A Thinking Reed

  • Election fallout – animals & the environment

    Obviously the big news from this week’s election is the G.O.P.’s takeover of the House and seats it gained in the Senate, neither of which bodes well for meaningful action on climate change or other environmental issues. (As was pointed out in various places, all the G.O.P. Senate candidates disputed the global warming consensus and…

  • Pedantry

    I don’t like to be that guy–the one who airs his grammar or usage pet peeves. But this one’s been bugging me for a while. It’s the use of “myself” in place of “me.” As in: “Let Jane, Bob, or myself know if you have any questions.” The practice seems rampant in corporate America and…

  • Meet the new boss

    Right-wing Utah congressman Jason Chafetz is poised to become the new chair of the committee for overseeing D.C. affairs. On his agenda: overturning same-sex marriage in the District and curtailing District autonomy more generally. Really makes the whole “no representation” thing stick in your craw.

  • Never trust anyone under 30

    Young people can’t be bothered to vote; Republicans win big as a result.

  • Companions on the way

    I meant to link earlier to Jeremy’s helpful post on Elizabeth Johnson’s book on the saints, Friends of God and Prophets. Johnson argues for a reformed, “companion” model of the communion of saints, as contrasted with the more traditional “patronage” model. According to Johnson (per Jeremy’s summary; I haven’t read the book), just this kind…

  • Two-party state

    I can’t help but recall that, in the last ten years, we’ve been confidently informed by partisans and pundits of both the “permanent Republcan majority” and the “new Democratic majority” and the supposed relegation of the G.O.P. to a “rump party.” Both claims have been falsified in pretty short periods of time. Can we now…

  • NASA’s climate change evidence page

    http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ A very handy summary of the evidence for climate change. Not that it will change the minds of hardened deniers. (Particularly since we all know that the crypto-Islamic/Kenyan anti-colonialist Obama administration has turned NASA into a Muslim outreach enterprise.)

  • A better hope

    In continuing to circle around the question of eschatology and look at it from different angles, I went back to Clark Williamson’s Way of Blessing, Way of Life. I wrote a short post on his eschatology here, but I thought it might be worth looking at it more in-depth. This is partly because I think…

  • For Reformation day

    “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none, a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one. “It is clear then that to a Christian man his faith suffices for everything, and that he has no need of works for justification. But if…

  • Jesus and the end: what if he was “wrong”?

    In my post on Marcus Borg’s view of Jesus and eschatology, I asserted that if Jesus did expect an imminent supernatural in-breaking of some sort, then he was wrong, a conclusion that would disconcert many Christians. This might have been too categorical of a statement. In his book The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus,…