A Thinking Reed

  • What mainliners can learn from evangelicals

    Mainliners can be awfully smug in their (our) attitude toward evangelicals. There is a certain “Lord, I thank you that I am not like other people” syndrome in the way mainliners view evangelicals. In some mainline churches I’ve been in, evangelicals are the perpetual “other” over against whom we define ourselves. We’re NOT conservative, NOT…

  • Friday Metal: King’s X, “Ooh Song”

    I’ve become kind of obsessed with this band and have been methodically collecting their back catalogue. This is from their fourth, self-titled album, which came out in 1992.

  • God, hell, and the Euthyphro dilemma

    There’s a discussion over at Jesus Creed on a new book called Erasing Hell, which is, I take it, a response to Rob Bell’s Love Wins. I haven’t read either book, but the argument of Erasing Hell, as sketched by the author at Jesus Creed, calls for some comment. From the post: A central claim…

  • What does Oxford have to do with Jerusalem?

    I’m reading Keith Ward’s More than Matter? and found it interesting to learn that two of Ward’s teachers were the Oxford philosophers Gilbert Ryle and A.J. Ayer. Ryle was famous for characterizing Cartesian dualism as “the ghost in the machine,” and Ayer was the famed proponent of logical positivism. Ward says that he came to…

  • Friday Metal: Revocation, “Cradle Robber”

    Looking forward to the new album from these guys next month. 2009’s Existence Is Futile was one of the best metal albums that came out that year.

  • The witness of John Stott

    I’ve been reading some of the remembrances of John Stott, the Church of England pastor and evangelical icon who passed away today at the age of 90. One of the most striking things is that Stott seems to be fondly remembered by nearly everyone across the spectrum of evangelicalism. He combined theological orthodoxy (even conservatism)…

  • New atheism as 19th-century positivism redux

    This article puts its finger on one of the problems I’ve long had with the so-called new atheism: [I]n its basic outlines [A.C.] Grayling’s humanism is that of the nineteenth-century positivists, who built a philosophy around their belief in the perfectability of human nature. For Grayling, and for the other New Atheists, reason doesn’t just…

  • Music break: Thin Lizzy, “Emerald”

  • The Lord God made them all

    Bertram of Minden, “Creation of the Animals,” from the Grabow altarpiece (1383)

  • A word for Borders

    If you care about books, you’ve probably heard that Borders is finally shutting its doors for good. I’m so old I can remember when big national bookseller chains were villified for driving out small independent booksellers. Now these big national chains are being run out of business by Amazon and e-readers. One era’s Goliath is…