A Thinking Reed

  • Favorite books read in 2013

    This is not based on any kind of rigorous methodology;  these are just the books I enjoyed and/or that “stuck with me” the most throughout the year. As should be obvious, these were not necessarily books published in 2013. Fiction: Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy I decided to start reading this late last year after seeing…

  • “Lost” Johnny Cash album to be released next year

    This is great news: There’s new never-before-heard music coming from Johnny Cash. Cash’s estate is releasing “Out Among the Stars,” an album he recorded with Billy Sherrill in the early 1980s that was never released by Columbia Records, then disappeared when the company dropped Cash in 1986. Turns out Cash and his wife, June Carter…

  • Elvis, “Silver Bells”

  • Can process theology be Christian?

    This isn’t directly related to the “classical theism vs. theistic personalism” debate, but it touches on some similar issues: evangelical theologian Roger Olson ruffled some feathers recently by declaring that process theology can’t be an authentically Christian theology. This garnered a response from Bo Sanders at Homebrewed Christianity and from theologian Philip Clayton. Olson’s main…

  • A Doctor Who theory

    (Contains spoilers for the most recent season.) It’s been known for a while that the upcoming Doctor Who Christmas special “The Time of the Doctor” will be Matt Smith’s last appearance and will pass the torch to Peter Capaldi. This suggests there will be some variation of the classic “regeneration” scene where the incumbent incarnation…

  • 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…