A Thinking Reed

  • The Lutheran Song

    I’d be a bad Lutheran if I didn’t link to this (well, I might be a bad Lutheran anyway). (I don’t think Adam Sandler has much to worry about, incidentally.)

  • Movie memery

    This one comes by way of Marvin. 1. One movie that made you laugh The Princess Bride 2. One movie that made you cry Big Fish 3. One movie you loved when you were a child Back to the Future 4. One movie you’ve seen more than once Ghostbusters (many, many times) 5. One movie…

  • 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…