A Thinking Reed

  • Schwenkler vs. Larison on trade

    There’s a spirited and high-quality debate about free trade between John Schwenkler and Daniel Larison at Larison’s site here. I’ll admit that I’ve swung more into the protectionist camp in recent years, or at least I think the benefits of free trade have been greatly overblown. But old-time protectionism that benefits certain well-connected interests at…

  • Carrie vs. the hunters

    I figure that any overlap, however tenuous, between heavy metal and animal rights falls under this blog’s purview, so I will link to this story about former American Idol-turned-country superstar Carrie Underwood. Carrie’s latest single is a remake of the immortal Mötley Crüe ballad “Home Sweet Home” and is being used as the soundtrack for…

  • Douthat to the Times

    “Sam’s Club” Republican Ross Douthat has been tapped to replace evil neocon genius Bill Kristol on the New York Times op-ed page. I enjoy Douthat’s writing, which is generally thoughtful, and he has an interesting perspective as a conservative who seems genuinely concerned with addressing economic insecurity and inequality. Predictably, he’s a virtual heretic among…

  • The man came around

    Here’s a great retrospective of the final five Johnny Cash albums (well, technically the last one was released posthumously), which were released on Rick Rubin’s American Recordings label. A piece on Cash’s earlier work is promised in weeks to come. (Fair warning: contains bad language.) I remember being in college and listening to “The Wanderer”…

  • What (if anything) is wrong with ESCR?

    Even if you don’t think (as I don’t) that a just-fertilized embryo is a human person with full moral standing, it’s not unreasonable to feel a bit queasy about embryonic stem cell research. I think philosopher Bonnie Steinbock, in several articles and books, provides one helpful way of thinking about this. Even if embryos don’t…

  • 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…