A Thinking Reed

  • “A refuge from insignificance”

    For those for whom life means action, the world is a stage on which to enact their dreams. Over the past few hundred years, at least in Europe, religion has waned, but we have not become less obsessed with imprinting a human meaning on things. A thin secular idealism has become the dominant attitude to…

  • “Teach us how to pray”

    Fr. Chris on the Art of the Collect.

  • Okay, now I’m officially excited…

    Yes, Harrison Ford is probably too old for this, but still.

  • Directing traffic between science and theology

    The other day I asserted that Christian theology still hasn’t fully absorbed the insights of Darwinism, even where it claims to have accepted them. This Christian Century article provides a good overview of some attempts to do just that. I think there are two issues that stand out as particular challenges for theology here: the…

  • Dionne on faith and politics

    I’ve always liked E. J. Dionne’s work, and there was a good interview with him on NPR (listen here) this morning about his new book Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. Here’s an article he recently published at Commonweal. Dionne’s earlier book Why Americans Hate Politics is a great overview of…

  • More on +Rowan’s lecture

    Via Fr. Chris, an in-depth analysis and defense of the now-infamous Rowan Williams “sharia lecture” by Mike Higton, a theologian and scholar of Williams’ work. As Higton says in his brief summary: Despite everything you’ve heard and read, the most striking thing about Rowan Williams’ lecture is that he mounts a serious and impassioned defence…

  • John Gray contra humanism

    Over the weekend I started reading John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Gray, a British political philosopher, has gone from being a free-market Thatcherite to a critic of global capitalism to a proponent of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. If there is a connecting thread here it’s Gray’s resolute opposition to utopianism…

  • The primary is closed (to me, anyway)

    I registered independent here in DC partly because I figured the primary race would be essentially over by the time they got to us. Shows what I know. Not that I’m naive enough to think that a single vote could tip the contest, but the “Potomac primaries,” at least on the Dem side, aren’t totally…

  • The vegan’s dilemma

    Someone in my neighborhood was getting rid of a bunch of old magazines and I picked up from their stack an old issue of the unfortunately now-defunct magazine Satya, which billed itself as a journal of “vegetarianism, environmentalism, animal advocacy, and social justice.” Happily a lot of their archives are online, and I found this…

  • Ecclesiastical pet peeve

    When the “prayers of the people” sound more like political hectoring.