A Thinking Reed

  • Lutherans to repeat Anglican follies?

    Oh great. Is the Lutheran World Federation about to go the way of the Anglican Communion? In my experience, Lutherans are less keen on centralized ecclesiology than (some) Anglicans, so maybe we can avoid an analogous meltdown and keep cooperating, like with the good work of Lutheran World Relief, under the loose confederation that seems…

  • The pessimist’s case for Obama

    I somehow missed it when it was first posted, but this lengthy post by Daniel Koffler at AotP is the best response I’ve seen to the civil libertarian/anti-war case against Obama, in part because it concedes many of the left/libertarian/paleo critiques (on FISA, the war, etc.). Obama is never going to be as anti-interventionist as…

  • What’s a social capitalist anyway?

    The limits of Internet political quizzes aside, my economic philosophy is a bricolage of bits from Wilhelm Roepke’s “humane economy,” E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful,” stray pieces of Catholic social thought, some Bill McKibben, and a dash of Hayek. Market economies are the best mechanism we have for producing and distributing goods, but that they…

  • Bean vs. teat

    What’s more environmentally friendly – soy milk or cow’s milk? Looks like soy by a nose. Personally, I’m a big cheese-eater, but I do like to put soy milk on my cereal and in the occasional espresso drink. The article makes the interesting point that the limited market for soy milk is a mark against…

  • Strawman watch

    Julian Sanchez provides a devastating take-down of this astonishingly bad article by Wesley Smith. Amazingly, Smith doesn’t even mention the conditions under which animals are raised in factory farms, which is surely one of the most salient motivating factors for vegetarians and vegans. Instead, he rests his argument, as Sanchez notes, almost entriely on a…

  • Politics in 4D

    Here’s an interesting multi-axis political quiz that scores you on social attitudes, economic beliefs, civil liberties, and war and peace. Mine seemed pretty accurate: I was a socially moderate/”social capitalist”/libertarian-pacifist.

  • Ultimate ATR link

    Heavy metal monk. Awesome. (via my college pal Chris.)

  • Rights of apes, rights of men

    Are animal rights activists being persecuted in Austria?

  • “Creeping militarization”

    Tom Engelhardt offers some evidence.

  • Left and Right: the prospects for liberty*

    John is wondering how committed “the Left” is to civil liberties given that Barack Obama is largely getting a free pass on his deviations, while Bob Barr, a genuinely pro-civil liberties candidate, is being ignored. Meanwhile, in reviewing Bill Kauffman’s latest, W. James Antle III seriously questions whether “there is still such a thing as…