A Thinking Reed

  • Friday Metal: Soilwork, “Two Lives Worth of Reckoning”

    The new album, The Panic Broadcast, comes out next Tuesday.

  • Heart of Christianity 3 – Bible

    Unlike his take on faith, I found Borg’s treatment of the Bible surprisingly weak. He starts out by saying that Christianity is centered on the Bible because it points to God, but that the Bible has become a stumbling block for many because of biblical literalism. Literalism, according to Borg, puts an undue emphasis on…

  • Heart of Christianity 2 – Faith

    I liked chapter two, “Faith: The Way of the Heart,” not so much because it breaks any new ground, but because it clearly lays out what I (at any rate) find to be a helpful understanding of the nature of faith. Borg notes that some people criticize Christianity for being more about believing than being…

  • Borg’s Heart of Christianity – 1

    Taking a break from the denizens of the deep, I started reading Marcus Borg’s The Heart of Christianity. This is a kind of Mere Christianity for liberal Christians, and something that people at my church have found helpful, so I thought I’d give it a read. (I’ve been critical of Borg in the past, but…

  • Ah the world, oh the whale

    I finished Philip Hoare’s The Whale this weekend, and I highly recommend it. It’s part memoir, part natural history, part literary criticism, part social and cultural analysis, and part mystical meditation. Hoare traces our history with the whale, focusing on the high-tide of the American whaling industry in the 19th century, followed by the more…

  • Huxley on the Bard and religion

    Speaking of Shakespeare and Christianity, one of the best essays in the Aldous Huxley collection I recently read was “Shakespeare and Religion.” You can read it online here.

  • Stuff evangelical hipsters like

    The author of the blog (and book) Hipster Christianity asks: How many of these 50 books have you read? If you’ve read more than 20 of them, there is a good chance that you are a Christian with artistic or intellectual tendencies. If you’ve read more than 30 of them, you are most likely a…

  • Independence runs in the family

    This is neat: five of America’s greatest 19th-century writers–Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne–had grandfathers who were involved in the revolution.

  • Friday links

    – Jim Henley on the high road and the low road – The July issue of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics focuses on poverty and development – How easy would it be to fix Social Security? – The Twilight series: not just bad, but morally toxic – Who you callin’ a pescatarian? – Marvin writes…

  • Friday Metal: Covering Sabbath

    As Alfred North Whitehead might’ve said, all heavy metal consists of a series of footnotes to Black Sabbath.