I don’t know if it’s really accurate to call King’s X “metal,” but “groove-oriented, soulful, progressive hard rock” isn’t quite as pithy. Anyway, this is from their excellent 1989 album Gretchen Goes to Nebraska. They’re a criminally under-appreciated band, probably because they not only straddle genres, but also straddled the Christian-secular music divide for much of their career.
Month: July 2011
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HSUS and egg industry reach agreement on better treatment of laying hens
This seems like a big deal:
In an historic agreement reached today by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and the United Egg Producers (UEP), these long-time adversaries will work cooperatively to enact the first-ever federal law related to the treatment of chickens. It would also be the first federal law related to the on-farm treatment of animals raised for food.
The proposed federal legislation endorsed by the HSUS and UEP would:- Ban barren battery cages—small, cramped cages that nearly immobilize more than 250 million birds today—and essentially phase in double the amount of space each laying hen is presently given.
- Require environmental enrichments for birds such as perches, nesting boxes, and scratching areas for all hens.
- Prohibit forced molting through starvation, an inhumane practice that involves withholding all food from birds for up to two weeks in order to manipulate the laying cycle. Tens of millions of hens in the country still endure this cruelty today.
- Prohibit ammonia levels in henhouses from going above 25 parts per million.
- Prohibit the sale of eggs and egg products in the U.S. that don’t meet these requirements.
- Mandate that all egg cartons sold in the U.S. clearly identify the method of production; such as “Eggs from Caged Hens.”
From what I’ve read, the egg industry was motivated to reach this agreement in part because of the various state-level initiatives the HSUS had been pursuing, like Proposition 2 in California a couple of years ago. Rather than deal with a patchwork of state-level regulations, it seems they’d prefer a uniform federal standard.
In addition to the concrete improvements this should make in the lives of the millions of laying hens in the U.S., it will also be a big step to enshrine in federal law the principle that farmed animals are entitled to a certain level of humane treatment.
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John Macquarrie and process theology
I’m currently re-reading Scottish Anglican theologian John Macquarrie‘s marvelously lucid Principles of Christian Theology (first published in 1966; I’m reading the substantially revised version that was published about 10 years later). I first read it as an undergrad when my interest in existentialism was at its height. In the first part of the book, Macquarrie draws on the work of philosophers like Sartre and, especially, Heidegger to develop an “existential-ontological” natural theology. It’s existential in that it uses an analysis of human existence as its jumping-off point; it’s ontological in developing the idea of God as “Holy Being.” By this Macquarrie means that God is not a being among beings in the world, but rather the very possibility of anything existing at all. God is the power of “letting-be.”
One thing that struck me upon this reading, though, was how close some of Macquarrie’s ideas are to the process thought of A.N. Whitehead and his followers. In particular, Macquarrie’s description of human selfhood, while obviously owing a lot to the existentialists, emphasizes how the self incorporates what is bequeathed to it by the past with its apprehension of future possibilities and creates something genuinely new. This is very similar to the model of selfhood that lies at the center of Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism.” Further, Macquarrie develops what I think could be fairly called a “di-polar” version of theism which sees God as having both an eternal, unchanging nature and an aspect that is involved in and affected by what happens in history. One key difference is that Macquarrie preserves God’s ultimacy, while for Whitehead and most (but not all) forms of process theism, God is not properly speaking the ultimate creator or origin of everything. From a Christian point of view, Macquarrie’s view seems much more satisfactory.
I just ordered Macquarrie’s In Search of Deity, which was the published form of his Gifford Lectures deliverd in 1983 and 1984. Looking at the subtitle (“An Essay in Dialectical Theism”) and browsing the table of contents suggest that Macquarrie may have moved even closer to a semi-Whiteheadian view later in his career.
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State of the blog address
I just realized that July 1st marked the 7th anniversary of my blogging efforts. I started out on a Blogspot site (“Verbum Ipsum”) and migrated over to WordPress and A Thinking Reed a few years later. (All the archives have been imported to this site.) I’ve been at it more or less continuously ever since 2004, with only one or two breaks of any significant length.
Sometimes I ask myself why I continue to blog, particularly as the blogosphere has become so diversified and specialized. For instance, there are lots of theology blogs by clergy, academic theologians, and others with much more impressive credentials than me. What can I possibly add to their conversation? The only persuasive rationale I can come up with is that (a) every Christian is called to think about and reflect on their faith; (b) I like having an outlet for stuff I’m thinking about, particularly what I’m reading; and (c) blogging has enabled me to connect with a handful of like-minded folks with whom to compare notes–something that’s not always easy to find in “real” life.
I’m less persuaded that blogging about other things, like politics, is worth the effort. Partly that’s because politics just isn’t as close to my heart as other things I like to write about. To the extent that I am still interested in thinking and writing about politics, it’s the higher-level questions about what makes for a just and sustainable society–not the day-to-day Democrat vs. Republican stuff–that interest me. (I follow day-to-day politics, but I don’t feel like I usually have anything particularly interesting to say about it.)
There’s also the development of social media–sites like Facebook and Twitter now absorb a lot of the energy that people might once have put into blogging. While I use both those services, I don’t think either one can really replace blogging. Facebook I see as a more informal setting for interacting with friends or family, particularly those I don’t see often. Twitter is useful as a “micro”-blogging platform and has made the link-plus-sentence-of-commentary blog post more or less obsolete. It also can generate some interesting online conversations. But neither one allows for the development of a more formal and extended argument or line of thought, something blogs are much better suited for. In fact, one of the most frustrating things about Twitter, in my view, is how it virtually forces people to resort to unsupported assertion much of the time. There are real limits to the value of that kind of conversation.
When it’s all said and done, I guess I continue to blog because I like to read and I like to write about the things I’m reading and thinking about. If I wasn’t doing it here, I’d be doing it in a notebook or journal. But the blog, because it’s public, forces me to be a bit more polished and to clarify my thought more than I would in those other mediums. And it facilitates interaction with interesting people, some of whom I would now consider friends. Not a terrible way to spend one’s free time.
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The economic logic of cycling
From an excellent post at the NYT’s Economix blog:
Here is the economic logic behind increased efforts to promote bicycle use:
Cars enjoy huge direct subsidies in the form of road construction and public parking spaces, as well as indirect subsidies to the oil industry that provides their fuel. These subsidies far exceed the tax revenue generated by car use (as this excellent discussion of the technical issues at stake in these calculations makes clear.)
Yet cars impose major social costs: their use contributes to global warming, traffic congestion, accident fatalities and sedentary lifestyles.
Bicycle use is good for both people and the planet. In a country afflicted by obesity and inactivity, people who get moving become healthier. Riding a bike to work or to do errands is far cheaper than joining a gym. Cutting back on gas consumption improves air quality, reduces dependence on imported oil and saves money.
Increased bicycle use is practical and feasible, especially if it can be combined with effective public transportation for long-distance needs. As John Pucher of Rutgers University (dubbed Professor Bicycle by some of his fans) explains, about 40 percent of all automobile trips in metropolitan areas are less than two miles – a distance easily biked.
Read the rest here.
In general, I’d say the costs of our auto-centric culture, both the public subsidies that make it possible and the social costs it imposes, are largely invisible to most of us. We assume that everybody driving places individually in their car is normal, and anything that departs from that is odd or could only be brought about by some form of social engineering. Just achieving parity between driving and other forms of transportation–by, for example, making it just as easy for people to bike to work as drive–would be a huge accomplishment.
A Thinking Reed 