A Thinking Reed

  • The “stupidity” of closing libraries

    If you really want complete freedom of choice, complete openness of information, where nobody is spying on you, no one is selling your presence to advertisers, the only place to find it is a library, where they keep books. –Author Philip Pullman, “declaring war” against library closures in the UK (Via Alan Jacobs)

  • More thoughts on Girard, Atonement, and Christology

    Thinking about this a bit more, I wonder if the problem with Girard’s work–at least to the extent that I’m familiar with it–isn’t that his concept of Atonement is too “subjective” but that he’s not working with an adequate (or at least explicit) Christology. I once wrote of my “suspicion that bad atonement theories are…

  • A side of Calvin we don’t often hear about

    From an interview with novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson: [Calvin] writes very beautifully about the notion that any encounter with another human being is an encounter with an image of God. If it’s someone offending against you, it is someone that God is waiting to forgive for his offense. And so it’s a sort of…

  • Placher on Girard on Atonement

    When it comes to re-thinking the doctrine of the Atonement, many contemporary Christians are attracted to the work of literary theorist Rene Girard and his account of the “scapegoat mechanism.” In Girard’s telling, what the crucifixion narratives in the gospels do is reveal this mechanism whereby we kill the innocent to create social peace as…

  • Communicating the gospel after Christendom

    I urge everyone who cares about these things to read these two posts from bls at The Topmost Apple on how the church is dealing (or not) with our current “post-Christendom” situation. She makes two main points: first, the church often acts like it has nothing very interesting to communicate, and, second, what it does…

  • Bonus Friday Metal: Cynic, “Cabron-Based Anatomy”

    I love the band Cynic. They started out in the late 80s as a progressive death metal band akin to other stalwarts of the Florida metal secne (Death, Atheist), put out an awesome album (“Focus”) in 1993, broke up a year later, and got back together and put out an even more awesome album (“Traced…

  • Hammers of Misfortune, “A Room and a Riddle” (plus album stream)

    I’ve been enjoying NPR’s stream of the new album from San Francisco’s Hammers of Misfortune (listen here; the album comes out next Tuesday). Here’s a clip from one of their earlier albums: HoM is a project of John Cobbett, formerly guitarist of the excellent black metal-ish band Ludicra (who sadly broke up earlier this year).…

  • Immolation, “Majesty and Decay”

    Death metal with a capital “D.”

  • Structural sin and the ways of death-dealing

    Christianity Today ran a rather silly article trying to undercut the claims of the Occupy Wall Street protesters: Occupy Wall Street protest signs seek to ignite a revolution of the 99 percent against the (richest) 1 percent, who are responsible for our troubles. Christians of course are forbidden from supporting this kind of worldview. The…

  • “In the struggle between ‘labor’ and ‘capital,’ capital has basically won.”

    I haven’t blogged about the ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” (and other) protests, but I did want to share a couple of recent pieces that I found helpful for putting them in context. Using a plethora of charts, this post at Business Insider lays out about as clearly as you could ask the problems with how…