A Thinking Reed

  • Paramore, “Now”

    This might cross the line into guilty pleasure territory, but I’ve been enjoying the heck out of this album.

  • Theistic personalism vs. classical theism, revisited

    Fr. Kimel at Eclectic Orthodoxy has been posting a lot of great stuff recently on concepts of God. His most recent post contrasts “theistic personalism,” which views God as, essentially, a person writ large, with “classical theism,” which has a less anthropomorphic understanding of the divine being. He comes down, with some help from Edward…

  • A “greatest common denominator” approach to the Bible

    I don’t have much invested in the debate over biblical “inerrancy.” It strikes me as largely an intra-evangelical debate, one driven in large part by a very conservative, Reformed strain of evangelicalism. But I do have something invested in the inspiration and authority of the Bible. I think that a “liberal” view which regards the…

  • Midnight Oil, “King of the Mountain”

  • When is schism justified (or required)?

    Emergent blogger Tony Jones calls for a “schism” regarding women in the (evangelical) church: That means: If you attend a church that does not let women preach or hold positions of ecclesial authority, you need to leave that church. If you work for a ministry that does not affirm women in ecclesial leadership, you need…

  • Inerrancy versus sufficiency

    In a post yesterday, Daniel Silliman quoted historian Molly Worthen arguing that biblical “inerrancy” became an entrenched position among evangelical Christians only when it seemed necessary to shore up beliefs that were under attack by theological modernists. Prior to that, evangelicals held a variety of views on the inspiration of the Bible. He specifically mentions…

  • To effect an intellectual revolution

    This was the perfect medium for changing the way most Americans thought about the nation’s founding acts. Lincoln does not argue law or history, as Daniel Webster did. He makes history. He does not come to present a theory, but to impose a symbol, one tested in experience and appealing to national values, with an…

  • “The Night of the Doctor”

    This is a cool “mini-episode” leading in to the upcoming Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor.” It marks the return of Paul McGann as the eighth Doctor, who’s only appeared on screen one other time–in a made-for-TV movie from the 90s that was meant to revive the franchise for an American…

  • Johnny Cash & Joe Strummer, “Redemption Song”

  • Utilitarianism as “moral Esperanto”?

    The Atlantic‘s Robert Wright has a thought-provoking review of Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Greene used scans of people’s brains to examine their responses to the famous (famous by the standards of professional philosophy, anyway) “trolley problem” thought-experiment. In the thought-experiment, people are asked whether they would…