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

  • Yes, Virginia, the pope believes in global warming

    Apparently some right-wing Catholics have interpreted the fact that the words “global warming” or “climate change” do not appear in Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical to mean that the pope is a global warming skeptic of some sort. Neil Ormerod, a Catholic theologian in Australia, attempts to set the record straight. Read more

  • The need for cranks

    I meant to flag this interesting article from the New Republic last week: “The Usefulness of Cranks: Nature as a standpoint for social criticism.” It’s about, among other things, the tensions between forms of environmentalism that value nature for its own sake and the progressivist and humanist assumptions of liberalism. Mainstream environmentalism (as represented by Read more

  • Creaturely theology

    Following on the heels of his Why Animal Suffering Matters, Andrew Linzey’s Creatures of the Same God addresses many of the same issues, but from a more explicitly theological point of view. In fact, Creatures is a collection of mostly previously published essays, expanding on and refining ideas first developed in Linzey’s other books, especially Read more

  • The missing element in the US climate change debate

    Ethics, says Donald Brown, a professor of environmental ethics at Penn State, guest posting at Climate Progress. He offers the recent debate in Scotland as an instructive contrast. Good introductions to the ethics of climate change are James Garvey’s (aptly titled) The Ethics of Climate Change, Michael Northcott’s A Moral Climate (written from a theological Read more

  • What’s actually in the bill

    Open Congress has put together a rebuttal of the most common myths (or lies, depending on how charitable you’re feeling) about HR 3200–the House version of health care reform–with links to the relevant provisions of the bill. Read more

  • What’s a health care exchange?

    This is a helpful article. Read more

  • The trouble with “humanitarian advocacy”

    Wow, this is a pretty damning post on the Save Darfur Coalition by Conor Foley, an international human rights worker and author of The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War: for the last five years the Save Darfur coalition has been pumping out a message about an ongoing genocide which is essentially untrue. Read more

  • Against threat inflation

    Stephen Walt and Matthew Yglesias both have smart posts on looking at climate change through a national security lens. Possibly one of the worst outcomes of our failure to address climate change (and other attendant issues like peak oil) would be to lock ourselves into a zero-sum, conflict-based position with the rest of the world. Read more

  • Genius physicist for socialized medicine

    Just sayin’. Read more

  • Health care info you can use

    Given the ratio of noise to light in the current health care debate (“death panels”!), it’s become rare to see a sober look at what’s actually being proposed. Lynn offers some helpful links on making sense of the various health-care reform plans currently under consideration. The FCNL’s side-by-side comparison of the plans is particularly good, Read more