A Thinking Reed

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

Culture

  • “Christian” as a niche demographic

    Timothy Noah at The New Republic laments the use of the term “Christian” to refer exclusively to conservative, evangelical Protestants (and the cultural products that cater to them): Every morning I wake up to National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” and this morning my first stirrings of consciousness concerned the new movie October Baby, about a Read more

  • The “stupidity” of closing libraries

    If you really want complete freedom of choice, complete openness of information, where nobody is spying on you, no one is selling your presence to advertisers, the only place to find it is a library, where they keep books. –Author Philip Pullman, “declaring war” against library closures in the UK (Via Alan Jacobs) Read more

  • Friday Links

    –Marvin on the Presbyterian Church’s decision to allow congregations to call non-celibate gay and lesbian pastors. –Libraries are part of the social safety net. –“I hated vegans too, but now I am one.” –On anti-Semites and philo-Semites. –Mark Bittman asks, “Why bother with meat?” –Jesus and eco-theology. –Jeremy discusses Herbert McCabe and Gerhard Forde on Read more

  • Friday Links

    –John Cohn at The New Republic on the end of “compassionate conservatism.” –Should life be more like a game? — The rise of white identity politics in DC? –From Book Forum, a collection of links on how we treat animals. (I guess that makes this a meta-link?) –How Pearl Jam went from being the biggest Read more

  • Traditional marriage hasn’t existed for a long time

    This article from the WaPo clearly lays out why the supposed threat to “traditional” marriage posed by same-sex marriage is based on a misunderstanding: We are near the end of a two-stage revolution in the social understanding and legal definition of marriage. This revolution has overturned the most traditional functions of the institution: to reinforce Read more

  • Christmas is awesome

    Christmas has been getting flak from all sides this year. Conservative Christians think it’s too secular or “multiculturalized”; secularists think it’s too religious, or they make what they seem to think is the devastating point that Jesus was probably not actually born on December 25th; “radical” Christians think Christmas is too sentimental or commercialized; liturgical Read more

  • Huxley on the Bard and religion

    Speaking of Shakespeare and Christianity, one of the best essays in the Aldous Huxley collection I recently read was “Shakespeare and Religion.” You can read it online here. Read more

  • Pre-Christmas odds and ends

    The ATR household is off to visit family for the better part of the next week, so blogging will be light–well, even lighter than usual. Here’s a sampling of what I’ve been reading ’round the Web lately: Christopher has several posts on l’affaire Rick Warren that are, as usual, very much worth your time. (See Read more

  • Environmentalism for the rest of us

    I meant to link to this piece from Orion magazine earlier (via Russell I think). It’s all about cultivating an environmentalism that can appeal to working class people (specifically white ones in this case), not just by appealing to their interests, but by understanding and sympathizing with their culture. It’s no secret that much of Read more

  • Tammy Faye Messner (Bakker), RIP

    Tammy Faye, one of the symbols of the corruption of American televangelism lost her battle with cancer. A few months ago my wife and I watched the documentary The Eyes of Tammy Faye. I have to say that I came away from that much more sympathetically disposed to her. Obviously the kind of fundraising she Read more