A Thinking Reed

  • Friday metal – best of 2007/personal faves

    Decibel magazine, sort of the Pitchfork of heavy music, has released its list of the top 40 metal albums of the year. There’s a lot on here I haven’t heard, but here are some of the albums I’ve enjoyed, a few of which didn’t make Decibel’s list: Baroness, The Red Album: This is the first…

  • NR endorses Romney

    Exotic religious beliefs aside, could there be a blander, more uninspiring candidate? It truly bodes ill for the GOP and the conservative movement that the current crop is the best they could come up with. The people who are generating all the buzz are the outliers (Huckabee, Paul), the people who are calling into question…

  • Praying the Psalms with Luther

    Speaking of spiritual practices, I wanted to mention another little gem I picked up recently. Our Missouri-Synod brethren at Concordia Publishing have put together a little volume called Reading the Psalms with Luther. This consists of the entire Psalter (in the ESV translation) with each psalm prefaced by a short introduction from Luther’s work The…

  • Items of interest from the JLE

    From this month’s Journal of Lutheran Ethics: First, an article on the neglect of spiritual practices in the ELCA and how, if the church doesn’t offer pathways to intimacy with God, people will seek them elsewhere. I can definitely sympathize with this. As someone who (re)turned to Christian faith as a young(ish) adult I was…

  • Paul Zahl’s theology of grace

    Another newish book that I picked up almost on a whim is Paul Zahl’s Grace In Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life. Zahl was until recently dean of Trinity Episcopal Seminary, is a determined low-church evangelical and vocal opponent of revisionist moves on same-sex relationships. Despite some disagreement there, I’d read his Short Systematic Theology…

  • Hillary and the meat-industrial complex

    The recently announced co-chair of “Rural Americans for Hillary” is the former head of “the main trade group representing CAFO [concentrated animal feeding operations, a.k.a. factory farms] operators.” More here. Hard to think of too many things that’ve been more generally detrimental to the livelihood of “rural Americans” that industrial farming (not to mention their…

  • Who ever heard of a skinny Santa?

    Seriously? (via Mary)

  • Another view

    I don’t have anything interesting to say about Mitt Romney’s religion speech, but, as it happens, yesterday I was hanging out with an out-of-town Mormon friend. I asked him what he thought of Romney’s speech. He didn’t like it because he doesn’t think Mormonism should strive to be mainstream. He said he has never thought…

  • Eddie Izzard + Legos + Star Wars = hi-larious

    A friend sent this to me (warning: some salty language):

  • Alterna-nomics

    I finally got my hands on a copy of Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy and I’m tempted to call it my non-fiction book of 2007. It manages to be both troubling and hopeful as it paints a bleak picture of what our present obsession with “growth” is doing to us and to the planet, while holding…