A Thinking Reed

  • Calvin on the Atonement and God’s wrath

    One of the problems with penal substitutionary theories of the Atonement, at least as sometimes presented, is that, on the one hand, they present God the Father as being unable to be reconciled to humanity until his wrath is spent, but on the other hand, the Bible is very clear that the work of Christ…

  • Theologians, take heed!

    The medieval philosophy and theology blog Scholasticus has posted a fantastic quote from philosopher Peter Van Inwagen: One advantage philosophers bring to theology is that they know too much about philosophy to be overly impressed by the fact that a particular philosopher has said this or that. Philosophers of the present day know what Thomas…

  • Friday metal – unapologetic hair metal edition

    Hair metal has become synonymous with late-80s excess and VH1 ironic nostalgia specials. Many people consider the advent of grunge as something akin to divine providence due to its role in sweeping the radio clean of the scourge of hair (a.k.a. glam) metal. Now, I’d be the last one to deny that there were some…

  • Fryblog

    My wife and I have recently been watching the DVDs of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, the hilarious British sketch comedy show with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie (now playing a misanthropic doctor on House, M.D.). They also, of course, did the Jeeves and Wooster series based on P.G. Wodehouse’s books. Today the Young…

  • Wolterstorff on religion, liberty, and democracy

    The other day I was browsing my iTunes library and came across this talk by Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff on religious grounds for political liberty and democracy that I had apparently downloaded and then promptly forgot about. So I finally listened to it and it’s quite good. One of the points that Wolterstorff makes which,…

  • Bernard and the Reformers

    Interesting post (via Brandon) on Bernard of Clairvaux’s influence on Luther. See also this post on Bernard and Calvin at the same site.

  • A critical but substantive faith

    William Placher reviews Hitchens’ God Is Not Great at the Christian Century. He’s surprisingly appreciative, though he doesn’t shy from criticism (“The second frustration of reading this book [in addition to the factual errors], at least for a theologian, is that its author seems not to have read any modern theology, or even to know…

  • The strangeness of the Bible

    I really liked this review article in Books & Culture of a new book about the Bible and sex. So often we treat the Bible as little more than window-dressing for our preconceived moral or political agendas that we often lose sight at the sheer weirdness of the text. The Bible rarely provides ready-made moral…

  • September reading notes

    Well, okay, the month isn’t over yet, but it sure is flying. Earlier I mentioned I was still working on Monbiot’s Heat. Well, I still am. Just haven’t been in the mood to read it. ‘Nuff said. Finished Jame’s Alison’s Raising Abel. I stand by my earlier claim that, while Alison has some absolutely brilliant…

  • Simple music, simple faith?

    I came across this in yesterday’s NY Times: Does Simple Music Form Simple Faith? I’m not really sure what to make of it, but I thought I’d pass it along. Essentially, the author asks if beautiful complex music (and other art) can actually be a hindrance to faith: The church has reason to fear great…