A Thinking Reed

  • “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse”

    We’re doing a “lessons and carols” service at church tomorrow and I’m one of the readers. The passage I was assigned is Isaiah 11:1-9. It’s not terribly original to say so, but it’s one of my favorites: A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his…

  • Friday Metal: High on Fire, “Frost Hammer”

    Revisting some of the better stuff I heard this year. High on Fire’s Snakes for the Divine is right up there.

  • Merry Christmas from the Ramones

    I was singing this in the shower this morning for some reason. When I was in high school I had a badly copied VHS tape of Ramones videos that I must’ve watched a hundred times, and this was on it.

  • Food politics: it’s not about “freedom”

    The new “culture war” over food safety and regulation is a perfect example of the misleading way these debates are so often framed in American public life, a framing that uncritically swallows conservative rhetoric about “freedom.” The debate (over, for example, the food safety bill currently working its way through Congress or the Hunger-Free Kids…

  • C.S. Lewis as imaginative theologian

    In the introduction to the Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, editor Robert MacSwain considers whether a volume on Lewis even belongs in the Cambridge series on religion, rather than, say, literature, which was after all Lewis’s day job and primary area of expertise. Moreover, academic theologians have generally ignored, if not disdained, Lewis and his…

  • The radical Lewis

    I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that many C. S. Lewis fans–maybe especially his many evangelical admirers–don’t know that Lewis wrote a pamphlet for the British Anti-Vivisection Society. This essay, reprinted later in God in the Dock, anticipates some key arguments since made by philosophical proponents of animal rights. Lewis posits…

  • Tillich on Barth

    I’ve been reading Langdon Gilkey’s Blue Twilight, a collection of essays on religion in America (broadly speaking) that covers topics like religious pluralism, the environmental crisis, creationism and evolution, and the rise of the Religious Right. Gilkey was a student of both Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich and was in many ways trying to carry…

  • Some best metal of 2010 lists

    The year-end “best of” lists have already started to appear. Here are some lists of the best metal albums of 2010 from a few trusted sources: – The AV Club’s Leonard Pierce offers his picks here. – Phil Freeman has a top 40(!) (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4) list as well as an entertaining…

  • More theo-podcasts: Evolutionary Christianity

    Speaking of theology podcasts, readers might also be interested in this series: The Advent of Evolutionary Christianity. The series is a production of Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution, and the topic is integrating Christian faith with an evolutionary understanding of the world. Interviewees include Ian Barbour, John Cobb, Brian McLaren, and others.…

  • Friday Metal: The Sword, “Warp Riders”

    I had actually forgotten about these guys. Their first album was a really good slice of retro Sabbath-inspired classic metal, but the follow up garnered some disappointing reviews and I never bothered to check it out. This year’s release, Warp Riders, however, has received a lot of praise. I haven’t heard the album yet, but…