A Thinking Reed

  • 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…

  • My own personal primary

    Say what you will about these internet quizzes, my results have been remarkably consistent: 73% Mike Gravel66% Dennis Kucinich56% Ron Paul55% Chris Dodd54% John Edwards54% Bill Richardson50% John McCain50% Barack Obama49% Mike Huckabee49% Joe Biden47% Hillary Clinton42% Mitt Romney35% Fred Thompson34% Tom Tancredo27% Rudy Giuliani2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz (via Connexions)

  • The end of the world as we know it (5): New creation

    At the end of the previous post I wrote that Polkinghorne sees embodiment as essential to what it means to be human, partly because of the interrelatedness that is an intrinsic feature of all things. A self existing in isolation is, if not a contradiction in terms, at least living an extremely diminished and attenuated…

  • More thoughts on Obama

    I was maybe excessively churlish about Barack Obama in this post. All things considered, I think an Obama candidacy (as opposed to a Clinton candidacy) would be a good thing. His positions on climate change and energy policy in particular strike me as among the best in the field, and that’s no small matter. I…

  • The end of the world as we know it (4): Human nature

    As we’ve seen, Polkinghorne is developing an eschatological vision that takes the findings of modern cosmology seriously, but is consonant with the deepest insights of the biblical tradition. The key principles are: that any hope for life beyond this world must be rooted in God’s faithfulness and that the shape of this hope will be…

  • Iowa

    My two cents, for what it’s worth: I was happy to see more or less “anti-establishment” candidates win, continuing to undermine the “inevitability” theme that had been running through the campaign. Neither Huckabee nor Obama are my ideal candidate by any stretch, but I’d much rather see a match up between those two than, say,…