A Thinking Reed

  • The varieties of leftism and the social democracy of fear

    I linked below to this great post by Russell Arben Fox, which is in turn a riff on this post from Crooked Timber’s Chris Bertram. The original post identified four streams of left-wing politics and mused about what direction the European left should go in. Russell takes Bertram’s typology and applies it to the U.S.…

  • Friday Links

    –Marvin on the Presbyterian Church’s decision to allow congregations to call non-celibate gay and lesbian pastors. –Libraries are part of the social safety net. –“I hated vegans too, but now I am one.” –On anti-Semites and philo-Semites. –Mark Bittman asks, “Why bother with meat?” –Jesus and eco-theology. –Jeremy discusses Herbert McCabe and Gerhard Forde on…

  • Friday Metal: Grand Magus, “Hammer of the North”

    No-frills, traditional heavy metal. Good stuff.

  • More on cycling, mostly links

    Okay, maybe the hottest day of the year (so far) wasn’t the most opportune moment to start biking to work regularly. But I got my shiny new Capital Bikeshare key in the mail over the weekend and couldn’t resist trying it out. I’ve also finally found a route that’s both efficient and bike-friendly. Anyway, I’ve…

  • The problem and necessity of eschatology

    (See my previous post on Craig Hill’s In God’s Time.) Hill goes on to identify some of the obstacles to a retrieval of eschatology for non-fundamentalist Christians. While he recognizes that significant work has been done in recent theology to put eschatology back at the center of the faith (he cites Moltmann and Pannenberg among…

  • God wins

    No, this isn’t a riff on Rob Bell’s latest book. The expression is Craig Hill’s two-word summary of what eschatology is all about in his book In God’s Time: The Bible and the Future (published in 2002). Hill is a professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary, and his book is an attempt to…

  • Friday links

    –Ta-Nehisi Coates on Moby-Dick. –Amy-Jill Levine: “A Critique of Recent Christian Statements on Israel” –From Jeremy at Don’t Be Hasty: Why the church can’t take the place of the welfare state. –A discussion of “summer spirituality” with Fr. James Martin, S.J., author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything. –A review of Keith Ward’s recent…

  • Friday Metal: Goes Cube, “The Homes Of”

    Very interesting band.

  • The cycling life

    Grist has a really good article on DC’s popular new(ish) bikeshare program, arguing that a “bikeshare system can make fundamental change happen in a city.” Also see this article: “The Real Reason Why Bicycles Are the Key to Better Cities.” I used Capital Bikeshare for the first time the other day and thought it was…

  • Peter Singer, utilitarianism, Christianity, and climate change

    Here’s an interesting post from Mark Vernon, an English journalist and author (and former priest in the Church of England), reporting on a recent conference at Oxford University on the engagement of Christian ethics with the thought of Peter Singer. According to Vernon, Singer discussed problems that his brand of utilitarianism (“preference utilitarianism”–the view that…