A Thinking Reed

  • Pray for peace

    I did not know this: Memorial Day is not actually a day to pray for U.S. troops who died in action but rather a day set aside by Congress to pray for peace. The 1950 Joint Resolution of Congress which created Memorial Day says: “Requesting the President to issue a proclamation designating May 30, Memorial…

  • Friday metal – ARSIS, “We Are the Nightmare”

    The triumphant return of Friday metal – after a hiatus of at least a few weeks, I think. Lately I’ve been majorly digging We Are the Nightmare, the new album from Virginia death metal outfit ARSIS. I’ve seen them referred to as “technical” death metal, which refers to the crazy-ass playing. But these guys don’t…

  • Theology and piety

    Marvin echoes a call from Books & Culture‘s Jon Wilson for evangelicals (and, by extension, the rest of us) to get their eucharistic theology in order. Which is all to the good, but only half the battle, I think. Lutherans officially have a “high” eucharistic theology, but the practice at many churches hardly reinforces that.…

  • Radical faith and creation

    As my previous post may have suggested, I’ve been dipping into the greatest hits of H. Richard Niebuhr (Reinhold’s younger brother and no mean theologian himself). Right now I’m finishing up his Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, which I had read as an undergrad, and I remember it making an impression on me at the…

  • Surprisingly relevant

    H. Richard Niebuhr on what Karl Barth called “culture Protestantism”: How often the Fundamentalist attack on so-called liberalism–by which cultural Protestantism is meant–is itself an expression of cultural loyalty, a number of Fundamentalist interests indicate. Not all though many of these antiliberals show a greater concern for conserving the cosmological and biological notions of older…

  • Fair warning

    I’m considering a post – perhaps a series! – on the greatness of my long-beloved Beverly Hills 90210. My wife and I have been watching the just-released DVD of season 4. So great.

  • One of these things is not like the others

    Rod Dreher writes: I think the most common, and superficially common-sensical, questions that comes up in discussions of this issue is, “How does Jill and Jane’s marriage hurt Jack and Diane’s?” The idea is that unless you can demonstrate that a gay marriage directly harms traditional marriage, there is no rational objection to gay marriage.…

  • The sanctimonious carnivore

    I really don’t want to turn this into the all vegetarianism all the time blog. For one thing, I do have other interests. For another, I can only assume most readers don’t like being hectored about their dietary choices all the time. Plus, I’ve never been the proselityzing type. But for whatever reason there seems…

  • Book meme redux

    Marvin also tagged me for this book meme, which I’m pretty sure I did a while back, but maybe it’d be interesting to do it again without looking at my old answers. Here goes: 1. One book that changed your life: Miracles, by C.S. Lewis. Reading this book as an undergrad was the occasion for…

  • (Eco)culture wars

    Via Jeremy, a smart post from Patrick Deneen on the way Left vs. Right thinking is driving a lot of people’s reactions to environmental and resource challenges. I continue to be somewhat amazed at the glib dismissal of global warming and other environmental problems on the part of many conservatives. There is almost no attempt…