A Thinking Reed

  • Don’t blog angry

    I’m sorry to see that Marvin is apparently hanging up his blogging spurs, although I understand and respect his reasons for doing so. Still, it’s a loss for those of us who’ve been edified by his writing but aren’t part of the academic or religious milieus where he plans to re-focus his energy. I have…

  • Friday Metal: Anthrax, “Madhouse”

    An oldie but a goodie, from the 1985 album “Spreading the Disease.” Their new album “Worship Music”–the first with singer Joey Belladonna since 1990’s “Persistence of Time”–comes out next Tuesday. I’m really looking forward to hearing it.

  • Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    I want to continue my summary of R. Kendall Soulen’s The God of Israel and Christian Theology (see previous post here). In chapter 2 Soulen looks at the traditional “canonical narrative” of Christian theology as it was formulated in the early centuries of the church and argues that it “inscribes the logic of supersessionism [i.e.,…

  • MLK, nonviolence, and the fusion of ends and means

    My recent visit to the newly opened Martin Luther King Jr. memorial here in D.C. prompted me to pick up Harvard Sitkoff’s 2008 biography, King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop. To my embarrassment, I actually don’t know a lot about the details of the Civil Rights movement or King’s life in particular. Sitkoff’s relatively brief (under…

  • Friday Metal: Heaven and Hell, “I”

    Heaven and Hell was the 2006-2010 reincarnation of the Ronnie James Dio-fronted Black Sabbath lineup. This tune comes from the Sabbath album “Dehumanizer.” This is from a live performance at Radio City Music Hall in 2007.

  • Meat in a vat?

    This piece from NPR has generated some interest in the topic of in-vitro meat–that is, meat grown in a lab from a cell culture. Apparently there is a real possibility that sometime in the next decade or so we could see lab-grown meat on our supermarket shelves. On its face, this seems like a win-win…

  • Church, class, and bourgeois virtue

    Jim Henley cites some recent research showing that church attendance correlates with income and “familistic and bourgeois values”; he goes on to offer some speculative explanations of why church might be inhospitable to working-class folks. I think there’s a lot of truth there, but I also have to ask, if this is a recent phenomenon…

  • Friday Metal: Sinister Realm, “Winds of Vengeance”

    File under “neo-traditional.” Nice to hear some of these recent metal acts with actual singing! A refreshing change from the now-cliched “extreme” vocals.

  • God and the White Whale

    Brandon points to this interesting piece by Reformed theologian R.C. Sproul on Moby-Dick, which Sproul correctly notes is the greatest American novel. Sproul argues for a Christian reading of Melville’s work–seeing Ahab as man in rebellion against God (symbolized by the White Whale). Melville experts and scholars come to different conclusions about the meaning of…

  • A worry about open Communion

    I don’t have really strong feelings one way or the other about “open” Communion–i.e., communing the non-baptized. I can see arguments both for and against it. But I do have some questions about how I’ve seen it put into practice. At several churches I’ve been to that practice open Communion, there is little or no…