A Thinking Reed

  • New JoC

    One of the benefits of being a snotty atheist as a teenager was that I had very little exposure to the world of Contemporary Christian Music. I couldn’t help but feel bad for a Christian friend of mine who listened almost exclusively to bad Christian knock-offs of secular bands. Although my older sister, who is…

  • Drink like a grown up!

    I realize this has been going on for some time, but I just want to go on record in opposition to all forms of the flavored martini. I was at a restaurant this weekend that offered a chocolate chip martini for the love of Pete! Hey do you want a bowl of Cap’n Crunch with…

  • Hart on natural evil and the broken cosmos

    David Bentley Hart’s The Doors of the Sea is, in large part, a sharp rejoinder to any “theodicy” that would seek to make evil – physical, natural, or moral – a necessary means to the acheivement of some good. As such, it provides a useful counterpoint to the kind of account offered by Keith Ward.…

  • Tiber swimming

    This article from the Christian Century discusses the journeys of six prominent theologians – three Lutherans, two Anglicans, and a Mennonite – to Rome. The reasons generally seem to be an attraction to Catholic ecclesiology and/or the worry that mainline Protestantism is incapable of embodying a genuinely orthodox and catholic Christianity. I wonder if there’s…

  • Feast of the Assumption of the BVM/Feast of Mary, Mother of Our Lord

    Today marks the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin in the traditional Catholic reckoning. The ELCA observes it simply as the festival of Mary, Mother of Our Lord, while the Episcopal Church has it as St. Mary the Virgin, Mother of Our Lord. The Orthodox Church, meanwhile, celebrates the Dormition (“falling asleep”) of Our Most Holy…

  • Pascal’s Fire 4: Plato’s revenge

    Pretty much everything I know about quantum theory I learned from reading Stephenen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and I’ve always been wary of people who attempt to draw broad philosophical implications from it. To Keith Ward’s credit, though, he is pretty circumspect in his treatment of the topic. Unlike earlier major scientific revolutions…

  • Pascal’s Fire 3: Evolution, suffering, and omnipotence

    Ward takes the theory of evolution as established, at least in its main outlines, but he does question some of the interpretations often given of evolution, especially by “evangelical atheists” like Richard Dawkins. While it’s possible to see evolution as simply an interplay of randomness and the pressures of survivial, it’s also possible, he thinks,…

  • Pascal’s Fire 2: The disenchantment of the cosmos?

    In Part One, “The Formation of the Scientific Worldview,” Ward examines four major advancements in scientific thinking whose impact extended well beyond the fields in which they originated. These are the heliocentric theory of the solar system, associated with Copernicus and Galileo, Newton’s laws of motion, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the advent of quantum…

  • Pascal’s Fire

    A while back I posted some thoughts on Keith Ward’s What the Bible Really Teaches, which was a rejoinder of sorts to Christian fundamentalism. His newest book, Pascal’s Fire, might be seen as a rejoinder to scientific fundamentalism. Ward’s goal in this brief book is to rebut the notion that the advance of science has…

  • Lessons from London

    Alan Bock tries to draw some. In a nutshell: solid police work, um, works. Police state tactics aren’t necessary. And invading and occupying Muslim lands is counterproductive. He also makes a frequently neglected point, that over the long term the U.S. stands a better chance of encouraging cultural change in the Muslim world by being…