A Thinking Reed

  • Into that good night (for now)

    Hard as it is for me to believe, I’ve been blogging for over five years straight, since I started my first blogspot blog back in July 2004. (All the archives from that have since been imported over here.) That’s three cities, two jobs, a handful of churches, various political mutations, and heaven knows how many…

  • Of boycotts

    I’m sort of puzzled that the Whole Foods boycott (both the boycott itself and the controversy about the boycott) has gotten as much mileage as it has. I’m not the boycotting type myself, but the response still seems a bit disproportionate to me. Suppose WF as a company was dedicating resources to opposing health care…

  • Placher on atonement, one last time

    The Christian Century recently published a posthumous article by the late Presbyterian theologian William Placher: “How Does Jesus Save?” In it, Placher wrestles, as he had in the past (including in his wonderful book Jesus the Savior), with various theories of the atonement and their shortcomings. He sees “liberals” and “conservatives” increasingly at loggerheads over…

  • Farmers vs. “agri-intellectuals”

    A while back, the American–the magazine of the American Enterprise Institute–published an article by farmer Blake Hurst called “The Omnivore’s Delusion,” taking to task “agri-intellectuals” like Michael Pollan who have criticized industrial farming. Here Tom Philpott points out some of the holes and omissions in Hurst’s argument. Philpott acknowledges that the sustainable food movement hasn’t…

  • 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…

  • Does exercise make you thinner?

    Maybe not. One interesting suggestion in the article is that we evolved in such a way that constant, low-impact activitiy throughout the day may be more suitable for us than the intense, relatively brief bursts of activity in a typical bout of “working out.”

  • I’ve been boycotting Whole Foods for years

    But mostly because of the prices and intolerable smugness. Link via JL Wall at Upturned Earth.

  • Friday Metal: Napalm Death, “Time Waits for No Slave”

    The grand-daddies of grindcore:

  • Ah, the ivory tower…

    One of the many puzzling things about this post from Brian Leiter on veganism is that it seems to take place in a world unrecognizable as our own. To wit: Let’s suppose, plausibly enough, that sentience (the ability to experience pleasure and pain) is a morally relevant characteristic. Since animals are sentient, it seems there…

  • 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.