A Thinking Reed

  • Friday Metal: YouTube can’t handle Iron Maiden edition

    Their epic “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” – in two parts, because YouTube can’t handle all that metal in one video.

  • Bad arguments against vegetarianism, the continuing series

    The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates recently wrote two posts on why he’s “going vegetarian.” One thing that always seems to happen when someone discusses their decision to become vegetarian is that people take umbrage–as thought they’re being personally attacked. Some of TNC’s commenters fall into this category. One argument made there–and one that comes up with…

  • Social justice and Christianity are inseparable

    I’ve honestly not paid much attention to Glenn Beck–I’ve never even seen a clip of his show, and most of what I know about him comes from blogs and other media reports. This past weekend’s “Beckfest” on the Mall, though, significantly raised his profile. It’s even being suggested that he’s now the head of a…

  • History’s greatest monster strikes again

    Is there no end to his evil? Aijalon Mahli Gomes, the American held in North Korea since January, reunited with his family here Friday after flying in with former President Jimmy Carter. A day after Mr. Carter secured his release in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, Mr. Gomes stepped off a private plane at Logan…

  • Friday Metal: Irish folk edition

    The traditional Irish folk song “Whiskey in the Jar” as performed by… The Chieftans: The Dubliners: Thin Lizzy: and Metallica:

  • Guest in the House wrap-up

    Readers may have noticed that my posts on Williamson’s book haven’t been very critical. That’s in part because I think he’s right about a lot of things. But it has more to do with the fact that I was mainly trying to get clear in my own mind about what he’s saying. I think a…

  • Williamson on Christology

    A question that naturally arises for any Christian theology that attempts to recognize the ongoing reality of Jewish faith and life is What about Jesus? That is, do Christians need to sacrifice, or at least modify, their convictions about the uniqueness and salvific importance of Jesus in order to avoid supersessionism? In A Guest in…

  • Speak rightly of God

    I have one or two more posts on Williamson’s Guest in the House of Israel in the works, but if you’re interested in what I’ve been writing about so far you might want to check out this article–Speak Rightly of God: Clark M. Williamson as a Church Theologian–which provides an overview of his work. I…

  • Israel and the church: co-witnesses to the love and kingdom of God

    I’m not going to blog exhaustively about the remaining chapters in Clark Williamson’s A Guest in the House of Israel, where he applies the insights of a post-Holocaust theology to various topics (covenant, scripture, Christology, doctrine of God) with interesting results. What I thought I’d do instead is take a look at one area–the doctrine…

  • The Crusades, Fox News edition

    This would seem to tell you all you really need to know about Rodney Stark’s God’s Batallions: The Case for the Crusades: Clearly this is not the politically correct version of the Crusades, and that is fine: there is little that was politically correct about the Crusades in the first place. The difficulty I have…