A Thinking Reed

  • 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.

  • Sane repetition

    I see that the Catholic webzine Godspy is up and running again (via Kevin Jones). One particular article I liked was blogger Eve Tushnet’s commendation of repetitive prayer. This hits home for me: In “falling back on” other people’s words I can admit that I can’t express myself very well, and I need help even…

  • Sunday Metal – Grammy edition

    The Grammy awards have been notorious for their obliviousness to what was actually going on in music, going back at least to how long it took them to catch on to this whole “rock ‘n’ roll” thing. And they’ve been particularly lacksidasical in recognizing metal performances, with the first award in the hard rock/metal category…

  • Making room for religious law?

    There’s been a lot of blogospheric hubabaloo about this rather dry and academic lecture given by Rowan Williams on the possibility of recognizing, in some official fashion, religious legal jurisdictions within a pluralistic society. What was reported as the Archbishop appeasing Islamic extremists is, in reality, a nuanced exploration of some significant issues in the…

  • The Buddha and the Christ

    Here’s an interesting piece by a lapsed Catholic who studied Tibetan Buddhism and eventually found his way back to the Catholic Church. He discusses Tibet, and the many misconceptions Westerners have about it, as well as the differences between Buddhism and Christianity. Partly for personal reasons and partly out of curiosity I’ve been delving into…

  • Whose faith? Which rationality?

    In a comment to this post, Eric makes the valuable point that “reason” is not a univocal term. He points out that what some theologians are up to is trying to recover a richer notion of what reason is. He refers to Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address which called for a kind of “re-Hellenization” of our…