A Thinking Reed

  • Charles Wesley gets his due

    It appears that new scholarship is discovering some of the long-forgotten (or even suppressed) differences between Charles Wesley and his more famous brother. One interesting point that comes up in this piece is that C.W. leaned more heavily toward keeping Methodism as a movement within the Church of England. I suppose it doesn’t mark me…

  • Burke v. Madison

    Whether, like Burke, one believes that anarchy is the great threat to liberty and social peace, or, like Madison, that tyranny poses the greatest threat to liberty, goes a long way toward determining if one is a conservative or a liberal. –John McGowan, American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time, p. 105 McGowan here is…

  • Iran: It’s not about you, America

    I fully endorse this meme.

  • The health care “debate”

    I don’t have a strong specific policy preference as far as health care reform goes, but I was out eating with some friends this weekend and was provided, courtesy of the CNN playing on the TV at the restaurant, with a telling example of how the health care debate is being carried on. (Usually I…

  • Problems of omnipotence, omniscience, and temporality

    In his book Pascal’s Fire, Keith Ward writes: …ultimate mind is the actual basis of all possible states. It is the only being that must be actual, if anything at all is possible. It is thus uniquely self-existent, not deriving its existence from any other being. Its nature is necessarily what it is–there are no…

  • Think of the children!

    United Egg Producers, a trade association for the egg industry, has begun churning out “kid-friendly” propaganda aimed at free-range egg producers: Who knew stuff like this was simply intended to keep the poor things dry and warm? Story here (via).

  • Unfair but amusing

    “…when Theodore Roosevelt, to his lasting discredit, referred to Thomas Paine, without having read him, as ‘a filthy little atheist,’ he was slandering someone whose belief in the traditional doctrines of the existence of a Supreme Power and the immortality of the Soul was much more unqualified than the belief of two thinkers who have…

  • Friday metal retro-80’s goth-pop

    Brooklyn’s Blacklist plays an infectious brand of goth-influenced, post-punk pop (more Cure or Sisters of Mercy than Evanescence, thankfully):

  • “Critical Animal” on Pollan

    A couple of posts providing some interesting criticisms of Michael Pollan’s views on meat eating, here and here. Pollan’s obviously doing more than nearly anyone to draw attention to the problems with our system of food production, including factory farming. And yet, he seems to have a soft spot for silly atavistic arguments against vegetarianism.

  • Is theistic evolution incoherent?

    At the First Things blog, Joe Carter has a post challenging the coherence of “theistic evolution.” This view, held by people like Kenneth Miller, accepts the orthodox Darwinist position that the evolution of human beings did not require any special intervention by God (contra both old-school creationists and Intelligent Design proponents). Further, according to an…