A Thinking Reed

  • 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.

  • Lewis’s “trilemma” revisited

    Alan Jacobs takes issue with Anthony Kenny’s discussion of C. S. Lewis’s famous “trilemma” argument in Mere Christianity for the divinity of Jesus. Here’s Kenny: One line of argument he made popular went like this. Jesus said that he was God. Jesus was neither a deceiver nor deceived. Therefore Jesus was indeed God. Mocking the…

  • Van Morrison, “Into the Mystic”

  • Gay marriage for some, tiny American flags for others

    Well this is pretty much unqualifiedly good news: Married gay and lesbian couples are entitled to federal benefits, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday in a major victory for the gay rights movement. In a second decision, the court declined to say whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Instead, the justices said…

  • Camera Obscura, “Do It Again”

    I’ve really been enjoying this album–it’s called Desire Lines and came out earlier this month.

  • Slavery, divine judgment, and atonement

    During my vacation I read James Oakes’ The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. Oakes tells the story of how the radical abolitionist Douglass and the temperamental conservative Lincoln converged on a brand of antislavery politics that eventually resulted in the emancipation of America’s millions of slaves…

  • The Clash, “Washington Bullets”

    I’ve been listening to The Clash’s sprawling 2-disc (3-LP when it was released) album “Sandinista!” A lot of people regard it as a bit of a mess, but I think it’s kind of amazing.

  • Wesley’s “conversion”

    Methodist and other churches remember today as the anniversary of John Wesley’s “Aldersgate Experience.” Richard Hall at Connexions provides some of the background here. Essentially, Wesley reported having a vivid experience of assurance in his own salvation when hearing a reading from Luther’s Preface to Romans. While this has sometimes been described as Wesley’s “conversion…

  • Willie Nelson, “Whiskey River” (Live, 1974)