A Thinking Reed

  • Who’s got the messiah complex now?

    Good analysis from Chris (of Lutheran Zephyr) on McCain and Obama’s answers to Rick Warren’s “Does evil exist?” question at the Saddleback Church forum. Obama’s response–noting that only God can ultimately defeat evil and that the potential for evil lurks in our own hearts and in our best intentions–was very Niebuhrian.

  • Things I miss about being a (fellow traveling) Anglo-Catholic

    Marian feast days! We do have a small icon of the BVM and Christ child in the side chapel at our current (Lutheran) church, and our recent Vicar had a closet devotion to her, I suspect. (She agreed when I once mentioned my fondness for the doctrine of the Assumption.) But that’s about as far…

  • Consumerism and social justice

    Gaius makes a fair point: cries against “consumerism” can ring hollow when there are people who are genuniely struggling, even in the land of overstuffed plenty. But this doesn’t solve the problem, that, given resource and environmental constraints, an economy devoted to ever-expanding consumption is unsustainable. And “we the people” bear some responsibility for it.…

  • Consumerism, simplicity, and sin

    If Andrew Bacevich is right that our consumptive habits are the cause, not only of resource depletion and environmental degradation, but of our far-flung military adventurism, then the unpleasant conclusion seems to be that we need to start consuming less. Here’s an article (via Book Forum) about, among other things, a professor in Western Pennsylvania…

  • Bacevich on Moyers

    Via Andrew Sullivan, here’s a great interview on Bill Moyers’ Journal with Andrew Bacevich on our foreign policy and what is, in his view, its underlying cause: our demand for an undending, fossil-fuel-dependent supply of consumer goods and our inability to practice self-restraint. Bacevich’s new book, The Limits of Power, looks like a worthy sequel…

  • Back

    Regular blogging (or as close as I come to regular blogging) to resume shortly.

  • Out of office

    The Wife and I are taking what I like to think of as a well-deserved vacation in the form of a week’s trip to Glacier National Park. Blogging will be nonexistent until at least the 17th. Enjoy what remains of the summer, folks.

  • Hypocrisy

    George Monbiot: Sure, we are hypocrites. Every one of us, almost by definition. Hypocrisy is the gap between your aspirations and your actions. Greens have high aspirations – they want to live more ethically – and they will always fall short. But the alternative to hypocrisy isn’t moral purity (no one manages that), but cynicism.…

  • Was this trip really necessary?

    In a comment to the previous post, Jeremy said: And if [the new creation] is “a brand new order of a completely different kind” then why didn’t God create it that way in the first place. If I recall, Keith Ward said that the universe as it exists may be the only kind in which…

  • I Am Legend, human extinction, and theodicy

    We watched this the other night and I liked it quite a bit more than I expected. I think using CGI zombies was a mistake, but other than that it was a taut sci-fi/horror thriller with some interesting themes (the fate of humanity, providence, the nature of heroism, etc.). Will Smith nicely toned down his…