A Thinking Reed

  • Dale Allison on the limits of the quest for the historical Jesus

    Over the holiday I read Dale Allison Jr.’s The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus. Allison is a well-regarded historical Jesus scholar with a number of tomes to his name and a practicing Christian. This book is his attempt to come to terms with how his work as a historian affects his personal faith. As…

  • Friday Metal: Get well, Ronnie!

    Very sad news: metal legend Ronnie James Dio has been diagnosed with stomach cancer. Here’s hoping for a speedy recovery!

  • Forthrightness needed on climate e-mails

    Andrew Leonard at Salon makes a good point about what has come to be called (inevitably) “Climategate.” Yes, the hacking into private e-mails was a criminal act, but the apparently unethical behind-the-scenes behavior of the scientists involved is bound to shake public confidence in climate science, whether or not such a response is reasonable. As…

  • Buddhist emptiness and Christian salvation

    Kristin Johnston Largen, a professor of theology at the Lutheran seminary at Gettysburg, has written a stimulating little book: What Christians Can Learn from Buddhism: Rethinking Salvation. In it she offers a summary of the key points of what Christianity and Buddhism mean by salvation and reflects on how Buddhist notions of salvation can shed…

  • Friday Metal: Paging Donald Blake

    It doesn’t really get much more metal than this:

  • More on assisted migration

    Here’s a Wired article from last year on assisted migration (or colonization) for species endangered by climate change, as discussed in the previous post. Apparently this is something that at least some ecologists take quite seriously. Obviously, a huge concern is the havoc that such transplants could wreak on their new ecosystems, as Camassia pointed…

  • Noah, climate change, and “assisted migration”

    In Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough’s Creaturely Theology, Christopher Southgate expands on an idea he discussed briefly in his recent book The Groaning of Creation (see my posts here). Southgate points out that, due to human-caused climate change, we’re looking at a massive die off of animal life in the near future (what has been…

  • Intelligent dissent on the food movement

    I’m obviously sympathetic to a lot of the proposals of Michael Pollan, et al., but some of what passes for criticism of our system of food production can come across as simplistic, naive, or nostalgic. That’s why I was happy to discover the blog of historian and author Maureen Ogle who, among other things, subjects…

  • Friday Metal: The Red Chord, “Fixation on Plastics”

  • Annals of Lewisania

    Saw the movie “An Education” yesterday. A small subplot turns on one of the characters pretending to know C.S. Lewis and forging an autograph on a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Debate ensues about whether he goes by “Clive” or “C.S.” I know that he went by “Jack” with friends and…