A Thinking Reed

  • Friday Metal: The Devil Wears Prada, “Outnumbered”

    This band has a terrible name, but the song’s about zombies and that’s kind of cool.

  • Unredeemed history and Christian anti-Judaism

    In her book Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Origins of Anti-Semitism, Rosemary Radford Ruether argues that a key difference between Christianity and Judaism is that Christianity has been unwilling for much of its history to live with the tension of the unrealized messianic age. As a result, Christians have accused Jews of being blind to…

  • Divine determinism and divine sovereignty

    Marvin argues that a doctrine of divine determinism–that everything that happens, even apparently horrible things like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, is an expression of God’s will–is actually a more comforting doctrine than people sometimes give it credit for: If this sounds harsh, and as I said last week, I am against harshness as…

  • Now that’s a book I’d like to read

    Cover Author Working On Word-For-Word Remake Of ‘Moby-Dick’ LOS ANGELES—Cover author Gerald Putty told reporters Monday that he is about six months away from finishing a word-for-word rewrite of Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick, saying that his version will be “utterly true in every way” to the original. “When you cover a novel like this, you’re…

  • Mission creep watch

    As Kevin Drum notes, our mission in Libya–ostensibly aimed at protecting civilians from Qaddafi’s regime–has become a bona fide intervention into a civil war. When this was being pitched as a humanitarian effort to protect civilians, it seemed unseemly to ask about the character of the rebels or the nature of the government they would…

  • Depressing column of the week (month? year?)

    Bob Herbert is leaving the NYT and goes out with a tour de force: So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life…

  • Friday Links

    –Today is the Feast of the Annunciation; here are some thoughts on that. BLS also has one of her outstanding musical offerings for the day. –John Piper, theological nihilist? –Catholics are “more supportive of legal recognitions of same-sex relationships than members of any other Christian tradition and Americans overall.” –How to live without a mobile…

  • Friday Metal: Obscura, “Septuagint”

    German technical death metal band Obscura’s new album Omnivium comes out next week and is currently streaming at their MySpace page. I really liked their previous album Cosmogenesis and am looking forward to hearing this one. Here’s “Septuagint” (no idea why the song is named after the Greek Old Testament, but it’s pretty good):

  • Humanitarianism of convenience?

    Good post from Digby on the humanitarian rationale for our latest war: We intervene in places in which we have large financial and strategic interests, period. It’s merely a convenience to attach a humanitarian label to it and persuade everyone that we are doing God’s work instead. Even the arguments for Iraq were all wrapped…

  • Iowa factory farms try to put the clampdown on free speech

    I had blogged previously about efforts by factory farms and their political allies in Iowa to make it illegal to create videos or other evidence of the mistreatment of animals in intensive-farming facilities. But the bill under consideration apparently goes further than that. According to this editorial in the Des Moines Register (via Farm Sanctuary),…