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

  • Markets in animal welfare

    Thanks to Jeremy for directing my attention to, among other things, this issue of the journal Law and Contemporary Problems (affiliated with Duke Law School) which focuses on animal law and policy. In particular, this article by Jeff Leslie and Cass Sunstein offers an in-depth argument for a “disclosure regime” that would label food products Read more

  • Should we stay or should we go?

    A debate at the Commonweal Magazine website between Matthew A. Shadle and Andrew Bacevich. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, so caveat lector and all that. Read more

  • God and the taxman

    The September “issue” of the Jounal of Lutheran Ethics is now up, with a special focus on taxes, wealth, and poverty 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

  • The cow-man cometh

    This story reports that the UK has given the green light to scientists to create human-animal ‘chimera’ embryos for research purposes (see here for a bit more background). Essentially this involves combining an animal egg (cows in this case) with human genetic material to create an embryo from which stem cells can be extracted. The Read more

  • Catholicism, vegetarianism and the conscientious omnivore

    Bernard Prusak, who teaches at Villanova University outside of Philadelphia, recently published a thoughtful article on Catholicism and vegetarianism at Commonweal (you can also read it at his website here). Dr. Prusak was a practicing vegetarian for a while, but gave it up partly because he became convinced that meat-eating was, if not necessary, at Read more

  • The penal state

    I finally got around to reading this Glenn Loury piece on our scandalous rates of punitive and discriminatory incarceration. Very powerful stuff. The theologian William Placher has written some very good stuff on this often-neglected topic. In his book Jesus the Savior he writes: Practices like visiting prisoners grew out of the core of Christian Read more

  • From animal rights to cosmic democracy

    The second part of Clark’s essay on “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” wades into deeper and more interesting waters. Clark contends that it’s “better to abandon abstract argument, in favour of historical.” Ownership, he maintains, is a social concept and thus the idea that we can do whatever we want with what we “own” Read more