A Thinking Reed

  • 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…

  • Animals and Good Samaritans

    This is in interesting article about the dilemmas that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association faces concerning whether and when to help marine animals in distress. Dilemmas like this are sometimes used as a reductio ad absurdum of animal rights. For instance, people will sometimes ask, if we have an obligation not to wantonly kill…

  • Left-wing American exceptionalism

    Christopher makes an important point. To anyone who’s tempted to believe that the Bush years were a complete departure from an otherwise unbroken American tradition of “moral leadership” I’d recommend–for starters–getting acquainted with Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power, which I blogged about here. Then we can move on to the collected works of Reinhold…

  • Recent musical discovery — Wovenhand

    From the department of man does not live by heavy metal alone: Wovenhand (or “Woven Hand” as I sometimes see it written) started off as a side project for David Eugene Edwards, the front man for the alt-countryish group 16 Horsepower. But they broke up and Wovenhand now seems to be his full-time project. Anyhoo,…