Christian defense of liberty

    The Christian Century reviews Glenn Tinder’s recent book on liberty. I haven’t read the book, but I’m a big fan of Tinder’s earlier work, The Political Meaning of Christianity, which has been aptly characterized as combining the insights of both Niebuhrs: H. Richard and Reinhold. From the review: What makes Tinder’s discussion so refreshing and…

  • Rowan Williams on prayer

    I came across this during a Google search: One of the primary tasks of any prayer is ‘How do I let God be God? How do I empty my mind and heart – not so as to confront a kind of void, but so that the personal presence of God can come in?’ If all…

  • Perfect love casts out fear

    From James Alison’s Faith Beyond Resentment: The whole of my previous life had been marked by an absolute refusal to die. The absolute refusal to take on my baptismal commitment. Of course, because I was unable to imagine that my ‘self’, the ‘I’ who will live for ever, is hidden with Christ in God. And…

  • Sanctuary cities

    There was a nice article in today’s Washington Post about a trip to an animal sanctuary in New York state. Sometimes the question is posed to vegetarians whether farm animals wouldn’t die out if we all abandoned meat-eating, since the reason that so many cows, pigs, chickens, and other farm animals exist in the first…