A Thinking Reed

  • Animals, nature, and Christian ethics

    Stephen Webb, theologian and author of On God and Dogs and Good Eating, has an intriguing article at The Other Journal called “Theology from the Pet Side Up: A Christian Agenda for NOT Saving the World” which combines two of my pet interests (pardon the pun), Christian concern for animals and the theology of nature.…

  • Evangelism in the mainline and the loss of transcendence

    Chris at Even the Devils Believe has a good post on birth rates and evangelism in mainline Protestantism, jumping off from the recent comments from Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori about how Episcopalians aren’t incresing their numbers due to the low birth rates among “better-educated” people who care about preserving the earth. Leaving…

  • PETA priorities

    I’m at least somewhat sympathetic to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; if nothing else, they raise issues that many, many people would just as soon never think about. But this case strikes me as a misallocation of what one can only assume are limited resources. Apparently they were chastising a pastor in Alaska…

  • A simple order of prayer to carry with you

    Recently I’ve been using David Adam’s The Rhythm of Life: Celtic Daily Prayer for, er, daily prayer. It’s a nice little easy-to-use office with certain “celtic” themes. But, unlike some attempts at celtic Christian spirituality it’s thoroughly grounded in Scripture and orthodox theology. There are four offices for each day of the week and each…

  • Let us now praise Starbucks, Borders, Target…

    Speaking of the blessings of a consumer society, Virginia Postrel, who is basically the anti-Crunchy Con, has an article in defense of chain stores (link will decay). As someone who grew up in a small town, I have come to appreciate chain stores. The much ballyhooed “mom and pop” stores in my home town were…

  • The Jeffersonian impulse

    Jeff Taylor, author of the interesting-sounding new book on the Democratic Party Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy, has an essay adapted from the book on Imperialism and Isolationism: Contrasting Approaches to Foreign Policy. Taylor tries to dispel some myths about isolationism: To some, isolationism may imply…

  • The problem with John McCain

    John McCain seems like an admirable person in many ways, but he’s never been someone I’d particularly want to see in the Oval Office. Here’s a good op-ed on why. For some reason, McCain’s actual views frequently get obscured in all the media fawning over his straight-talkin’ maverick persona. There is also the any-stick-to-beat-Bush-with phenomenon:…

  • Moral diversity in the church

    I recently picked up a collection of essays from the library called Gays and the Future of Anglicanism, edited by Andrew Linzey and Richard Kirker. The essays cover a broad range of topics responding to the Church of England’s Windsor Report, which censured the American Episcopal Church and a diocese within the Canadian Anglican church…

  • Hagel on exiting Iraq

    I said before that one of my hopes from the election was that some of the few GOP senators who haven’t entirely drunk the administration kool-aid might start to put pressure on the White House for a change of course in Iraq. Here’s Chuck Hagel in the Washington Post arguing for just that. What he’ll…

  • C.S. Lewis, scholar and spiritual writer

    Unbeknownst to me until this morning, today the Episcopal Church calendar commemorates C.S. Lewis. As is traditional, we remember “saints” on the day of their death, or their birth into eternal life. (As it happens, Lewis died on November 22, 1963, the very same day as JFK and Aldous Huxley.) Here’s the collect (via fellow…