A Thinking Reed

  • Mainline on the sidelines

    Political theorist/theologian Charles Mathewes reviews a book on the public witness of the mainline and its decline. He makes what seems to me a crucial point: the ineffectiveness of much of the mainline is in large part a function of the fact that the denominational bureaucracies often don’t represent the people in the pews. And…

  • Wishy-washy theological liberals

    It’s a commonplace that even those who purport to take the entire Bible “literally” end up emphasizing certain passages and reinterpreting others. Take, for instance, this story of a charismatic church in Loudon County, VA that appears to be taking on cult-like features centering around the iron-fisted leadership of its head pastor. Among other things,…

  • Department of odd arguments

    Emmylou Harris fans vs. Allison Krauss fans. I may be simple, but I would’ve thought the fan base for these two artists would have a pretty substantial overlap; it certainly wouldn’t have occurred to me that their differences would generate such heated debate! I’m a fan of both these ladies and have seen them both…

  • Beyond Prejudice 4

    In the previous posts we saw Pluhar make a two-step argument for moral rights. First, she argued that any agent, reflecting on the nature of her own agency, must advocate for herself basic rights to freedom and well-being, simply because she is a purposive agent. Second, Pluhar contends that the principles of consistency and universalizability…

  • Ecopsychology?

    I don’t know that I’d buy all the theoretical trappings, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there’s something to this. As a kid growing up in a small, largely rural town, I spent a lot of time riding my bike, wandering around in the woods, and spending a lot of more-or-less unsupervised time…

  • Thrifty

    Took a trip this afternoon to a big Salvation Army thrift store just outside of DC in Maryland. These were my finds: –Peter Singer, ed., In Defense of Animals –Keith Akers, A Vegetarian Sourcebook: The Nutrition, Ecology, and Ethics of a Natural Foods Diet –J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion –Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives,…

  • The virtues as a response to climate change

    Thanks to Derek for passing along this terrific piece on “Changing the Climate: Spiritual steps for Sustainable Living” by a Benedictine monk, Abbot Christopher Jamison. Abbot Jamison thinks that the classical virtues provide an important part of the response to global warming and other aspects of our changing environmental situation. This reminds me of a…

  • Less Friedman, more Schumacher

    Patrick Deneen calls for an economic re-thinking on the Right. It remains to be seen, I think, whether the Right or the Left will be the first to seriously re-examine the assumptions underlying an unlimited growth/unlimited consumption economy. The Left has a long history of attending to social justice issues and questions of equality, but,…

  • Beyond Prejudice 3

    If, following Pluhar, we agree that any reflective agent has reason to affirm that she has basic rights to freedom and well-being, why should that agent extend those rights to others? In other words, must the reflective agent also be a moral agent? To start, let’s review why Pluhar (following Gerwith) thinks that any reflective…

  • Jan Lievens – “Forgotten Dutch Master”

    I recently saw this exhibit at the National Gallery. Lievens was a contemporary and friend of Rembrandt who became somewhat overshadowed, partly because some of his work was later mis-attributed to Rembrandt. The exhibit is an attempt to give him his proper due. I thought that his “Raising of Lazarus” was particularly striking. (This image…