A Thinking Reed

  • One world?

    I recently read Peter Singer’s One World: The Ethics of Globalization, which was originally delivered as a series of lectures in 2000. I had a longish post in the hopper about national loyalties and obligations to strangers, but it didn’t really go anywhere so I junked it. Suffice it to say, I don’t always agree…

  • Just war at the JLE

    Always a timely topic (unfortunately): the Journal of Lutheran Ethics has a review symposium of Gary Simpson’s War, Peace & God: Rethinking the Just War Tradition.

  • “A wholly American and appropriate indulgence”

    “An Ode to Bourbon” ‘Nuff said.

  • Friday metal – Dio, “Rainbow in the Dark”

    Is Ronnie James Dio the worst dresser in metal? Well, he’d have some pretty stiff competition (see, e.g., the entire sub-genre of “viking metal”), but I think he’d be a strong contender. Doesn’t stop him from rocking, though. (If anything, it might help.)

  • Cooking with ATR

    Jennifer’s post here makes me think that this sort of thing might actually be interesting or useful to some folks. One of the most common questions I get as a vegetarian is “What do you eat?” I chalk this up to a couple of things. One is that, for many people, the standard American meal,…

  • Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, RIP

    The co-founder and longtime editor of First Things, and noted conservative polemicist, has passed away at age seventy-two. I’ve drifted away from reading FT over the last few years, partly because it seems to me to have embraced a more down-the-line conservative ideology than before (whether that says more about them or me is debatable).…

  • Intolerable

    I was doing some online research on website development for a project I’m working on and came across this statement: It’s an established fact that Internet users today are increasingly impatient and intolerable. Indeed!

  • Bittman on our meat-guzzling way of life

    Readers of the previous post might be interested in this talk from Mark Bittman: “What’s wrong with what we eat.” His story will be familiar to people who follow these issues, but it’s a good primer. Bittman makes a big deal out of the meat issue (rightly, IMO) and the impact that our levels of…

  • The anti-foodies’ foodie

    Salon has an informative review of Mark Bittman’s new manifesto/cook book Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating. Bittman is the author of several cookbooks and writes for the NYT, including the “Minimalist” column about cooking. The reviewer, Laura Miller, calls Bittman the “anti-foodies’ foodie” and describes his book as an application of Michael Pollan’s…

  • Make with the flying cars already!

    Mean Automakers Dash Nation’s Hope For Flying Cars