A Thinking Reed

  • Progress in religion

    The progress of religion is defined by the denunciation of gods. The keynote of idolatry is contentment with the prevalent gods. – Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

  • Melville’s prophetic mission

    Melville does not attack traditional ideas about God with the object of replacing them with better ideas; his mission is prophetic, that of calling us to a deeper life. He is a forerunner of religious writers in our own time, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Elie Wiesel, whose keynote is the maintenance of discourse concerning ultimate…

  • How can theology learn from feminism?

    This article is old, but it provides a good model for how theology can engage with feminism. Sponheim, a professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, isn’t willing to say either that theology should reject feminist insights or that it should accept them uncritically. What he’s after is genuine dialogue or conversation in which both…

  • A very brief argument for animal liberation

    From philosopher Steve Sapontzis: Very briefly, the argument for [animal liberation] runs as follows. Morality is goal-directed activity which aims at making the world a better place in terms of reduced suffering and frustration, increased happiness and fulfilment, a wider reign of fairness and respect for others, and enhanced presence and effectiveness of such virtues…

  • Why do Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin (and the American people) hate our freedom?

    William Saletan has a good round-up and rebuttal of the campaign on the Right to prevent the construction of a Muslim community center and mosque in lower Manhattan, not far from the World Trade Center site. Maybe I’m naive, but it’s actually kind of shocking to hear high-profile pols like Gingrinch and Palin all but…

  • Hearts alive

    Finished Moby-Dick this weekend – wow, what a book! The literary genre-hopping, the cosmological speculations, the epic scale, the humor, the unforgettable characters, the ornate, rhythmic splendor of the language – is there any other novel like it? (I’m not even sure it is a novel!) I think it may have supplanted The Brothers Karamazov…

  • From hell’s heart I stab at thee

    Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces,…

  • Friday Metal: Protest the Hero, “Blindfolds Aside”

  • Cannibals

    It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own…

  • The man show

    This is a bit of an easy target, but “Man Church” is at least interesting for what it supposes men want church to be like: Man Church is church the way a man expects it to be done. No singing, short sermon, time to talk with other guys, no women present, and coffee and donuts.…