A Thinking Reed

  • You too can be a right-wing hack!

    This piece at Reason.com is really kind of embarrassingly bad, but it does serve a useful purpose in collecting many of the right-wing anti-environment tropes in one place for easy reference: Point out that environmentalists want to run your life and take away your money (they’re basically communists in other words). Feign(?) misunderstanding of scientific…

  • Greening the Bible?

    Ben Myers at Faith & Theology has a post that may be trying a bit too hard to be contrarian, poking fun at the “Green Bible” recently published by Harper Collins. This version of the NRSV is printed on recycled paper with a cotton/linen cover and features green-lettered passages that deal with themes of the…

  • Call of the wild

    Here’s a good review of what sounds like a fascinating book–philosopher Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf, in which Rowlands tells the story of his relationship with his pet wolf Brenin. Rowlands’s unusual book — part autobiography, part philosophical discourse; harshly cynical yet somehow also inspirational — is above all a meditation on the…

  • Ah, sweet freedom

    I’m not sure precisely what rights the Founders intended to protect with the Second Amendment, but I’m pretty sure they don’t include the right to sell AK-47s to Mexican drug cartels.

  • The Life You Can Save 2

    In part 2 of The Life You Can Save, Singer considers some of the psychological obstacles to giving more, as well as some ways they might be overcome. Chapter 4 reviews some research that provides a measure of insight into our reluctance to give to strangers living in extreme poverty. For instance, people are less…

  • NRCAT statement on the torture memos

    The National Religious Campaign Against Torture is calling for a “commission of inquiry” in light of the Office of Legal Counsel memos released this week by the Obama Justice Department: We must, as a nation, address the fact that high-ranking officials in our government authorized torture and that agents representing our country carried out acts…

  • An essay on atonement and theodicy

    Note: this is a re-worked version of a series of posts I did back in 2004 on the Atonement and the Problem of Evil. There were a lot of broken links among them, and, since I think the material holds up pretty well, I thought it might be worth slightly re-working the series and combining…

  • Links on animals and such

    A profile of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of The Face on Your Plate (via). A short Q&A with Peter Singer on dog shows and PETA. A really interesting interview with Jane Goodall in which she talks about, among other things, her “mystical experiences” in the jungle.

  • Friday metal – Kylesa-fest

    I’ve really been digging the new album Static Tensions by Georgia natives Kylesa. The band is an odd amalgam of doom metal, hardcore, and psychedelic rock. And they have two drummers! Here are a couple of clips from their previous album, Time Will Fuse Its Worth: Listen to more here.

  • The Life You Can Save 1

    I finally got my hands on a copy of Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save: Acting Now To End World Poverty, courtesy of the DC city library, and have been working my way through it. Like most of what Singer writes, it’s extremely clear and accessible, filled with facts as much as philosophical arguments.…