A Thinking Reed

  • Summer reading list update

    Well, we still have over a month of summer left, calendar-wise anyway. Since my last update I finished Moby-Dick and read the better part of a collection of critical essays. I finished Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas and decided to follow up with his Religion in the Making. As a supplement to all this…

  • Whitehead on theological revisionism

    I don’t know why I’ve suddenly been interested in reading Whitehead, but after Adventures of Ideas I turned to an earlier work–Religion in the Making. Here you can see the germs of a “Whiteheadian” doctrine of God, particularly in his critique of traditional notions of omnipotence and transcendence: This worship of glory arising from power…

  • What would “conservative” marriage look like?

    “Advance or Decadence are the only choices offered to mankind. The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe.” — Alfred North Whitehead As more and more people come to support same-sex marriage, social conservatives and other opponents of marriage equality have been driven to reject the fundamental premise of modern marriage. This…

  • Whitehead on the task of theology

    In his book Adventures of Ideas, Alfred North Whitehead criticizes “liberal clergy and laymen” of the 18th and 19th centuries for rejecting systematic theology. The problem with the old theology wasn’t its intellectual or systematic character, Whitehead says, but its insistence on “dogmatic finality.” Metaphysics–or systematic, rational thought about the universe rooted in our deepest…

  • Death of the seas

    The WaPo ran a good review this Sunday of two books on the slow-motion environmental catastrophe taking place in the earth’s oceans.

  • If you’re looking for substantive blogging

    …you haven’t been finding it here, have you? But Marvin‘s been on a tear lately. Also, be sure to check out Jeremy‘s series on Catholic Social Teaching.

  • Friday Metal: Napalm Death, “On the Brink of Extinction”

    Downloaded their latest album this week and this is my favorite song so far.

  • 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…