A Thinking Reed

  • Christmas unplugged

    I may have been overeating a bit, but I’ve been doing a pretty good job of limiting my diet of electronic media during the holidays. I haven’t tweeted or checked Facebook (or blogged, obviously) since leaving town for my wife’s ancestral home in Indiana on the 23rd. I’ve limited e-mail to once or twice a…

  • Friday Metal: Top 10 albums of 2010

    As always, based entirely on my own subjective criteria, quirks, and whims. In (rough) ordinal ranking: 1. Iron Maiden, The Final Frontier Watch the video for the title track here. 2. High on Fire, Snakes for the Divine 3. Ludicra, The Tenant 4. Soilwork, The Panic Broadcast 5. Enslaved, Axioma Ethica Odini 6. The Sword,…

  • Best books of 2010 (the year of the whale)

    Here are the best books I read in 2010, most of which weren’t published in 2010. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: Probably the greatest novel I’ve ever read. I hope to someday find words to write more adequately about it. Philip Hoare, The Whale: A social and natural history of man’s dealings with whales. This is the…

  • An experiment in apologetics

    Camassia recently wrote a post following up on a discussion we were having here about religious pluralism, specifically with regard to Marjorie Suchocki’s book Divinity and Diversity (see my original post here). One of the issues that came up in the ensuing discussion was whether affirming religious pluralism means you’re excluded from contending for truth…

  • Christmas is awesome

    Christmas has been getting flak from all sides this year. Conservative Christians think it’s too secular or “multiculturalized”; secularists think it’s too religious, or they make what they seem to think is the devastating point that Jesus was probably not actually born on December 25th; “radical” Christians think Christmas is too sentimental or commercialized; liturgical…

  • “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…