A Thinking Reed

  • Denis Edwards on new creation: radical transformation and real continuity

    One problem for any Christian eschatology–an underappreciated one, it seems to me–is reconciling it with the rather bleak view of the universe’s future provided to us by modern science. We’re told that our universe will, after billions of years of expansion, either collapse back in on itself in a “big crunch” expand endlessly into an…

  • Book notes

    Currently reading: Denis Edwards, How God Acts. See my posts on this here, here, and here. The second half of the book, which I may or may not blog about in more detail, is less concerned directly with the question of divine action, but offers Edwards’ take on redemption, the atonement, and the salvation of…

  • German frugality: threat or menace?

    Is it possible that there’s something wrong with an economic system that requires us to scold people for being too frugal, not buying a bunch of useless crap they don’t want, etc.?

  • “Cetacean psychosis”

    Does captivity drive orcas crazy?

  • Denis Edwards and Keith Ward on miracles

    Miracles present what is probably the toughest challenge for Denis Edwards’ noninterventionist account of divine action. After all, isn’t a miracle by definition an act of God “intervening” in, or overriding, or bypassing the normal chain of events? Edwards considers one traditional view on what a miracle is, namely that of Thomas Aquinas. As we’ve…

  • Quasi-mea culpa on Marcus Borg

    A while back I lamented that moderate-to-progressive Christians were in danger of creating their own theological ghetto by creating an “approved” reading list of people like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. I wrote that “Borg and Crossan, for example, though they both have some good insights, seem to want to replace 2,000 years of…

  • Johnny Cash nixed “Imagine”?

    From a review of the new Johnny Cash album American VI: Ain’t No Grave: The success in large part on this sixth collection, as with the entire series, comes down to song selection, which [producer Rick] Rubin has overseen with excellent taste. Talk about a dream job: Thinking up cool songs for Johnny Cash to…

  • Friday Metal: Baroness, “A Horse Called Golgotha”

    Baroness’s Blue Record was at or near the top of pretty much every heavy metal critics’ “best of” list last year. And this is one of the album’s best songs:

  • Edwards on providence

    If God acts in a non-interventionist way as Denis Edwards suggests–acting through “secondary causes” and allowing natural processes and created beings their own proper autonomy–then what about events that theology has traditionally viewed as special divine actions that bypass the normal order of things? Let’s look at two cases: God’s providential ordering of all things…

  • The Sea World incident

    You may have heard the sad news of the Sea World trainer who was killed by the killer whale she was working with. Authorities were aptly referring to it as a “tragic accident,” but could these sorts of things be avoided by not keeping such creatures in captivity in the first place? Jim Henley provides…