A Thinking Reed

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

War & Peace

  • Bacevich book club

    TPM Cafe is hosting a “book club” on Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power, wherein various smarty-pants foreign policy thinkers weigh in on the book and Bacevich gets an opportunity to respond. Read it here. I blogged about Bacevich’s book here. Read more

  • McGovern: Don’t escalate in Afghanistan

    An open letter to the President from Mr. “Come Home, America” himself (via A Conservative Blog for Peace). Read more

  • Girard on war and apocalyptic

    Via bls comes this review of a new book by Rene Girard (not yet translated into English, it appears) wherein Girard critiques Von Clausewitz’s On War and discusses the prospects for humanity’s self-annihilation. Girard turns to the Revelation of John, the apocalyptic passages in the Epistles, as well as the “little apocalypse” of Mark 13 Read more

  • MLK was unserious

    I was offline for most of the day yesterday and missed this good post from Matt Yglesias on King and nonviolence (via Marvin). Read more

  • Just war at the JLE

    Always a timely topic (unfortunately): the Journal of Lutheran Ethics has a review symposium of Gary Simpson’s War, Peace & God: Rethinking the Just War Tradition. Read more

  • Tit for tat

    One of the most unfortunate (and oft-observed) aspects of the blogosphere is that, in discussing events that require actual expertise to understand, genuine insight tends to get drowned out by soapbox editorializing. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: whenever there’s a flare-up of hostilities, every blogger and his Read more

  • 2008: The year in book blogging

    I’m not going to provide a best books of the year list, but here’s a sampling of those that got their hooks into me enough to generate some more or less in-depth blogging (needless to say, most of these weren’t published in 2008): Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power “Empire of dysfunction” Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond Read more

  • Empire of dysfunction

    If I could put one recent political book in the hands of conservatives trying to rebuild their movement and liberals irrationally exuberant about all the “change” that’s about to take place, it’d be Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power. Heck, as long as I’m wishing, I’d like to get it in President-elect Obama’s hands too. Read more

  • November/December reading notes

    Also known as the lazy man’s book review, or capsule reflections on books I might not get around to posting on at greater length: Ecology at the Heart of Faith by Denis Edwards and Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology by H. Paul Santmire A Catholic (Edwards) and a Lutheran (Santmire) Read more

  • Remember Iraq?

    Patrick Cockburn reports on the situation there in the wake of the recently concluded “status of forces” agreement that’s supposed to have US troops out by 2011. Read more