A Thinking Reed

  • 25 books every Christian should read(?)

    That is, according to a book recently published by Harper under the auspices of Renovare, the evangelical-ish spiritual renewal movement. (Actually, since this book has the list, aren’t there 26 books every Christian should read? Seems like some sort of paradox there…) In any event, here’s the list, with titles I’ve read in bold. An…

  • Resurrection and Docetism

    People sometimes argue against “spiritual” interpretations of the Resurrection of Jesus on the grounds that they are “Docetic”–that is, they deny the full reality of the Incarnation after the fashion of the ancient heresy of Docetism, which said that Jesus only appeared to be fully human. Specifically, it held that Jesus’ body was an illusion…

  • The Common English Bible–a new translation

    My dear wife got me an Amazon Kindle for my birthday, which I’ve been enjoying immensely. Poking around in the Kindle store, I decided I should download a version of the Bible. But which one? I usually read either the New Revised Standard Version or the Revised English Bible. But the Kindle version of the…

  • American “multarchy”

    Philosopher Gary Gutting writes that America doesn’t have a democracy, but a “mutlarchy”–a system that includes elements of the five types of government delineated by Plato in The Republic. These are —aristocracy: “rule by the ‘best’, that is, by experts specially trained at governance” —timarchy: “rule by those guided by their courage and sense of…

  • Metallica, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”

  • Participatory soteriology and the shape of Christian life together

    Christopher offers a semi-defense of Pelagius (a semi-Pelagian defense?) and calls for a movement of “Advent asceticism” that sees a particular form of communal obedience not as an attempt to earn heaven, but as a response to Heaven as it has come to live among us in the Incarnation. He notes that much Protestant theology,…

  • Darkest Era, “Heathen Burial”

    From The Last Caress of Light, one of my favorite albums of 2011.

  • Pelagius for the rest of us?

    (I tweeted a bit about this earlier, but I thought I might as well write some thoughts into a proper blog post.) As if to confirm our most stereotypical expectations, a proposal is being put before a diocese of the Episcopal Church in Atlanta to “rehabilitate” Pelagius by reversing the Council of Carthage’s (5th century)…

  • Against the circus

    Mother Jones has published a damning report on Ringling Brothers circus and its cruel and abusive treatment of its elephant “performers”: Feld Entertainment [Ringling’s parent company] portrays its population of some 50 endangered Asian elephants as “pampered performers” who “are trained through positive reinforcement, a system of repetition and reward that encourages an animal to…

  • King’s X, “Dogman” (live)

    This is a nice clip from the old Jon Stewart show: