A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Andrew Linzey

  • Animal rights is more than Peter Singer

    Tony Jones posted a link to a Peter Singer article arguing, among other things, that animal-welfare concerns should trump claims to religious liberty in cases like humane slaughter laws. Whatever the merits of Singer’s argument (Brandon pretty thoroughly demolishes it here), the post at Tony Jones’ blog provides an example of how Christians often react to Read more

  • Christianity and the roots of anti-animal sentiment

    Over at the blog Year of Plenty, Craig Goodwin reviews Laura Hobgood-Oster’s recent book The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals. It’s a generally positive review, but at the end Goodwin takes issue with some of Hobgood-Oster’s explanations for our troubled relationship with the animal world: The references and historical background offered on Read more

  • Peter Singer, utilitarianism, Christianity, and climate change

    Here’s an interesting post from Mark Vernon, an English journalist and author (and former priest in the Church of England), reporting on a recent conference at Oxford University on the engagement of Christian ethics with the thought of Peter Singer. According to Vernon, Singer discussed problems that his brand of utilitarianism (“preference utilitarianism”–the view that Read more

  • God’s right to the respectful treatment of God’s creatures

    I’ve been re-reading Andrew Linzey’s Christianity and the Rights of Animals and just wanted to jot down some salient passages. On intensive farming: To put it at its most basic: animals have a God-given right to be animals. The natural life of a Spirit-filled creatures is a gift from God. When we take over the Read more

  • Friday links

    – Many people have pointed to this omnibus post at Mother Jones that provides background, context, links, and ongoing updates on the situation in Egypt. – Marvin writes on understanding apostolic poverty. – At the blog Memoria Dei, a post discussing feminist theologian Mary Daly’s use of women’s experience as an analogue for the divine. Read more

  • The radical Lewis

    I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that many C. S. Lewis fans–maybe especially his many evangelical admirers–don’t know that Lewis wrote a pamphlet for the British Anti-Vivisection Society. This essay, reprinted later in God in the Dock, anticipates some key arguments since made by philosophical proponents of animal rights. Lewis posits Read more

  • Human “exceptionalism” as moral exclusion

    In his review of Wesley Smith’s book that I linked to below, Angus Taylor puts his finger on exactly what has long bothered me about Smith’s rhetoric of “human exceptionalism”: Even if can be shown … that all human beings deserve an elevated moral status, it is not clear why this elevated status should entail Read more

  • The crooked path from metaphysics to morals

    Guest-blogger “Aeolus” at In Living Color flags a book by Rod Preece that attempts to set the historical record straight on Christianity’s attitude toward animals. The assumption among many animal advocates has been that Christianity reinforced a hierarchical attitude that was inherently detrimental to animal well-being, and that only a more science-based approach, heavily indebted Read more

  • A debate on animal rights

    Just catching up on some of my post-Christmas reading: in Sunday’s Washington Post there was a mini-debate between Andrew Linzey and neuroscientist Adrian Morrison over the rights of animals. Linzey is certainly right that Morrison misses the thrust of his central argument. The question isn’t whether humans are different from non-human animals, but whether that Read more

  • Toward a non-anthropocentric theology

    Jeremy asked if I’d recommend any books on moving away from an anthropocentric theology. This is a question at the intersection of some perennial ATR themes, so I thought I’d post the answer here. The following list makes no pretense to be either authoritative or exhaustive, but these are some books (in no particular order) Read more