A Thinking Reed

  • Office hours

    Derek of Haligweorc has a nice essay up at the new “Epsicopal Cafe” on the Daily Office and Anglican identity. I confess to having more or less fallen off the Daily Office wagon. What discipline I’ve managed to keep up has consisted of a Bible reading plan combined with a couple of Psalms each day…

  • Bread for the world

    Interesting primer on feeding everybody, and sustainably to boot.

  • The triumph of anti-Constantinianism

    Over at Faith and Theology there’s a (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) poll on the “worst theological invention.” What’s interesting is not just that only one of the “inventions” is an actual heresy, but that “Christendom” and “just war theory” got enough nominations to make the poll. (Though, in fairness, biblical inerrancy and “the Rapture” are the current…

  • anagnosis

    Check out the new blog of regular ATR commenter Josh/Joshie/Joshie (Poo). He’s blogging texts of the Christian mystical tradition, beginning with The Mystical Theology by Pseudo-Dionysious.

  • Ethical seriousness without self-absorption

    Hugo has a reflective post on his journey “further up and further in” to the vegan lifestyle and contemplates the importance of gradual change. And here’s an insightful post on how the quest for moral improvement can become ironically self-absorbed. The last point is an important one, I think. In our society, obsessed as it…

  • Globo-democracy?

    In making the case for a “global parliament,” George Monibot concedes something that seems to undercut his entire argument: Global democracy has a special problem – the scale on which it must operate. The bigger the electorate, the less democratic a parliamentary body will be. True democracy could exist only in the village, where representatives…

  • Our farm policy: bad for animals, bad for the environment, bad for the poor, bad for our waistlines…

    Michael Pollan writes about how US farm policy keeps the prices of fattening and unhealthy foods artificially low, while allowing prices on things like fruits and vegetables to rise. Why, he asks, would we want to encourage such a situation, especially if we face an “epidemic” of obesity? He also points out how this connects…

  • Once more into the breach…

    At the risk of boring readers to tears, Robert Jenson’s article on the atonement prompted me to write something about the oft-made criticism that Anselm imports the conceptual apparatus of feudal law into his theory of atonement and that this distorts the idea of God by replacing it with a deity who is an easily…

  • Cross talk

    I haven’t read either of these yet, but they’re bound to be of interest: Robert Jenson, “On the Doctrine of the Atonement” N.T. Wright, “The Cross and the Caricatures”

  • D.M. Baillie on the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith

    This weekend I re-read Donald Baillie‘s brief book God Was In Christ. Though originally published in 1948 it still strikes me as fresh and contemporary, not least in the way that it treats the problem of the “historical Jesus” and/vs. the “Christ of Faith.” Baillie is waging a two-front war here. On the one side…