A Thinking Reed

  • 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…

  • Dark Knight blogging – post-viewing edition

    I’m happy to say that The Dark Knight met or exceeded most of my expectations and didn’t fall into most of the traps I feared it would. I liked how its version of the character harked back to the noirish 70s Denny O’Neil version, though seen through a gritty, Frank Miller-ish lens. Some (slightly spoilerish)…

  • Kristof on Prop. 2

    The NY Times columnist, an admitted meat-lover, writes in favor of the California ballot measure to outlaw some of the most egregious practices of confinement farming: “My hunch is that in a century or two, our descendants will look back on our factory farms with uncomprehending revulsion.” Via Erik Marcus.

  • Fake out

    Via Marvin and Matt Yglesias, a study showing that vegan “sausages” were able to fool a surprisingly large number of people. I have to say, though I’m a vegetarian and not a vegan, I eat very few ersatz meat products. There’s a kind of paradigm shift that you make when you realize that a meal…

  • Durable community

    An experiment in local energy self-sufficiency in Germany. I’d like to see some discussion of how scalable something like this is, but it sounds promising.

  • Gibbons are people too!

    Well, they’re apes at least.

  • “The love of God in Christ Jesus” – but do we believe it?

    Today in church we heard a passage from Romans that contains one of my favorite couple of verses in the entire Bible (I imagine I’m not alone in this): For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth,…

  • At the risk of becoming a one-note blog…

    I don’t really want to be in the position where I feel like I have to blog about everything that appears in the media on animal rights, especially since the same arguments tend to get repeated over and over again. But since this piece appeared in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section, it might be…

  • Eat PB&J, save the planet

    As a big fan both of peanut butter and jelly and reducing our meat consumption, I really like this.