A Thinking Reed

  • 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:

  • 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…