A Thinking Reed

  • Physicalism, reductionism, and the soul

    This off-the-cuff post on atheism generated some interesting discussion with Gaius about physicalism, reductionism, and humanism, among other things. I don’t know that I can express my views on the matter better than I tried to do in this post from a few years ago discussing Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire. In short, we often abstract…

  • Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith, and the perennial philosophy

    In the previous post I mentioned Aldous Huxley’s embrace of the “perennial philosophy” and his influence on the scholar of religion Huston Smith. Smith’s work had a big influence on me during my undergraduate years. When I was a callow 20-year-old atheist, Smith’s writings, as well as a series of interviews he did with Bill…

  • Huxley on distractions

    I’ve been spending what free time I have this summer dipping into the works of Aldous Huxley, both his fiction (Island, Eyeless In Gaza) and non-fiction (Brave New World Revisited). I’m currently working my way through a collection of essays called Huxley and God, which, as the title suggests, deals broadly with religion. Huxley is…

  • “Graceful simplicity” in worship

    Interesting post on Justin Martyr’s account of an early Eucharist (via Connexions). I’m not completely sold on the principle that whatever the early church did was better, but I do think there’s a case to be made for occasionally pruning the liturgy to let the gospel show forth more clearly (a sound Reformational principle). I’d…

  • Varieties of atheism

    Brandon points out the problem with lumping all contemporary atheist thinkers together as “new atheists.” He highlights the work of philosopher Owen Flanagan, whose work I’m not particularly familiar with, as an atheist who doesn’t necessarily fit the new atheist paradigm. It sounds to me–at least from Brandon’s description–that Flanagan is what I would call…

  • Balance!

    Today’s WaPo offers a review of a spate of new political books under the headline “Flame-throwing political books from the Right and the Left.” In judicious Post fashion, it finds the Left and the Right about equally guilty of partisan extremism. “If you believe the liberals,” we’re told “we have Republicans going insane after their…

  • Friday Metal: Revocation, “Dismantle the Dictator”

  • Lectionary irony

    In an earlier post I mentioned that our church was hosting a gathering of the “Network of Spiritual Progressives” this past weekend. As part of that event, Rabbi Michael Lerner–one of the chief movers of the network and the publisher of Tikkun magazine–preached at our church this Sunday. Ironically, perhaps, this passage from Galatians was…

  • Christ, Bible, Church: Some thoughts on in/fallibility

    As I noted on Friday, Derek recently wrote a post setting forth some provisional thoughts on the church and infallibility. While I generally agree with his conclusions, I did raise, in a comment over there, some questions about using the hypostatic union as an analogy or model for thinking about the relation between the human…

  • Friday Metal: Everyone in Converse

    Here’s a clever video from the German metalcore band Heaven Shall Burn (a very metal name, that):