A Thinking Reed

  • By what authority?

    After surveying the issue of anti-Judaism in Christian theology, Clark Williamson proposes some criteria for a post-Holocaust theology: – Beware of unchanged “pre-Shoah” theological statements (i.e., we need to apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to traditional formulations). – Do theology in conversation with Jews. – Say nothing that could not be said “in the presence…

  • What is Christian anti-Judaism?

    Brandon points out in a comment to this post that I haven’t really defined what Williamson means by “anti-Judaism.” So here goes. First, it’s distinguishable from, though obviously related to, anti-Semitism. Anti-Judaism refers more broadly to the notion that Christianity is superior to, completes, and/or replaces Judaism as an ongoing religious enterprise. Williamson’s argument is…

  • Friday Metal: I’m old edition

    As the metal blog Invisible Oranges points out, Anthrax’s seminal album Persistence of Time turns 20 tomorrow. This was one of my very favorite albums when I was an angsty 15-year old, and it represents Joey Belladonna-era Anthrax at the height of its powers. (John Bush-era Anthrax still remains underrated in my book, though.) Anyway,…

  • Christianity’s constitutive anti-Judaism

    One of the most troubling things about reading Clark Williamson’s A Guest in the House of Israel is realizing that anti-Judaism isn’t just some anomalous bug of Christianity that can easily be tossed out. It’s more or less a constitutive feature of the patristic-medieval-Reformation-modern Christian consensus. As Christianity gradually emerged as a separate religion, the…

  • Anti-Judaism as works-righteousness

    The claim that Jews lost the covenant because they were not worthy of it is simply works-righteousness. Works-righteousness takes a gift provided by the free and unconditional grace of God and turns it into a condition apart from which God is not free to be gracious. Works-righteousness has nothing to do with an entirely different…

  • Brian McLaren: Conversations on Being a Heretic

    I’ve never read anything by Brian McLaren, and I get the feeling I’d disagree with him about a fair number of things, but this interview made me like him. I get the impression that the guy has to put up with a lot of b.s. from self-styled heresy-hunters. Brian McLaren: Conversations on Being a Heretic,…

  • Whitehead on value and subjectivity

    A quick addendum to the process theology post: I decided I was interested in finding out a bit more about Whitehead’s theory of value because of the role value plays in his metaphysics, and – lo and behold! – there’s an article by John Cobb called “Whitehead’s Theory of Value.” As a bonus, the first…

  • On weekday vegetarians, flexitarians, and other part-timers

    A while back I wrote a post about the debate between vegetarians and “conscientious omnivores.” I proposed that this debate was largely irrelevant to the bigger problems that characterize the standard American diet: [T]his is an extremely specialized debate among a very tiny segment of the population. The vast majority of the meat consumed in…

  • Friday Metal: High on Fire, “Rumors of War”

  • Summary thoughts on process theology

    Last night I finished Cobb and Griffin’s introduction to process theology, so I wanted to get some thoughts down on the general Whiteheadian perspective. I think the expanded name sometimes used – process-relational theology – is actually more helpful because both elements, process and relation, are key to understanding what this school of thought is…