A Thinking Reed

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

Social and ethical issues

  • Making room for religious law?

    There’s been a lot of blogospheric hubabaloo about this rather dry and academic lecture given by Rowan Williams on the possibility of recognizing, in some official fashion, religious legal jurisdictions within a pluralistic society. What was reported as the Archbishop appeasing Islamic extremists is, in reality, a nuanced exploration of some significant issues in the Read more

  • Faith, rationality and the common good

    Fr. Chris has a good post defending Jeffrey Stout from Christian neo-traditionalist critiques. I’m no expert on Stout, but I think I’m overall more sympathetic to what I take to be Stout’s side in this debate. Call me an old-fashioned liberal, but I am deeply skeptical about this idea of replacing a shared rationality with Read more

  • O brave new world!

    At the First Things sort-of-blog Jason Byassee reviews what sounds like a fascinating book from Methodist ethicist Amy Laura Hall called Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction which, in Byassee’s words “aims to show that the powerful narrative of ‘progress’ in twentieth-century American Protestantism is linked indelibly with eugenics, abortion, Hiroshima, racism, Read more

  • What kind of religious “center”?

    Bill McKibben reviews two books on Christianity: one by Harvard preacher Peter Gomes, and the other a book from the Barna Institute, the Gallup of evangelical Protestantism, reporting on young people’s perceptions of Christianity. Gomes is an interesting guy: a black, old-school New England conservative, Anglophile Baptist minister who happens to be gay. He’s widely Read more

  • Barth, Yoder, and the problem of war

    I assume that most readers of this blog also read Marvin’s site regularly, but in case you don’t, you should really check out his current series on Karl Barth and war: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 With more to come, including a “Yoderian” response to Barth’s position. See here for Read more

  • MLK and non-violence

    Given how Martin Luther King Jr. has become a kind of American plaster saint that politicians of all stripes routinely genuflect toward, it’s easy to forget how radical his message was: As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve Read more

  • Animal cloning: cui bono?

    Marvin asks: So what if it’s safe? Do we need to clone beef cattle, dairy cattle, swine and chickens? It’s not like I’m starving, and I’m not sure how this helps people who are starving. Who benefits from cloning livestock? This seems to be yet another great example of what I’ll call “technologism:” If we Read more

  • It’s a small world

    The Mother Jones article on the global impact of China’s environmental problems that I mentioned the other day can be found online here. It’s long but well worth a read. Read more

  • God’s Own Party

    Harold Meyerson points out one of the problems with touting your party or candidacy as the “Christian” one: people will start to actually expect you to live up to the standards of Jesus. Here’s something C. S. Lewis had to say about the idea of a “Christian” political party: It is not reasonable to suppose Read more

  • Of staph infections and disappearing honeybees

    What does it mean to say that our industrial food system is “unsustainable”? Michael Pollan suggests an answer: when you insist on treating animals like machines as a necessary requirement of your food system and they persist in behaving like organisms. Call it biological blowback. Read more