A Thinking Reed

  • The virtues and vices of St. Anselm

    Christopher has a terrific post on St. Anselm and atonement theory. As longtime readers might know, I’m definitely in the St. Anselm-as-unfairly-maligned camp. Among other things, his view of atonement is not the same as what is commonly referred to as “penal substitution”: Anselm explicitly denies in Cur Deus Homo that God punishes Jesus in…

  • Michael Jackson, RIP

    Maybe people who are a bit younger only remember Michael Jackson as the weirdo, quasi-hermit he later became. But at the peak of his popularity (I was, I think, in third grade when Thriller came out) he was about the most exciting thing on the planet. Anyway, MJ skeptics, go watch. p.s. Andrew Sullivan has…

  • Metal 101

    A very nice primer from the AV Club.

  • Aid: it works (sometimes)

    Good post by Matthew Yglesias: Ultimately, obviously, the ideal solution would be for Africans to get richer. But the per capita GDP of Africa isn’t going to magically reach American (or even Mexican or even Chinese) levels overnight even if Africa does start seeing strong growth. Meanwhile, people with HIV will die really soon unless…

  • First Things and climate denialism

    John Schwenkler with an excellent post taking down First Thing‘s resident climate change denialist, Thomas Sieger Derr. I’m not sure if I’ve changed or it has, but I used to really enjoy reading FT and was a faithful subscriber for about ten years. It introduced me to a lot of contemporary theology offered at a…

  • “The war over Waxman-Markey”

    Two helpful pieces from Mother Jones: Pass a flawed climate bill now, or wait for a better one? Environmentalists duke it out. The devil’s in the details of the new climate bill.

  • Public plan as second-best option

    Christian social ethicist Gary Dorrien argues that a publc health plan–at least one with teeth–could be an acceptable second-best option, in lieu of a single-payer plan, which he favors. I still don’t have firm views on specifically what kind of heath system reform is needed, but I am convinced that, as Dorrien puts it, “[h]ealth…

  • Creation’s travail

    To hear some anti-green conservatives tell it, you’d think that nature-worship and radical environmentalism were making major inroads into our society. Of course, the opposite is much closer to the truth: the general attitude toward the natural world that underlies most of our daily activities is one that regards nature as little more than a…

  • June metal releases

    Two I’m looking forward to: June 23–Darkest Hour, Eternal Return (DC-based melodic death metal) June 30–Killswitch Engage, self-titled (the kings of Boston metalcore; though there are worries that this album is their attempt to break through to mainstream success, suggesting parallels with a certain self-tilted metal/pop crossover circa 1991…)

  • We’re number 37! USA! USA!

    The World Health Organization ranks the world’s health care systems. EDIT: Note that the ranking is several years out of date. I mistakenly thought it was new data. Post in haste, repent at leisure, I guess…