A Thinking Reed

  • Kyuss, “Asteroid”

  • American Christians should relax about church decline

    Popular Christian blogger Rachel Held Evans wrote an article for CNN on “why millenials are leaving the church.” She really means the evangelical church, and she cites issues like excessive politicization, an anti-science attitude, and hostility to LGBT folks as reasons why people in her generation are jumping ship. She suggests that churches need to…

  • Smashing Pumpkins, “Cherub Rock”

    Apparently this album came out 20 years ago tomorrow. Which makes me feel kind of old.

  • A liberal revival?

    According to the New York Times, after a period when it was more fashionable to study relatively marginalized religious movements like evangelicalism and Mormonism, historians are turning their attention back to liberal mainline Protestantism. One of the more surprising arguments, made by David Hollinger, is that the legacy of the mainline may be deeper and…

  • God is no gentleman

    Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may remember me to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fashioned theism was bad enough, with its notion of…

  • “I Am the Doctor”

    Okay, this is kind of nerdy, but I’ve been watching the Matt Smith seasons of Doctor Who, and I really like the 11th Doctor’s theme:

  • Putnam and Plantinga on religion

    This discussion on religion with heavy-duty philosophers Hilary Putnam and Alvin Plantinga is from way back in 2000, but I found it well worth a listen. Somewhat ironically–considering that Putnam is Jewish and Plantinga is a Christian–I found myself more sympathetic to Putnam’s overall approach. I’m not nearly as familiar with his work, but the…

  • Abandoned classics

    The book recommendations site Goodreads had an interesting feature on books readers start but don’t finish. Here are their top five “abandoned classics”: 1. Catch-22, Joseph Heller I have it on my shelf but have never read it. 2. Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien Read it for the first time the fall before the…

  • Lewis’s trilemma in context

    Since we’ve been debating in the comments to this post just what Lewis was trying to accomplish with his trilemma argument, I thought it might be worth walking through the relevant passages in Mere Christianity step-by-step. It’s worth recalling that for all the attention it’s received, the argument only takes up somewhere in the neighborhood…

  • Queens of the Stone Age, “I Appear Missing”

    I never really got into this band before, but I’m enjoying the new album.