A Thinking Reed

  • Singer on the lives we can save

    Beside his writings on animal liberation and bioethics, Peter Singer is probably best known for his views on the obligations people in the affluent parts of the world have to those living in absolute poverty. His article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” is a classic in applied ethics; in it, Singer argues that those of us…

  • “Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts”

    Joseph Romm on our global economic Ponzi scheme. Sobering stuff.

  • Ward on God’s action in the world

    I’ve been reading side-by-side Arthur Peacocke’s Theology for a Scientific Age and Keith Ward’s Divine Action. While they construct similar positions, they have some important differences. Peacocke, for instance, argues that God acts on the universe in a “top-down” fashion that sets the parameters of what happens in the world, even while at the same…

  • Friday metal — the inimitable Axl

    I was skeptical of Guns ‘n’ Roses’ ballyhooed Chinese Democracy when it (finally) came out, but the album has grown on me considerably. Say what you will about Axl, you can’t deny his ambition to create a big, sprawling, bombastic, self-indulgent, at times over-produced, rock opera. Flawed though it may be, there are some excellent…

  • Faith and economics

    A conservative evangelical questions his uncritical embrace of laissez-faire economics. When you think about it, the marriage between evangelicalism and free market capitalism is downright odd, and, as far as I can tell, largely confined to the U.S. (British evangelicals, for instance, seem quite a bit more left-wing on economics than their American counterparts). I’m…

  • “God is not beyond”

    This meditation by Christian Wiman at the Christian Century is worth your time. Though, Wiman, being a poet, writes in a way that’s somewhat opaque to my flat-footed mind. Still, your mileage may vary.

  • In defense of pleasure

    I liked this article at Slate making what should be an obvious point: whatever health benefits it may be shown to have, it’s OK to drink wine because it tastes good and makes you feel good! The “medicalization” of food and drink, where everything is touted for its (real or imagined) health benefits, has gone…

  • Putting the public back in public goods?

    Michael Lind, who I always find worth reading, argues that Obama’s liberalism is timid, compared not only to FDR and LBJ, but to Eisenhower and Nixon. Why? Because those guys were in office before the neoliberal dogma took hold which demands that even public goods should be provided by the private sector. Instead of this…

  • What could Jesus have been wrong about?

    One Christian anti-evolution argument that I came across recently goes something like this: evolution can’t be true because Jesus believed in a historical Adam and Eve, a historical fall, etc., and this is incompatible with evolution. Clearly this is an argument aimed only at convincing other Christians. What’s interesting here is the implicit view of…

  • Johnny Rotten shills for butter

    Exactly what it sounds like (via Jesse Walker).