A Thinking Reed

  • The differences between liberals and libertarians

    An interesting piece here, part of a symposium on common ground between liberals and libertarians and the prospects for political cooperation. However, I increasingly think that the liberal reliance (at least among intellectual types) on John Rawls’ philosophical framework is a mistake. I’ve moved in a more egalitarian-liberal direction myself, but I’m starting to think…

  • Bacevich book club

    TPM Cafe is hosting a “book club” on Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power, wherein various smarty-pants foreign policy thinkers weigh in on the book and Bacevich gets an opportunity to respond. Read it here. I blogged about Bacevich’s book here.

  • Friday metal – living in the ’90s edition

    Metal didn’t exactly thrive during the era of grunge, but the underground kept the faith, and some groups, like NYC’s Prong, enjoyed a measure of popular success by incorporating “alternative” and industrial elements into their sound. “Whose Fist Is This Anyway?”

  • Food reform and climate change action

    Two sides of the same coin, argues Tom Laskawy. See also this two–part checklist of specific actions the USDA could take to reform the food system.

  • Bird brains

    More and more evidence that they’re smarter than we’ve given them credit for. What this article suggests is that we’re so used to thinking of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution that we’ve misled ourselves into thinking that qualities like intelligence must be strictly correlated with how much the animals resemble us anatomically. But more…

  • Atheism, theism, and live options

    A good post on theism/atheism (follow the links for more discussion). I like seeing William James’s “The Will to Believe” name-checked, as it was pretty formative in my own thinking about this stuff.

  • More on God and temporality

    In his Gifford Lectures, published as The Faith of a Physicist, John Polkinghorne considers the relation of God to time, calling it one of the “most puzzling, and most pressing, of general questions about God” (p. 59): It is clear that there must be an eternal pole to the divine nature. His steadfast love cannot…

  • God, time, and finitude

    Marvin asks: “Is God subject to time or not?” I’m not sure if this is right, but I take this as a stand-in for the cluster of issues grouped around the question of whether God can be affected by finite, temporal being, or whether we should continue to think of God–with the classic tradition–in terms…

  • Of liberals, libertarians, and utilitarians

    I don’t recall exactly how I came across it, but this is interesting: from a 1975 issue of the New York Review of Books, Peter Singer reviews philosopher Robert Nozick’s libertarian classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Surprisingly, Singer suggests that many of Nozick’s criticisms of John Rawls’ redistributionist liberalism hit their mark. In fact, Singer…

  • Does the environment need God?

    A lifelong atheist learns to jettison his simplistic views of religion (God as “an old guy sitting in a chair”) when he realizes that something very much like a religious zeal will be required to address the climate crisis. The worry I have here is of Christians being enlisted into providing a religious imprimatur on…