A Thinking Reed

  • Mary through Syrian eyes

    Neat article at Commonweal on the theological insights from recently translated ancient Syrian Christian hymns and antiphonal poems.

  • Ron Paul rising

    Ron Paul breaks another one-day fundraising record. Andrew Sullivan endorses Paul for the GOP nomination here. Also, I meant to link earlier to Chris Hayes’ interesting piece on the culture clash between “populist” and “cosmopolitan” libertarians.

  • Animal protection in the farm bill

    Wayne Pacelle, CEO of the Humane Society, summarizes four animal protection amendments that made it into the Senate version of the Farm Bill, dealing with issues ranging from imported puppies to using cloned animals for food.

  • “Commitment with detachment”

    I liked this article by Carol Zaleski at The Christian Century. She adivses Christians to take a political “time out,” not in abstaining from politics, but in abstaining from obsessing about politics: Some conservative wags like to say that liberalism is a mental disease. But the mental disease isn’t liberalism and it isn’t conservatism, it’s…

  • The peasants are revolting!

    It’s been pretty amusing over the past couple of days to watch elite conservative pundits wet themselves over Mike Huckabee’s rise to front-runner status. It’s as though all those years of courting evangelical voters without actually delivering much have led to rising expectations among this crucial part of the GOP base. It’s more than a…

  • 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…