A Thinking Reed

  • I always knew I was special

    E-mailed to me from a friend: “Heavy metal ‘a comfort for the bright child’” Intelligent teenagers often listen to heavy metal music to cope with the pressures associated with being talented, according to research. The results of a study of more than 1,000 of the brightest five per cent of young people will come as…

  • Religious trend-spotting

    Interesting interview with Philip Jenkins, probably best known for his excellent The Next Christendom, on the future of Christianity, Islam in Europe, terrorism, American religiosity, etc. The thing I like about Jenkins is that, although he tends to write for conservative publications, he strikes me as first and foremost a patient social scientist, not someone…

  • Can we do without growth?

    Bill McKibben writes in the LA Times of the need, primarily for environmental reasons, to cure ourselves of our addiction to economic growth (“Growth is the ideology of the cancer cell,” Edward Abbey once wrote). But my question is this: is is possible to have an economy that is both sustainable and wealth-creating? There are…

  • Saintly miscellania

    I don’t think that I linked to LutherPunk’s good discussion of invoking the saints. Here it is. Also, coinciding with the Feast of the Assumption Annunciation (duh!), Steven Charleston, former bishop of Alaska and Dean and President of the Episcopal Divinity School, is going to be speaking at our parish’s adult education forum this Sunday…

  • Ill-informed prediction

    Al Gore will be the Democrats’ nominee in ’08. With Edwards possibly stepping out of the race, the southern progressive spot will be wide open for Gore to jump in. Gore has neither HRC’s baggage from the war nor Obama’s inexperience. In fact, Gore has hands down more experience than anyone else in the race.…

  • Compassionate eating as Christian discipleship

    Here’s a good lecture on our relationship to animals from a Christian perspective by Matthew Halteman, a Calvin College philosopher. He also contributes to a blog on these themes here. Prof. Halteman conceptualizes “compassionate eating” as a Christian discipline, which he defines as a repetitive daily practice undertaken to narrow the gap between who we…

  • I’m just a dupe

    Sam Harris informs us that “there is not a person on Earth who has a good reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in a cave.” Not only is there no conclusive proof that Jesus rose from the dead, mind you, but no good reason…

  • The new evangelical radicalism

    The cover article of the latest In These Times (complete with the inevitable Jesus-as-Che cover image) is about the new “Christian radicalism” being promoted by a variety of younger evangelical leaders and what the secular left might learn from it. The author claims that folks like Rob Bell, Shane Claiborne, and Gregory Boyd are part…

  • Dem bones

    This is a bit tardy by blogospheric standards, but friend of this blog and regular commenter Joshie has a helpful analysis of the recent “Jesus tomb” brouhaha (Pt 1, Pt 2). Thomas at Without Authority posted a while back on what the implications would be for the Christian faith if something like this turned out…

  • Bang your head

    This may well fall into the category of things that precisely no one reading this blog cares about, but I’m very excited about the upcoming release of the new Shadows Fall album early next month. SF is part of the newer breed of American heavy metal that combines hardcore and death metal influences with a…