A Thinking Reed

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

Books

  • Aliens without sin

    Recently I’ve been reading A Case of Conscience by James Blish. This is a science fiction novel written in the 50s about a Jesuit priest/biologist studying a race of reptillian anthropoids on a distant planet. They have a seemingly perfect ethical society without friction or conflict, but also utterly destitute of religion or any sense Read more

  • Book review: Small Is Still Beautiful

    Joseph Pearce is a noted English Catholic writer who has written books on G. K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis among others. In Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered, Pearce seeks to update the wisdom of E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful for the 21st century. Read more

  • September reading notes

    Well, okay, the month isn’t over yet, but it sure is flying. Earlier I mentioned I was still working on Monbiot’s Heat. Well, I still am. Just haven’t been in the mood to read it. ‘Nuff said. Finished Jame’s Alison’s Raising Abel. I stand by my earlier claim that, while Alison has some absolutely brilliant Read more

  • The anti-utopian

    Nice profile (from a couple of months ago) of the eclectic and eccentric British political thinker John Gray. I’ve always found Gray’s stuff fascinating, and this piece puts his various ideological twists and turns (from Thatcherite neo-liberal, to skeptic of neo-liberalism, to all-around pessimist) in context. (Found here.) Read more

  • Scapegoats, sacrifice, and the “violence” of God

    In addition to the other books I’ve been juggling, this weekend I started reading James Alison’s Raising Abel, which carries the subtitle “Recovering the Eschatological Imagination.” Alison is a great writer and offers some startling insights that bring new life to seemingly obscure theological concepts, but here I want to think a little bit about Read more

  • August reading notes

    Some highlights from the past month: I blogged a bit about Keith Ward’s latest, Re-Thinking Christianity here, here and here. Ward continues his streak of intelligent, accessible theology that straddles the popular and the academic. The takeaway lesson from RC is that there isn’t exactly an unchanging core of doctrine, but that Christianity has changed Read more

  • Ends and means, again

    E.F. Schumacher on “Buddhist economics”: While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is “The Middle Way” and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of Read more

  • Schumacher on the poverty of economics

    It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, with increasing affluence, economics has moved into the very center of public concern, and economic performance, economic growth, economic expansion, and so forth have become the abiding interest, if not the obsession, of all modern socieites. In the current vocabulary of condemnation there are few words as Read more

  • Spong’s Jesus

    Ben Myers at Faith and Theology reviews the new book Jesus for the Non-Religious by the notorious John Shelby Spong. Dr. Myers’ review is consistent with the impression I’ve long had of Spong’s work: in an attempt to be modern and relevant he evacuates Christianity of everything that makes it remotely interesting and weird and Read more

  • McKibbon, Roepke, and John Paul II

    Caleb Stegall reviews Bill McKibbon’s Deep Economy (which I still haven’t read) in a recent issue of The American Conservative. In the course of the review he mentions this great exchange between economists Wilhelm Roepke and Ludwig von Mises: In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Read more