A Thinking Reed

  • Unintended consequences

    “Recent history shows us that there is no civil war so bad that it cannot be made worse – prolonged, intensified, made more bloody and intractable – by the intervention of Western liberals.” Daring to contradict such geopolitical experts as George Clooney, Brendan O’Neill offers a contrarian take on the campaign to “Save Darfur.” (Link…

  • Further adventures in Anglo-Catholicism

    This Sunday Abby and I went to our first “Solemn Mass” at the Church of the Advent. Until yesterday we’d been going to the earlier Sung Mass, which follows the Rite II Eucharist from the Book of Common Prayer pretty closely with just a couple of flourishes, such as the “Prayer of Humble Access.” In…

  • Compromised

    The gist of what I’ve been reading is the “compromise” between the White House and the “dissident” (ha!) Republican senators in regards to the treatment of terrorist suspects in light of the Geneva Convention standards on torture consists in essentially giving the President everything he wanted. Ari Berman at The Nation says that “Democrats chose…

  • Another example of my lameness

    I seem to have completely missed the whole “indie rock” or “indie music” boat. I don’t even know if the terms are supposed to refer to an actual genre of music or just to any band not signed to a major label. What are examples of “indie” groups? What do they sound like?

  • Blogging lameness

    I’m starting to realize that my heart isn’t really in the quickie link-plus-two-sentences-of-pithy-commentary posts these days. And I really can’t bring myself to work up an opinion on the “hot” topic of the moment (whatever that happens to be at any given time) simply for the sake of having one, hence the relative lack of…

  • MySpace

    A recent conversation with a longtime friend of mine: Longtime friend: “You should get a MySpace account. It’s a great way to find people you’ve lost touch with.” Me: “I had good reasons for burning those bridges.”

  • We’re all liberals now(?)

    This helpful post at Connexions argues that “liberal theology” should be seen more as a method or approach to theology than a set of substantive conclusions. In other words, there’s nothing about liberal theology per se that prevents one from, say, believing in the resurrection or the virgin birth or what have you. What’s distinctive…

  • Pope notes

    A round up of Muslim bloggers’ responses to Pope Benedict’s speech (via Fr. Jim Tucker). The pope’s address is well worth reading quite apart from the ensuing brouhaha. Of particular interest to me is his association of a voluntarist view of the divine nature and various programs of “de-Hellenization” with certain forms of Protestantism. Luther…

  • NRCAT message on S. 3861

    I received this message from the National Religious Coalition Against Torture identifying certain Republican senators who might be persuaded to support Sen. McCain in opposing the White House’s Military Commissions Act of 2006 which, among other things, would authorize “secret CIA interrogation facilities around the world that have permission to use an ‘alternative set of…

  • The church of the future?

    Here’s an interesting piece about the community that has grown out of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. While it has some of the heavy breathing about conservative Christians you’d expect to find at Salon (“Within this movement lies something as old as America itself, and as terrifying and alluring as anything Orwell predicted”), the author…