A Thinking Reed

  • 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…

  • Unnecessary roughness

    John Schwenkler, who blogs here, wrote, in a comment to this post: [It’s] hard to see [given what I characterized as the “traditional” view of our place in the cosmic scheme of things — ed.] why we, unlike other animals, should be under an absolute (or even less than absolute) obligation not to consume members…

  • Thoughts about the Ascension and other faiths

    Today at church we observed the feast of the Ascension and our pastor preached what I thought was a fine sermon. His message, in essence, was that the Ascension is important because it shows that the love that was revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is affirmed to be the sovereign force…

  • The humanist half-way house

    God save us even from well-meant benevolence. It is possible to be sure, in individual cases, what is or is not to an entity’s profit or harm. It seems entirely obvious that we should not wantonly do harm, but only (at the most) for our necessities. That we should do good is a much more…