A Thinking Reed

  • The man comes around

    Check out Chris‘s series on the theology of Johnny Cash in three parts (1,2,3). Proving that you can’t escape your Lutheran roots he uses a nice law/gospel dialectic. Someday I’ll write my series on the theology of Jerry Reed. Hound dogs and fishing will loom large in the system.

  • Yet another political quiz thingie

    Your Political Profile: Overall: 45% Conservative, 55% Liberal Social Issues: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal Personal Responsibility: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal Fiscal Issues: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal Ethics: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal Defense and Crime: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal How Liberal Or Conservative Are You? (via Haligweorc) It’s funny how end up as kind of a…

  • New Over the Rhine Christmas album

    Here’s an article from The New York Press on the great group Over the Rhine, who apparently have a new Christmas record coming out, with a pretty awesome cover. (via Thunderstruck) Their previous Christmas album is called The Darkest Night of the Year. For what it’s worth, OTR are a great live act if you…

  • Mouw on evangelicalism

    Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, is interviewed in the LA Times on what it means to be an evangelical. Nothing really new there, but he does highlight a kind of “broad tent” evangelicalism that seems to be gaining more notice. I read Mouw’s Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport and He Shines in…

  • The new new fusionism?

    There’s been a fair bit of blogospheric discussion of this piece by Brink Lindsey in the New Republic calling for a liberal-libertarian alliance (the link I provided is to the publicly accessible version at the Cato Institute website). The problem with proposals like these, it seems to me, is that they inevitably overestimate the number…

  • Miscellaneous Advent notes

    Sunday, as we all know, was the first Sunday in Advent, a season of penitence and hope as we await the coming of the Lord. This has dual connotations in that the coming of the Lord can refer both to the Nativity and to the Second Coming, which is why you get apocalyptic texts like…

  • The Zwingli-Clinton axis

    I was reading an article from a back issue of the Lutheran journal dialog and came across this amusing line: “This something could on that basis be regarded, alongside with the scriptures, as also normative as a sign of unity, even if not recognized by all the Lutheran Confessions, provided that ‘is’ does not really…

  • Barack Obama: Where’s the beef?

    Another link from Gaius: David Sirota critiques the hype about a 2008 Barack Obama presidential run. Coming from the progressive Left, Sirota points out that Obama has essentially no record of willingness to take the lead on any controversial issue. Sirota doesn’t blame Obama himself as much as the people for whom he’s become a…

  • Greeley against the draft

    Great response by Fr. Andrew Greeley to Rep. Charlie Rangel and the other “authoritarian liberals” who want to use conscription to provide a check on executive warmaking and/or to promote social and racial equality and/or as a moral tonic. (via Conservative Green) The obvious point is that the draft has historically not acted as a…

  • The meanings of limited government

    This post at the anabaptist blog Levellers does a good job encapsulating where I tend to differ from contemporary American conservatism. I had wanted to write a post for a while about the different meanings given to “limited government” by people whose primary concerns are, say, concentrated executive power versus those who are most worried…