A Thinking Reed

  • 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.

  • 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…