A Thinking Reed

  • Will the real Reinhold Niebuhr please stand up?

    There’s been much made of the “Niebuhrian” nature of President Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech: its frank recognition that dealing with evil sometimes requires the use of force; its rejection of non-violence; its anti-utopianism with respect to ending violent conflict, etc. And that’s all fair enough. But there was one key Niebuhrian theme that was conspicuously…

  • Friday Metal: Suicidal Tendencies, “Trip At The Brain”

    more about "Friday Metal: Suicidal Tendencies, “T…", posted with vodpod

  • It’s OK to criticize the President

    Really. He can take it. In some ways, the “How dare you criticize Obama!” people are the mirror image of the “I can’t believe Obama betrayed us!” people. Neither seem able to see him as first and foremost a politician.

  • Of wolf and man

    I “tweeted” recently that I head read and really enjoyed Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf. Rowlands, the eponymous philosopher, has written a bunch of books, including an excellent introduction to animal rights. TPATW defies easy summary, but it’s part-memoir and part-philosophical rumination arising from Rowlands’ experience living with a companion wolf named Brenin…

  • Putting the Chri$t back in Christmas

    I was hoping that this was a bad joke, but it seems not. Has it occurred to any of these folks that there might be something theologically problematic about encouraging retailers to use Christ as a marketing tool?

  • The apocalyptic Jesus and the divine Christ

    Continuing the series on Dale Allison’s The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (previous posts here and here). Despite his defense of the general picture of Jesus offered in the gospels, Allison is not out just to comfort conservatives or other traditional believers. For starters, as we’ve seen, he’s dubious that we can determine with…

  • Friday Metal: Between the Buried and Me, “Obfuscation”

    From their fantastic new album The Great Misdirect:

  • New cyber-breviary

    If you haven’t already done so, you should check out this online breviary (i.e., order for praying the Daily Office) compiled by Derek and some other liturgically knowledgable web elves. I’m more of a praying-from-a-book sort of guy, but this looks to be an awesome resource.

  • Manhattan evisceration

    If you’re lucky, you’ve been blissfully unaware of the recent Manhattan Declaration, a quasi-ecumenical “call of Christian conscience” signed by a veritable who’s who of right-wing ecclesiastical celebrities (largely overlapping with the First Things crowd). The basic gist is to reaffirm opposition to legal abortion and same-sex marriage as the paramount Christian principles, but wrapped…

  • The real Jesus

    As we saw in the last post, Allison thinks that the traditional method of sifting the NT materials to reveal pristine, authentic bits of knowledge about Jesus is doomed to failure. More promising, he argued, is discerning the general picture of Jesus, based on recurring themes. For example, citing numerous passages in the synoptic gospels,…