A Thinking Reed

  • Idealism in twenty minutes

    Keith Ward gives a concise overview and defense of metaphysical idealism: This lecture is essentially a summary of the argument from his 2010 book More Than Matter. The basic claim is that mind or consciousness is a fundamental component or aspect of reality, and it can’t be reduced to or explained exhaustively in material terms.…

  • Midnight Oil, “The Dead Heart”

  • Gary Dorrien’s social gospel

    At the heart of modern capitalist economics is the idea of infinite accumulation. At the heart of Christian social teaching, however, is a strong conception of distributive justice and the related notion that there is such a thing as having enough. The prevailing American preoccupation with piling up money and material possessions is spiritually deadening.…

  • Technology, love, and paying attention

    I really enjoyed this post from Michael Sacasas at his blog “The Frailest Thing.” He argues that it’s not smartphones (or any other attention-grabbing gadget) per se that make it hard for us to pay attention to the people we encounter–it’s us. It is sometimes a battle even to be attentive to another person or…

  • The Nonviolent God

    One of my worries about J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement was that I didn’t think a determined critic would be persuaded by his case for seeing God as essentially nonviolent. He offers some suggestive interpretations of various New Testament passages, but there’s no developed theology of the divine nature or an overarching argument for…

  • “Sexual complementarity”–important but not essential

    The main “philosophical” argument against same-sex marriage/marriage equality seems to be that it denies that “sexual complementarity” is at the core of what marriage is. Some versions of this argument take what I think is an implausible view of the metaphysical status of what they call the “conjugal union” of a man and woman, but…

  • A Tribe Called Quest, “Can I Kick It?”

  • Cautious optimism about the new pope

    Look, I’m a Protestant, so no pope is ever going to satisfy me. And I totally get that progressive Catholics would be upset by the same-old, same-old on women’s rights, LGBT rights, and other issues about which the Catholic hierarchy remains steadfastly conservative. But there are reasons for cautious optimism about Pope Francis (né Cardinal…

  • “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer?”

    In this month’s Christian Century, Anglican theologian Charles Hefling offers a take on the Atonement that’s very close to where I find myself on this nowadays. He rehearses the well-known points that the church has never dogmatically codified a particular theory of the Atonement but has cultivated a variety of models. He also gives a…

  • Why the ministry of women needs no defense

    British evangelical theologian Steve Holmes explains why he will no longer defend the ministry of women in the church. (Not exactly what you might think.) I can’t say that this has ever been a “live” issue for me. At nearly every church I’ve been involved with as an adult, women’s ministry was a given. For…