A Thinking Reed

  • Pro-life and pro-Obama

    Interesting post from Frank Schaeffer (son of the famed evangelical guru Francis Schaeffer). Schaeffer’s piece does have a whiff of the Obama-as-messiah meme, though, with its insistence that Obama can lead us to a “spiritual rebirth, a turning away from the false value of consumerism and utilitarianism that have trumped every aspect of human life.…

  • “We don’t want to be found”

    Good Lost recap and comments at the AV Club. (Spoilers ahoy!)

  • Don’t spook the blogger

    I’m hesitant to draw attention to Jennifer‘s low profile return to the world of blogging lest we scare her off, but let’s hope this positive reinforcement will encourage her to continue. 🙂 Now, if Camassia would come back…

  • Friday metal – Machine Head, “Now I Lay Thee Down”

  • Faith, rationality and the common good

    Fr. Chris has a good post defending Jeffrey Stout from Christian neo-traditionalist critiques. I’m no expert on Stout, but I think I’m overall more sympathetic to what I take to be Stout’s side in this debate. Call me an old-fashioned liberal, but I am deeply skeptical about this idea of replacing a shared rationality with…

  • O brave new world!

    At the First Things sort-of-blog Jason Byassee reviews what sounds like a fascinating book from Methodist ethicist Amy Laura Hall called Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction which, in Byassee’s words “aims to show that the powerful narrative of ‘progress’ in twentieth-century American Protestantism is linked indelibly with eugenics, abortion, Hiroshima, racism,…

  • How green is McCain?

    John McCain has distinguished himself from the Republican pack by actually acknowledging the reality of global warming and even sponsoring some legislation to combat it. But would a President McCain really do what’s necessary to seriously address the problem?

  • Ash Wednesday ruminations

    I managed to make it to church this afternoon for the service of Communion and the Imposition of Ashes. And it occurred to me that the cyclical nature of the liturgical year is a good way of driving home the Lutheran insight that we’re always beginning anew and always utterly dependent on God’s grace. In…

  • Confession

    The revivified American Gladiators is kind of awesome.

  • Friday metal – unemployed flying monkeys edition

    Protest the Hero, “Heretics and Killers”