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Brian McLaren on the atonement
I like this way of putting it: When people ask me about atonement these days, here’s what I often ask in reply: where do you primarily locate God on Good Friday? Is God primarily located with the Romans who are crucifying Jesus, or is God primarily located in the man on the cross, suffering at…
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Faith and factuality revisited
When I was reading Marcus Borg’s Heart of Christianity, I expressed some dissatisfaction with his treatment of the Bible. I felt like he wasn’t clear enough about the relationship between the meaning of the text and the question of its historical truth. Recently I picked up Borg’s newer book on Jesus, and I’m happier with…
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On becoming politically predictable
I haven’t done much political blogging lately, which in part has to do with the fact that (1) my core interests generally lie elsewhere and (2) I think you, dear reader, can probably get better-quality political blogging elsewhere. Another reason, though, has to do with the fact that, over the last few years, my political…
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Ruse on The Moral Landscape
Philosopher Michael Ruse takes a sledgehammer to Sam Harris’s new book on morality: I don’t know what Harris studied in his philosophy courses as an undergrad at Stanford, but they don’t seem to have penetrated very deeply. He denounces philosophers before him (including myself, I should admit) without really addressing the challenge their arguments pose…
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Chimps, morals, and God
This Frans de Waal essay and the accompanying video discussion with Robert Wright, on the evolutionary roots of morality, are worth checking out. De Waal’s argument is that moral impulses exist in our non-human animal relatives–particularly our closest relatives, the primates–and that we can see morality emerging along a continuum as a completely “natural” phenomenon.…
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The thorn in the flesh and the “weakness gospel”
I’m reading Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s book The First Paul, and it’s really good so far. I may have more to blog about the overall themes later, but for now I just wanted to note one interesting tidbit. There has been a lot of speculation about the “thorn in the flesh” that Paul…
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Human “exceptionalism” as moral exclusion
In his review of Wesley Smith’s book that I linked to below, Angus Taylor puts his finger on exactly what has long bothered me about Smith’s rhetoric of “human exceptionalism”: Even if can be shown … that all human beings deserve an elevated moral status, it is not clear why this elevated status should entail…
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Spoiler alert!
This trailer for the 1956 John Huston/Gregory Peck film version of Moby-Dick gives an awful lot away. Maybe they were assuming most people had read the book? I haven’t seen it yet, but the New York Times liked it quite a bit.
A Thinking Reed 