A Thinking Reed

  • The Life You Can Save 4

    While chapter 6 of The Life You Can Save was concerned with identifying individual programs that make a real difference in the lives of those they aim to help, chapter 7 looks at criticisms of aid at what we might call the “macro” level. One prominent critic of international aid is William Easterly, author of…

  • “it’s hard, if not impossible, to be a meat-eating environmentalist”

    Via John Schwenkler, Rod Dreher interviews James McWilliams, who Dreher calls a “contrarian agrarian.” He is a fierce critic of our system of industrial agriculture, but he also slaughters some sacred cows (pardon the expression) of the organic food and locavore movements. He has some kind words for GMOs and particularly questions the sustainability of…

  • The ecological promise of an orthodox theology

    I was flipping through H. Paul Santmire’s excellent book Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology, and discovered that he takes Matthew Fox’s (no, not that one) “creation spirituality” to task on many of the same grounds that I criticized J. Philip Newell. Like Newell, Fox embraces a form of nature mysticism,…

  • The use and abuse of Celtic Christianity

    Last night–somewhat against my better judgment–I went to hear a talk given by “Celtic Christianity” guru J. Philip Newell at a “faith forum” sponsored by a group of Capitol Hill churches, including ours. Though I didn’t know too much about Newell going in, my fears that it would be fuzzy feel-good New Ageism were, alas,…

  • The Life You Can Save 3

    In part 3 of The Life You Can Save, Singer tries to answer the question whether we each really can save a life (or several) by donating more to overseas aid. Specifically, how much does it take to save a life, and is aid actually effective in improving the lives of the world’s poorest people?…

  • 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…