A Thinking Reed

  • “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).

  • Our future: skyscraper farms?

    Paul Roberts (author of The End of Oil, The End of Food–you get the idea) writes that creating a sustainable food system will require more than “buy local” or “buy organic.” In some cases, he says, these can be misleading and oversimplifying labels for a much more complex reality. For instance, how food is produced…

  • Asking the right question

    In comments to my previous post, John corrected my understanding of Dennett’s views. It’s not, apparently, that Dennett denies that theism is logically compatible with evolution, it’s just that theism doesn’t explain or add anything to our understanding of evolution. But I’m not sure this is really a bad thing. I’m perfectly content to assume…

  • Evolution, creation, and human uniqueness

    There’s an account making the rounds of a recent debate between atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett and Christian theist Alvin Plantinga. One of the issues that comes up is the compatibility between Christianity (or theism more generally) and evolution, a perennial topic of interest here at ATR. Dennett seems to see them as incompatible. Plantinga not…

  • A two-phase Iraq withdrawal

    That’s what it looks like anyway, based on Obama’s speech and the analysis I’ve seen. “Combat troops” will withdraw in 2010 with “residual” forces engaged in training and counter-terrorism activities (which, make no mistake, will involve at least some combat). But full withdrawal is supposed to occur by the end of 2011. Not ideal, by…

  • By (almost) any means necessary

    I thought this interview with Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. They’re like Greenpeace on steroids: they do everything short of harming people to stop whalers. In fact, Watson calls Greenpeace the “Avon Ladies” of environmentalism and compares their philosophy of “bearing witness” to standing idly by while someone’s attacked: They have this…