A Thinking Reed

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

Conservatism

  • Moneybags Paul

    Ron Paul raised $4.2 million in Internet contributions in a 24-hour period yesterday as part of a concerted fundraising campaign. Wow! Paul’s total deposed Mitt Romney as the single-day fundraising record holder in the Republican presidential field. When it comes to sums amassed in one day, Paul now ranks only behind Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton, Read more

  • Rudy’s brain?

    I’m not wild about anybody currently running for president next year, but I’ve been convinced for a while now that Rudy Giuliani is objectively the worst candidate of either party in the 2008 race. He appears to display all the authoritarianism and militarism of the GOP circa 2007 without any shred of pro-life restraint or 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

  • Is Ron Paul crazy?

    Well, maybe. But he also manages to combine uncompromising rhetoric with political savvy, according to Jeremy Lott (via). This may help explain why Paul is doing better than anyone expected (his campaign reportedly now with more cash on hand than John McCain’s, for instance). One of the interesting thing about Paul is that he’s able Read more

  • Political self ID – a Christian humanist?

    This is an exercise in bloggy narcissism (or is that a redundancy?) so feel free to skip this post. The other day a friend asked me to describe my political outlook and I couldn’t come up with a very satisfying answer. Having persued the blog he suggested religious conservative, but to me that sounds a 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

  • The conservatism of Ray Davies

    Apropos of yesterday’s post, the lyrics from The Kinks’ “God’s Children”: Man made the buildings that reach for the sky And man made the motorcar and learned how to fly But he didn’t make the flowers and he didn’t make the trees And he didn’t make you and he didn’t make me And he got Read more

  • Paging Dr. No

    Here’s a pretty sympathetic if not uncritical profile of Ron Paul in the New York Times Magazine by Christopher Caldwell. One of the things I took away from this piece is that Paul’s ability to attract a broad spectrum of support from people who are alienated from the political status quo is the flip side Read more

  • Does God want us to be free?

    (Switching gears here; we’re talking about political freedom now, not the metaphysical variety.) There’s been an interesting debate recently, swirling around some of President Bush’s more exuberant comments about political freedom being a “gift from the Almighty.” The reference comes from a recent David Brooks column (not accessible to us proles who don’t subscribe to Read more

  • Green is the new Right(?)

    Philosopher Roger Scruton has a pretty good piece on conservatives and the environment in the latest American Conservative. He mostly avoids the ususal conservative pitfalls when talking about the environment, namely snarky dismissal or ad hominem attacks against Al Gore and dirty hippies. Scruton does make some solid points about the dangers of any “movement”: Read more