A Thinking Reed

  • Why I won’t vote third party

    Looks like Ron Paul, whom some of his supporters hoped would make a third-party run for president, is urging people who are sick of war, assaults on civil liberties, and, er, the Fed to vote for a third party–any third party! I appreciate the arguments that the two major parties and their candidates are either…

  • On the radio: Greenwald and Yglesias

    Very interesting discussion between Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and uber-blogger Matt Yglesias on the press’s coverage of the campaign. But one of the most important points comes out toward the end where Greenwald and Yglesias both agree that the Obama campaign has, disappointingly, shifted gears since the primary, where Obama seemed to welcome a debate with…

  • Tragedy of the commons

    I picked up this little primer on climate policy at the library and it offers a very lucid, and surprisingly substantial given its length, introduction to the various tools for responding to climate change (carbon tax, cap-and-trade, renewable energy investment, etc.), their pros and cons, and which players support or oppose which policies. He convinced…

  • Where the wild things are

    I don’t know what I think of the idea, but this is the most interesting thing I’ve read in a while. (In other words, it’s not about the election.) “Re-wilding,” in the words of one of the scientists interviewed, is the “super-colliding superconducting experiment of ecology.”

  • Yes we can

    Defend the Constitution, that is. I’m with John (and Ezra Klein): more please.

  • Food for the faithful

    Bls points us to an article from the Post on how religious believers are reflecting their faith in their food choices. I think the idea of having a church garden that supplies all the food for a seasonal picnic is fantastic. Not least because it resulted in an all-veggie potluck, about the opposite of most…

  • The Groaning of Creation 2: The Only Way?

    Before moving on, it’s worth spending a post on what Southgate calls the “only way” or the “best way” argument, which is, in his view, “the starting point for any evolutionary theodicy that does not allow itself to be lured down the blind alleys–such as a spurious appeal to fallenness–that I explored in Chapter 2”…

  • The Groaning of Creation 1: Intro

    I’ve been reading a very cool book by Christopher Southgate called The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. This short book hits on several topics that I’ve discussed here: the relation between evolutionary and theological accounts of nature, the understanding of sin and redemption in the context of an evolutionary universe,…

  • “Existence is a vulgar absurdity”

    Your daily dose of sports-themed existentialism, from The Onion.

  • Paging “values voters”

    John offers a timely reminder of the importance of torture as a moral issue and the need for religious voters in particular to hold politicians’ feet to the fire here. National Religious Campaign Against Torture