A Thinking Reed

  • 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…

  • Friday Metal: Dark Tranquility, “Iridium”

    Really cool video:

  • Friday Metal: The Human Abstract, “Patterns”

    This is from Digital Veil, one of my favorite metal albums of the year so far.

  • Macquarrie on hell and universalism

    If heaven is fullness of being and the upper limit of human existence, hell may be taken as loss of being and the lower limit. Loss of being need not mean annihilation, but includes every declination from a genuinely personal existence and every divergence from the fulfillment of authentic potentialities for being. Thus hell, like…

  • We’ve all got issues

    I can get behind the idea that the long-term debt is an issue we need to address. What I don’t get is the urgency it’s attracted in our current political debate. Just off the top of my head, I can think of any number of more pressing issues: –Global warming –Unemployment –Global poverty –Nuclear proliferation…

  • Friday Metal: King’s X, “Fall on Me”

    I don’t know if it’s really accurate to call King’s X “metal,” but “groove-oriented, soulful, progressive hard rock” isn’t quite as pithy. Anyway, this is from their excellent 1989 album Gretchen Goes to Nebraska. They’re a criminally under-appreciated band, probably because they not only straddle genres, but also straddled the Christian-secular music divide for much…

  • HSUS and egg industry reach agreement on better treatment of laying hens

    This seems like a big deal: In an historic agreement reached today by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and the United Egg Producers (UEP), these long-time adversaries will work cooperatively to enact the first-ever federal law related to the treatment of chickens. It would also be the first federal law related to…

  • John Macquarrie and process theology

    I’m currently re-reading Scottish Anglican theologian John Macquarrie‘s marvelously lucid Principles of Christian Theology (first published in 1966; I’m reading the substantially revised version that was published about 10 years later). I first read it as an undergrad when my interest in existentialism was at its height. In the first part of the book, Macquarrie…

  • State of the blog address

    I just realized that July 1st marked the 7th anniversary of my blogging efforts. I started out on a Blogspot site (“Verbum Ipsum”) and migrated over to WordPress and A Thinking Reed a few years later. (All the archives have been imported to this site.) I’ve been at it more or less continuously ever since…