A Thinking Reed

  • La Visitacion

    Yesterday I took my daughter to the museum at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown. It’s privately funded and thus was not affected by the (recently concluded) government shutdown. The museum is small, but it features a wonderful collection from the Byzantine Empire and an impressive exhibit of pre-Columbian American artifacts. It also has, tucked away in…

  • Christianity is not inherently right-wing

    To those of us of a more moderate or liberal disposition, the tendency of conservative Christians to identify right-wing politics with Christianity per se is a source of no small irritation. Today at Salon, Elizabeth Stoker and Matt Bruenig point out that the American Christian Right’s approach to wealth and poverty is an outlier when…

  • Shearwater, “Seventy Four, Seventy Five”

  • Tillich: Why the “historical Jesus” is not the foundation of faith

    Paul Tillich’s discussion of historical Jesus research in volume 2 of his Systematic Theology is a minor tour de force and could still apply today without too much change. The problem of historical Jesus research, Tillich says, is that you can’t get “behind” the New Testament documents to the “real” historical Jesus of Nazareth because…

  • Willie Nelson, “Shotgun Willie”

  • Tillich: beyond naturalism and supranaturalism

    At the beginning of the second volume of his Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich provides a recap of the major themes of the first volume, in part to address criticisms he had received since its publication. In particular, Tillich discusses his doctrine of God. He characterizes the “basic intention” of his position as an attempt to…

  • Further adventures in old-school Whovianism

    I posted a while back that I had started dipping into the vast catalog of classic Doctor Who serials, and since then I’ve watched a few more. As befits the show, I’ve been jumping around in time, watching adventures of various Doctors. These are three I’ve watched and enjoyed since my last post (WARNING: contains…

  • “Living the questions” isn’t everything

    James McGrath shared a cartoon today from David Hayward that depicted the cross on a church steeple being replaced with a question mark. I don’t want to read too much into the cartoon, which may have just been meant to be provocative or get people thinking, but it seems to me that progressive Christians sometimes…

  • Modern science, classical theism (3)

    One of the impulses motivating “revisionist” views of the divine nature (process theology, et al.) is not only that they can seem more consonant with modern science, but that they provide a more intimate and relational view of God. Many theologians have argued, in fact, that seeing God in responsive, relational terms such as those…

  • Modern science, classical theism (2)

    According to Cynthia Crysdale and Neil Ormerod’s (C&O) view, God creates in a single divine act “outside” of time and space (see the previous post). In Thomas Aquinas’ terms, God is the primary cause of the existence of everything that is, while creatures are secondary causes within the time-space framework. The implication is that God…