A Thinking Reed

  • 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.

  • 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…