A Thinking Reed

  • Everybody please stop focusing on “drones”

    Whatever you think of Senator Rand Paul’s filibuster of John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to head the C.I.A., one thing it doesn’t seem to have accomplished is to get people to focus on the president’s authority to kill people he designates as threats. This, rather than the use of “drones” per se, is the real…

  • Gerald O’Collins on original sin

    I’ve been thinking about original sin a little more, partly because we’re having our son baptized next month, and we met last week with our pastor to discuss the theology of baptism, as well as some of the practical details. (She observed that most of the parents who seem to have a problem with the…

  • Atonement without violence?

    Anabaptist theologian J. Denny Weaver’s much-discussed book The Nonviolent Atonement is the most thorough treatment I’ve read of the problem of violence in traditional theories of the Atonement. According to Weaver, these theories–which include both satisfaction and moral influence types–rely on divinely sanctioned violence to achieve reconciliation between God and humanity. More specifically, in both…

  • Regina Spektor, “How”

  • Re-post: Evolution, the Fall, and Original Sin

    I don’t usually do this, but it seems relevant in light of the previous post. I originally wrote this back in 2006: I enjoyed Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire so much (despite disagreement in places) that when I saw his Religion and Human Nature at a used bookseller for five bucks I snatched it up. RHN…

  • In defense of Original Sin

    In his book A Better Atonement: Beyond the Depraved Doctrine of Original Sin, author-theologian-blogger Tony Jones tries to do two things: refute, or at least call into question, the doctrine of Original Sin and offer different ways of thinking about Christ’s atonement that aren’t tied to this (he thinks) false and damaging notion. Ironically, perhaps,…

  • Robbie Fulks, “Georgia Hard”

  • The edge of grace

    Grace has an edge. God is not present simply as rounded curves and encompassing acceptance. Grace is neither the absence of judgment nor infinite compassion. Rather, grace is the sharpness of God engaging human conditions. It is God’s presence as strength in struggle, as denier of evil, as opponent of exploitation. Grace has an edge,…

  • On “exemplarist” theories of the Atonement

    In a post at “Jesus Creed,” John Frye criticizes–in the form of, er, a poem–“Abelard’s Moral-Influence theory [of the Atonement] (via Schleiermacher),” which he claims is making a resurgence (I’m not sure among whom). The gist of the poem is that this theory reduces Jesus to a “poster boy,” an example to follow and that…

  • The Joy Formidable, “Cholla”