A Thinking Reed

  • Big questions

    ATR favorite Keith Ward also has a new book out – The Big Questions in Science and Religion. You can read a lenghty excerpt here (I haven’t read the book or the excerpt yet). I’m guessing it will cover a lot of the same ground as his recent Pascal’s Fire, though it looks like this…

  • Northcott’s A Moral Climate

    Michael Northcott, a Scottish theologian, has a new book out on theological ethics and climate change. Northcott previously wrote a good book on the environment and Christian ethics, and this new one got a glowing write up in the Christian Century by Duke University chaplain Sam Wells. I’ve already ordered the book; it looks like…

  • The value of abstaining

    One objection you sometimes get to vegetarianism is that there’s no point in bothering because a single person giving up meat isn’t going to make a dent in the meat industry and, in all likelihood, isn’t going to save any animals. While this question might rest on some dubious premises (are we sure that no…

  • Chronicles of woe

    So, I’ve been working on one of those read-through-the-entire-Bible plans off and on for a while now. It’s actually pretty good because it alternates, roughly, half of an OT book with half of a NT book, which breaks things up nicely. However, I cheated a while back and skipped ahead to Romans, which means that…

  • Of course, the James Dean/Ricky Nelson duet was inevitable

    Nice appreciation of the great Howard Hawks/John Wayne flick Rio Bravo as a kind of “cinema of democracy” and John Wayne as something quite different than the symbol of rugged indivdiualism. Note: the author is neither Charles Taylor the canadian philospher nor Charles Taylor the evil dictator, but Charles Taylor the film critic.

  • If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

    Christopher speculates a bit about life after death. I’ve never understood or been much interested in a version of Christianity that omits hope in the resurrection. After all – isn’t the entire religion founded on the belief that a man was raised from the dead? Christopher’s both/and approach seems eminently reasonable to me.

  • The raw milk underground!

    What’s next – dairy speakeasies (sort of like the milk bars in A Clockwork Orange)?

  • Vegetarian Secrets Revealed!

    A member of that strange cult of vegetarians pulls back the veil and reveals their innermost secrets. Turns out they’re … pretty normal, actually. I will cop to being a veggie who fully understands the pleasures of meat-eating, but I also agree that after you go without for a long time it does start to…

  • Ecclesiology

    The blog Inhabitatio Dei has a post describing a typology of ecclesiology, laid out along a “high-low” axis and a “strong-weak” axis: High Church Ecclesiology: High view of church history and tradition. Emphasizes the liturgy and above all the Eucharist. Churches are generally structured episcopally (i.e. through a hierarchy of bishops who stand in communion…

  • Niebuhr on the Ascension (sort of)

    I found this essay by H. Richard Niebuhr and it has some good stuff to say about the Ascension and the whole idea of Jesus being elevated to authority above all the powers of the world: What has happened is that this forsaken and rejected Servant of God has been given a name above every…