A Thinking Reed

  • Conservatism 2.0

    Readers should check out Culture11, a new site that has been touted as a conservative version of Slate (which some wags have claimed is redundant), and which is staffed by some of the bright, young lights of eclecticly heterodox conservatism. Looks promising even if, like me, you fear we’re suffering from a politico-cultural commentary glut.

  • Of dogs and asses

    Today at the library I picked up what looks like a great new book: Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition, by Laura Hobgood-Oster. It’s a study of the role animals have played in Christian stories, art, iconography, and piety throughout the ages, with an eye toward recovering a more positive view of…

  • The end of (cheap) meat

    I’m agnostic, because under-informed, about whether “free-range” meat would result in higher meat prices than the factory farmed variety once you’ve taken into account all the hidden costs. But Paul Roberts, author of The End of Oil and The End of Food, contends that, even under the best circumstances, making the (necessary) switch to free-range…

  • Libertarian Leninism

    Do libertarians really hate environmentalism so much that they’ll soft-pedal Chinese authoritarianism just to stick a thumb in the eye of the Green Menace for the sake of the shiny capitalist utopia? (The idea seems to be that eventually, in the far-flung future, everyone will be rich, so we shouldn’t worry too much about the…

  • Friday metal – Gojira, “To Sirius”

    There won’t be much posting this weekend as I’m taking the train up to New York to visit some friends, but I’ll leave you with a little Friday metal (which I’ve really been slacking on around here). Now, to me, the words “French heavy metal” sound about as exciting as “French beer,” but, turns out,…

  • “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.…