A Thinking Reed

  • Abusus non tollit usum

    Christians who are understandably disillusioned with the Christian Right’s approach to politics sometimes draw what is–I think–an improper lesson from it. That is, since the Christian Right wants to use political power to implement an intolerant or destructive agenda, they infer that the problem is political power as such. Christian blogger Benjamin Corey seems to…

  • Odds and ends for a Friday

    I realize I’m exactly the type of person you’d expect to like a Sufjan Stevens album, but nonetheless–the new album is really good! Evangelical Christian groups are working on a statement of theological concern regarding factory farming. I’m no longer a vegetarian (and feel vaguely guilty about it), but I’m all for any efforts to…

  • Liberal Christians aren’t caving in to “society”

    This article makes two assumptions, neither of which really stands up to scrutiny. The first is that Christians have held the same views on marriage, sex, and gender for the last 2,000 years. But I think you’d have a hard time making the case that marriage and gender have been understood the same way during…

  • Recent reading

    More #content partly repurposed from my Goodreads page… The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia, Rowan Williams The former archbishop of Canterbury explores the theological underpinnings of Lewis’s beloved fantasy series with his customary erudition and pastoral heart. Williams also does a nice job responding to some recent critics of the series…

  • Party spirit

    The fact is that democracy requires not only the organization of political parties, but also a certain degree of mutual respect or at least tolerance. Whenever the followers of one political party persuade themselves that the future of the nation is not safe with the opposition in power, it becomes fairly certain that the nation’s…

  • The survival of chaos after the victory of God

    Jon D. Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence is one of the most stimulating theology books I’ve read in a long time. I was expecting something different–a theodicy of sorts; but what I got instead was more interesting. Levenson argues that key passages in the Tanakh/Jewish Bible present…

  • Some recent reading

    Shamelessly plagiarized from my Goodreads page: Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin A vivid, searing exploration of religious, racial, sexual, and individual identity. An American classic. Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin A very different book from Go Tell It On the Mountain, but still occupied with the nature of the self, its desires, and…

  • Barack Obama and American henotheism

    The response in some quarters to President Obama’s (frankly rather anodyne) remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast has been dispiriting, if sadly predictable. The right-wing outrage machine has (once again) deemed him an apologist for Islamist terrorism and an enemy of true Christianity and Western civilization. (How they square this with his actual record is…

  • Should Jews view Christianity as a new revelation?

    Over the past several decades Christians have been rethinking their relationship to Jews and Judaism. This has been prompted, most obviously, by the horrors of the Holocaust and the recognition that centuries of Christian anti-Judaism and persecution of Jews helped lay the groundwork for it. Most notably, both the Catholic Church and most mainline Protestant…

  • What’s the appeal of Christianity without God?

    I was only previously aware of Daniel C. Maguire as a theologian on the liberal end of Roman Catholicism. But it seems he now rejects belief in God altogether and has written a book called Christianity without God. I’m not interested in criticizing anyone for what they can or can’t believe. Atheism can be a…