A Thinking Reed

  • Rowan Williams on prayer

    I came across this during a Google search: One of the primary tasks of any prayer is ‘How do I let God be God? How do I empty my mind and heart – not so as to confront a kind of void, but so that the personal presence of God can come in?’ If all…

  • Perfect love casts out fear

    From James Alison’s Faith Beyond Resentment: The whole of my previous life had been marked by an absolute refusal to die. The absolute refusal to take on my baptismal commitment. Of course, because I was unable to imagine that my ‘self’, the ‘I’ who will live for ever, is hidden with Christ in God. And…

  • Sanctuary cities

    There was a nice article in today’s Washington Post about a trip to an animal sanctuary in New York state. Sometimes the question is posed to vegetarians whether farm animals wouldn’t die out if we all abandoned meat-eating, since the reason that so many cows, pigs, chickens, and other farm animals exist in the first…

  • Handful o’ links

    Britain’s Labour Party needs to reinvent itself as a new liberal party. Obama vs. McCain on climate and energy policy – not the same. Animals as gentically modified drug machines. Is Google re-wiring our brains? Obama: what kind of liberal?

  • C.S. Lews on democracy and authority

    I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the…

  • More Red Toryism, plus “atheism is bourgeois oppression”

    Russell has a nice post tying together some of the recent threads about “dissident conservatives” and “red tories.” Meanwhile, John Milbank expands a bit on his views in this interview. Pertinent passage: To my mind then, modernity is liberalism, liberalism is capitalism (‘political economy’) and capitalism is atheism and nihilism. Not to see this (or…

  • Why it matters

    I can imagine some Obama supporters saying, in response to this post, that Obama doesn’t really believe those things; he’s just saying what he needs to say to get elected. And that as president he would certainly never go to war with Iran to prevent it from getting nukes. First, we (or at least I)…

  • A yankee’s lament

    I am so not cut out for these DC summers. It’s supposed to be 99 today. In frickin’ June. Seriously.

  • How antiwar is Obama? or Put not your trust in princes

    Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo has recanted his earlier support for Obama in light of the latter’s recent speech to AIPAC where he, among other things, called Iran the greatest threat to world peace and vowed to do whatever it takes to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons. Lots of antiwar people have been drawn to Obama,…

  • What part of “last resort” isn’t clear?

    It’s a sad state of affairs when someone needs to make the case that war should be a last resort, but Doug Bandow does a good job this thankless task. Also, via Dan McCarthy, I see that Bandow has signed on as Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr’s foreign policy advisor, which is surely a point…