A Thinking Reed

  • Wanted: Augustinian liberals

    Jason Byassee reviews two promising-sounding books that try to reappropriate Augustine for a political theology that steers between Niebuhrian realism and Hauerwasian sectarianism. Sounds good to me.

  • Last word

    For what it’s worth (not much at this point, presumably), my top three reasons for supporting Obama: —A saner foreign policy. Hard core peaceniks and non-interventionists (among whom I count myself) will, I suspect, find much to dislike about an Obama foreign policy, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it will be far…

  • One party (non-)state

    All the hoopla of the presidential contest aside, voting as a DC resident is a pretty unexciting prospect. First off, there’s no doubt that DC’s 3 electoral votes will go to Obama. Democrats enjoy third world dictator-levels of support in the District, and last I checked Obama was polling above 80% here. You could vote…

  • Friday metal – All Hallow’s Eve edition

    Well, there was really no choice here:

  • The reason for the season

    An important discussion.

  • 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…