A Thinking Reed

  • Better copyediting needed

    Oxford University Press is publishing a pocket version of Phyllis Tickle’s popular Divine Hours series (an adaptation of the Daily Office/Liturgy of the Hours), which sounds like a worthwhile project. I couldn’t help, though, but snicker at this line on the book’s website page: “Tickle draws her texts primarily from the Book of Common Prayer…

  • As the Anglican Communion turns (and turns, and turns…)

    I’m sure others better informed than I am will have plenty to say about this NT Wright interview, but I have a couple of questions for Anglican/Episcopalian readers: Has the Episcopal Church violated its own canon laws in proceeding with the election of Gene Robinson? And in what sense does the structure of the Anglican…

  • Augustine’s Enchiridion 12: The Incarnation and the Holy Spirit

    In chapter 12 Augustine considers the role of the Holy Spirit in the Incarnation. Though we say that Christ was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, we don’t call him the son of the Spirit. Should we say that his divine nature is the Son of the Father but that his human…

  • Christian peace bloggers

    I’ve joined a “Christian Peace Bloggers” webring started by Michael Westmoreland-White of the Levellers blog. I think I properly fit into the catergory of “someone who believes war is a very last resort” and “that Christians are commanded to be working for peace so that such a resort doesn’t come.” In other words, I’m not…

  • Faith seeking understanding

    Deconstructionist theologian Don Cupitt urges the church to trade in its traditional reliance on western metaphysics, the view that “behind the flux of experience there had to be something Real, one, intelligible to us, and perfect” with a radical rethinking of Christian faith based on a kind of post-Derridean anti-realism: We used to assume that…

  • War, intervention, and risk

    Okay, here’s something that I’ve been mulling over for a while now. I’m not sure if this is right, but I thought I’d throw it out there. The question is: when are we justified in imposing the risk of death on others without their consent? One occassionally runs into arguments about whether “the Iraqis” are…

  • War and peace: some notes and links

    I haven’t blogged directly on politics much over here, but this article by Andrew Bacevich in The American Conservative caught my eye. Bacevich takes on both the neoconservative proponents of the “surge” as well as the establishmentarian “wise men” of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group: Almost without fail, media references to the Baker-Hamilton commission emphasize…

  • Eat food

    That’s the takeaway point from this NY Times Magazine article by Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma). Pollan details how an unholy trifecta of scientific experts, sloppy journalism and the food industry have distorted the American diet by pushing the idea of “nutritionism” – the notion that nutrients, rather than actual foods, are the…

  • Augustine’s Enchiridion: 10 & 11

    We’ve seen that for Augustine the human condition is pretty dire. Humans, due to the sin of our first parents, find ourselves spiritually crippled and condemned to death, our wills utterly impotent on their own to change our situation. A rather grim situation. But of course, the Christian story is the story of God’s mighty…

  • Pluralism and the work of Christ: 2

    In this post I suggested that there is a connection between one’s view of the work of Christ and one’s view of religious pluralism. My hypothesis was that holding a strongly “objectivist” view of Christ’s work tends to go with either an exclusivist or inclusivist position on other religions, while a more “subjectivist” account fit…