A Thinking Reed

  • Socialism and stuff

    Great piece by Hendrik Hertzberg on the “socialism” nonsense: The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would…

  • (Re)birth of the Reformation?

    This is a very interesting article about the efforts of the Evangelical (that is, Lutheran) Church in Germany to reestablish itself in the east, after years of suppression under Communism. One idea being floated is to turn Wittenberg into a kind of “Protestant Rome” and to amp up the public face of Protestantism with more…

  • Debitage

    Via Lynn, I discovered a previously unknown (to me) blog, Debitage, that has a lot of interesting posts on the environment, philosophy, politics, religion, and other topics. Of particular interest to me, there are several good posts on animal rights, for instance: here and here.

  • Violence and hermeneutics

    Marvin reflects on the place of texts in the Bible that seem to implicate God in violence, with a little help from St. Augustine. I’m not sure God insists that we be pacifists; I’m even less sure that God is a pacifist (as Marvin acknowledges and Miroslav Volf argues). But there are still passages in…

  • Voting as Catholics (and other Christians)

    At Commonweal, William J. Gould advocates a plurality of approaches to voting among Catholics: The kind of pluralism I have in mind would range from radical perspectives such as that of the eminent Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre—who contends that the two major parties are so defective that not voting is actually preferable to voting—to support…

  • The blood of the martyrs

    The Nation (of all places) has a troubling article on the persecution of Christians in India, something Pope Benedict has drawn attention to recently (along with the plight of Christians in Iraq).

  • Atheist self-parody watch

    I know it’s an overused trope to say that “fundamentalist” atheists like Richard Dawkins are mirror images of the fundamentalist Christians they despise, but when Dawkins starts crusading against Harry Potter books it’s pretty hard to resist.

  • How I (sort of) joined the vast left-wing conspiracy: confessions of a pessimistic liberal

    In the wake of talk of a new conservative-libertarian fusionism on the right, these remarks from political theorist Jacob T. Levy make for interesting reading. I used to consider myself a libertarian, and even voted Republican in the late 90s and early oughts, but was soon driven away from the GOP for reasons to familiar…

  • Jeffersonia

    I don’t know how many ATR readers live in the DC area, but the Library of Congress currently has a very cool exhibit of Revolutionary-era documents, “Creating the United States,” which includes Jefferson’s “rough draft” of the Declaration of Independence, complete with handwritten edits from Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and members of the Continental Congress.…

  • Unhappy conservatives

    The American Conservative asked an eclectic group of thinkers on the Right (broadly speaking) to offer their endorsements for the election. Interestingly, by my count there are four Obama voters, two McCain voters, and twelve people who say they will either vote third party, write someone in, or not vote at all. This isn’t too…