A Thinking Reed

  • Dangerous nonsense

    I’d like to register my protest at the now-widespread tendency to refer to the President as “the commander-in-chief” or worse “our commander-in-chief,” full stop. To my ear, the connotations are perilously close to those of the Roman title imperator and it makes the President sound like some kind of warrior-king. As the Constitution makes clear,…

  • Is same-sex marriage a threat to religious freedom?

    In the argument over same-sex marriage, social conservatives have seen a string of defeats. For all intents and purposes, they have lost the argument based on straightforward morality (“gay sex is wrong”) and the argument based on social harm (“it will undermine straight marriage”). But the last-ditch argument that, in the wake of the California…

  • A Christian defense of liberty

    The Christian Century reviews Glenn Tinder’s recent book on liberty. I haven’t read the book, but I’m a big fan of Tinder’s earlier work, The Political Meaning of Christianity, which has been aptly characterized as combining the insights of both Niebuhrs: H. Richard and Reinhold. From the review: What makes Tinder’s discussion so refreshing and…

  • 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)…