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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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…
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Other nations
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals … We patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more…
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Sen. Robert Byrd, animal advocate
Obviously Robert Byrd was a complicated man. He went from being a segregationist (and Klan member!) to an ardent champion of civil rights and supporter of Barack Obama’s election. He also went from being a supporter of the Vietnam war to a fierce critic of of presidential warmaking and executive power, giving eloquent and impassioned…
