A Thinking Reed

  • 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,…

  • The smiling God

    I don’t usually write about Joel Osteen and his ilk because a. evangelicalism isn’t really my milieu and b. it seems a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But if you like that sort of thing, Slate‘s review of Osteen’s new book is worth checking out.

  • The left-populist case for Ron Paul?

    This Fall I read Jeff Taylor’s Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy, in which he argues that the Democrats have traded a “Jeffersonian” ideology (decentralist, populist, libertarian, and non-interventionist bordering on pacifist) for a “Hamiltonian” one (basically the opposite). Bryan and Humphrey are for Taylor emblematic figures…

  • We’re doomed, the continuing series

    When I read things like this, I can understand why people want to ignore the issue of climate change. If things are as bad as writers like McKibben say, and if the measures they describe are what’s called for, then I just can’t see how we’re going to pull off anything that radical in time…

  • The end of the world as we know it (3)

    (See here and here for previous posts.) The third part of The God of Hope and the End of the World is Polkinghorne’s attempt to construct a positive theological vision out of biblical insights, but one informed by what scientific cosmology tells us about the nature and destiny of the universe. The resurrection of Jesus,…

  • The end of the world as we know it (2)

    The key principle that Polkinghorne uses to construct his eschatological vision is that of continuity/discontinuity. If God is going to bring new life out of this fated-for-death universe, it must be both continuous with what has come before and discontinuous in overcoming the frailties, limitations, and evils of the present universe. The paradigmatic expression of…