A Thinking Reed

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

Animal Rights and Issues

  • Climate and conservation

    This article in today’s Post discusses how people responsible for wildlife conservation are having to change their approach because of global warming. The old model, where you set aside a certain fixed area of land to protect the wildlife within it, is becoming obsolete as changes in the climate will, or are already, driving those Read more

  • All creatures great and small

    I just noticed that the Humane Society has put together a rather nice page on Animals and Religion and produced a 25-minute documentary called “Eating Mercifully.” The HSUS’s approach to religion is similar to its approach to the public at large: it assumes that principles of compassion and merciful treatment are already embedded in our Read more

  • “Sea kittens”?

    Stentor at debitage has some worthwhile thoughts on PeTA’s latest campaign, which he aptly describes as “merely silly, not offensive and progressive-coalition-fracturing,” in contrast to some of their others. Seems PeTA wants people to start calling fish “sea kittens” in order to create more empathy for them. Recognizing that fish are sentient creatures with their Read more

  • One world?

    I recently read Peter Singer’s One World: The Ethics of Globalization, which was originally delivered as a series of lectures in 2000. I had a longish post in the hopper about national loyalties and obligations to strangers, but it didn’t really go anywhere so I junked it. Suffice it to say, I don’t always agree Read more

  • Cooking with ATR

    Jennifer’s post here makes me think that this sort of thing might actually be interesting or useful to some folks. One of the most common questions I get as a vegetarian is “What do you eat?” I chalk this up to a couple of things. One is that, for many people, the standard American meal, Read more

  • Bittman on our meat-guzzling way of life

    Readers of the previous post might be interested in this talk from Mark Bittman: “What’s wrong with what we eat.” His story will be familiar to people who follow these issues, but it’s a good primer. Bittman makes a big deal out of the meat issue (rightly, IMO) and the impact that our levels of Read more

  • On Vilsack

    Jennifer asks what I think of Obama’s pick of Tom Vilsack for Secretary of Agriculture. Doesn’t she know that the question of who gives the invocation at the inauguration is much more pressing than our country’s food system? Sheesh! I only know what I’ve read, and the general impression I get is that Vilsack is Read more

  • 2008: The year in book blogging

    I’m not going to provide a best books of the year list, but here’s a sampling of those that got their hooks into me enough to generate some more or less in-depth blogging (needless to say, most of these weren’t published in 2008): Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power “Empire of dysfunction” Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond Read more

  • November/December reading notes

    Also known as the lazy man’s book review, or capsule reflections on books I might not get around to posting on at greater length: Ecology at the Heart of Faith by Denis Edwards and Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology by H. Paul Santmire A Catholic (Edwards) and a Lutheran (Santmire) Read more

  • Blogs of Christmas past

    Since content will likely be light this coming week, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to offer up some representative posts from the previous four Decembers since I started blogging, as a kind of retrospective. (Note: some of these originally appeared on my first blog, “Verbum Ipsum,” but have been imported to WP; Read more