Social and ethical issues
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I’m agnostic, because under-informed, about whether “free-range” meat would result in higher meat prices than the factory farmed variety once you’ve taken into account all the hidden costs. But Paul Roberts, author of The End of Oil and The End of Food, contends that, even under the best circumstances, making the (necessary) switch to free-range Read more
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Here’s an article from 2004 that gives a good Lutheran perspective on politics and voting in response to an article from evangelical historian Mark Noll about not voting. I don’t agree with it in all the particulars, and Christian pacifists will likely not be convinced, but I thought it was a solid statement of a Read more
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This post from “Inhabitatio Dei” reminds me that I engaged in a fair amount of hand-wringing on this blog* about voting in 2004. That was the year that we had various Christian luminaries–Alasdair McIntyre and Paul Griffiths come to mind–openly advocating not voting. I ultimately ended up voting third-party, finding both Bush and Kerry unacceptable Read more
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Gaius makes a fair point: cries against “consumerism” can ring hollow when there are people who are genuniely struggling, even in the land of overstuffed plenty. But this doesn’t solve the problem, that, given resource and environmental constraints, an economy devoted to ever-expanding consumption is unsustainable. And “we the people” bear some responsibility for it. Read more
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If Andrew Bacevich is right that our consumptive habits are the cause, not only of resource depletion and environmental degradation, but of our far-flung military adventurism, then the unpleasant conclusion seems to be that we need to start consuming less. Here’s an article (via Book Forum) about, among other things, a professor in Western Pennsylvania Read more
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George Monbiot: Sure, we are hypocrites. Every one of us, almost by definition. Hypocrisy is the gap between your aspirations and your actions. Greens have high aspirations – they want to live more ethically – and they will always fall short. But the alternative to hypocrisy isn’t moral purity (no one manages that), but cynicism. Read more
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The limits of Internet political quizzes aside, my economic philosophy is a bricolage of bits from Wilhelm Roepke’s “humane economy,” E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful,” stray pieces of Catholic social thought, some Bill McKibben, and a dash of Hayek. Market economies are the best mechanism we have for producing and distributing goods, but that they Read more
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The Post weekend book section has a nice write-up of a new book called For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement, written by Kathryn Shevelow. The book focuses on the animal protection movement that arose in England in the 18th and 19th centuries, a movement that came in the face Read more
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Christopher wonders what I think about the Spanish Parliament’s recent move toward granting “the right to life, the freedom from arbitrary deprivation of liberty, and protection from torture” to great apes. I touched on this briefly here, but that was mainly in the course of responding to William Saletan’s contention that animal equality of the Read more
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The issue before us is to discover or determine what we are, and what we are for. Traditional believers–among whom I count myself–suppose that there are answers to those questions, and that they can be found by prayerful examination of the Word of God in Scripture–and the world. Less traditional believers, reacting against the follies Read more
A Thinking Reed 