A Thinking Reed

  • Indiana Jones 4

    I’m cautiously optimistic. We’ve all been burned with the Star Wars prequel experience, and I’ve joked that it should be called Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Retirement Home, but I’ll be more than willing to give it a shot.

  • Zoos

    I’m against ’em, basically. Any practical benefit they serve (education, entertainment, scientific research, species conservation) can be provided in other ways that don’t infringe the natural liberty and well-being of wild animals. I mean, I’m not fanatical about it, and there are plenty of other more pressing issues, but I think it’s a practice that’s…

  • Lutherans and lay presidency

    The case for it. LutherPunk and Fr. Chris comment. I think there are good reasons to have only ordained persons presiding at the Lord’s Supper. However, in extreme cases I don’t see any insuperable theological objection to a lay person doing it. There’s a remark of Luther (perhaps apocryphal) that in emergencies “even” a woman…

  • Avery Dulles: Who Can Be Saved?

    Haven’t had a chance to read this yet, but I might have something to say about it later.

  • Obama: left-libertarian?

    Interesting view, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch.

  • I think the term for it is “ethnic cleansing”

    If this is correct, Huckabee–despite his kinder, gentler populist rhetoric–still seems to be singing from the Christian ultra-right hymnal when it comes to foreign policy, especially concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

  • Batman: The Dark Knight trailer

    I was a bit skeptical of Heath Ledger as the Joker, but this looks pretty awesome: (Replacing the boring Katie Holmes with the divine Maggie Gyllenhaal wasn’t a bad idea either.)

  • Elvis, rock, modernism, and authenticity

    I’ve recently been reading Charles Ponce de Leon’s (awesome name!) biography of Elvis, called Fortunate Son. One of the running themes is that Elvis’ “rebel” image belied an underlying conservatism that was born of his working-class Southern upbringing which emphasized deference to authority in order to earn “respectability.” But also important was Elvis’ love (and…

  • Blogroll update

    Ever since I started using Google Reader I’ve been lazy about updating the blogroll here since one of its purposes was to help me keep track of the blogs I read regularly. But I’ve just done a little housecleaning and added a few links to blogs that I’ve added to my regular diet.

  • The end of the world as we know it (6): animals

    (Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Reflection on the ultimate destiny of animals has not been a central feature of Christian thinking about the eschaton. Most theology in general has been relentlessly anthropocentric, and eschatology as a general rule is no different. This is perhaps especially true of post-Enlightenment theology which, influenced by Cartesian…