A Thinking Reed

  • Friday Metal: Peter Steele, RIP

    I was never a big Type O Negative fan, but was sad to hear about the death of frontman Peter Steele this week. Here’s “Black No. 1”:

  • Rights, liberties, and taxation

    A point that I’ve tried to make before, but which may bear repeating since it’s Tax Day: the distinction between “positive” and “negative” rights, or liberty, is largely illusory–or at least not that important. Libertarians sometimes use this distinction to differentiate their position from “welfare” liberals. In the libertarian utopia, rights are guarantees against interference…

  • Friday Metal: Barren Earth, “Curse of the Red River”

    “Supergroup” may be stretching it a bit for some, considering the band members are drawn from relatively obscure European death metal bands, but Barren Earth’s full-length debut is very good. Here’s the title track:

  • Red Toryism revisited

    Philosopher and political gadfly John Gray has what seems to be a balanced take on Philip Blond’s “Red Toryism,” which has been making waves in politico-theological circles. Blond is an acolyte of John Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy and an advisor to British Tory leader David Cameron who proposes a program of economic “relocalization” combined with political…

  • McLaren’s “heresy”

    I’ve never read anything by Brian McLaren, but the dust-up in some evangelical circles about his new book A New Kind of Christianity is interesting for what it reveals about the presuppositions of at least significant swaths of American evangelicalism. Nothing McLaren says, at least going by the summary offered in the story linked above,…

  • (Good) Friday Metal: Iron Maiden, “Run to the Hills”

    Live in Bogota, Colombia, from their 2009 documentary “Flight 666”:

  • Good Friday reading

    I recommend Christopher‘s meditation at the Episcopal Cafe.

  • The marginalization of the mystical

    Luke Timothy Johnson writes on keeping the “exoteric” (legal, moral, ritual) and “esoteric” (mystical, devotional) aspects of religion together. Both, he says, are necessary for the religious life to flourish, but western monotheisms–Islam and Christianity particularly–have become too focused on the exoteric.

  • “Reason” vs. reasons

    I want to zero in further on one small part of the John Polkinghorne interview excerpted below: I think that the fundamental question about something, whether science or religion, is not, “Is it reasonable?” as if we know beforehand what is reasonable, or what shape rationality has. The better question is, “What makes you think…

  • Friday Metal: Gojira, “Remembrance”