A Thinking Reed

  • “Sin boldly! Go vote!”

    Here’s an article from 2004 that gives a good Lutheran perspective on politics and voting in response to an article from evangelical historian Mark Noll about not voting. I don’t agree with it in all the particulars, and Christian pacifists will likely not be convinced, but I thought it was a solid statement of a…

  • Christians and voting, revisited

    This post from “Inhabitatio Dei” reminds me that I engaged in a fair amount of hand-wringing on this blog* about voting in 2004. That was the year that we had various Christian luminaries–Alasdair McIntyre and Paul Griffiths come to mind–openly advocating not voting. I ultimately ended up voting third-party, finding both Bush and Kerry unacceptable…

  • 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.…