A Thinking Reed

  • “Original Sin Liberalism”

    I appreciated this piece from E. J. Dionne on what he calls “Original Sin Liberalism,” which is a pretty accurate label for my own political outlook. Dionne is responding to conservatives who accuse liberals of believing that people are essentially good, and are only made bad by social structures or conditions. Dionne notes that liberals…

  • Welch’s at the communion table

    I used to make fun of churches who substituted grape juice for wine in communion. Then I joined a Methodist church where that’s standard practice. Its roots lie in the temperance movement, when zealous Methodists and other Christians decided that people struggling with alcohol shouldn’t be presented with temptation at the Lord’s table. Welch’s grape juice…

  • God as Ultimate Mind: Keith Ward’s “Christian Idea of God”

    Keith Ward’s recent book The Christian Idea of God is a slim but ambitious volume. It aims to turn on its head the common belief we know the material world is real while ethereal objects like God and the soul are at best speculative inferences. Ward points out that we’re actually more certain of the…

  • Hell and other theological gut-checks

    He [God] created this speck of dirt and the human species for his glory; and with the deliberate design of making nine tenths of our species miserable forever, for his glory? This is the doctrine of Christian theologians in general, ten to one. Now, my friend, can prophecies or miracles convince you or me that…

  • The welfare state is good

    Dylan Matthews at Vox has an excellent article defending the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program, which is (of course) under attack from the current administration. The piece is long and chock full o’ data, but the upshot is that the program serves people who really need it, not a bunch of freeloaders with backaches…

  • The multifaceted life and theology of Marilyn McCord Adams

    I recently came across this career retrospective/spiritual and intellectual autobiography from Marilyn McCord Adams, the prominent Anglican philosopher-theologian who died last year. She had a wide-ranging career as an important analytic philosopher working in the philosophy of religion and medieval philosophy, an Episcopal priest ministering to gay men in Hollywood at the height of the…

  • Toward utopia?

    I have always had a small-c conservative streak that makes me skeptical of utopian politics. The idea that human beings could, through their own efforts, abolish suffering, strife and injustice once and for all has always struck me as dangerously wrongheaded. Both history and my own religious tradition seem to tell pretty decisively against this…

  • Bernie Sanders and the progressive foreign policy turn

    Foreign policy was oddly absent for most of last year’s Democratic presidential primary. This is odd not just because foreign policy is obviously a large part of the president’s job, but because it’s an area where eventual winner Hillary Clinton was arguably the most vulnerable. You may recall that in the 2008 Democratic primary foreign…

  • Will Marcion win after all?

    In his recent book, Princeton Theological Seminary professor Brent Strawn makes a provocative case that American Christians are in imminent danger of losing the Old Testament—and with it much of the substance of Christian faith. Drawing on a variety of evidence, Strawn argues that we are losing our grip on the OT, making it comparable…

  • Tom Paine, the Bible and wealth redistribution

    I enjoyed this interview with University of Michigan philosopher Elizabeth Anderson on how workplaces effectively function as “private governments” and often act in oppressive ways toward their employees. That lead me to this piece by Anderson on Tom Paine as an early theorist of social insurance. In Anderson’s telling, Paine was responding to revolutionary communist…