A Thinking Reed

  • Farm bill folly

    I caught part of this Bill Moyers interview with Bread for the World‘s president Rev. David Beckman. Rev. Beckman talked a lot about the farm bill currently wending its way through Congress and how its distorted system of subsidies rewards big landowners and hurts poor people, both here and abroad. Worth watching if you’re interested.…

  • Meat in a vat

    It’s funny, from the standpoint of animal suffering I ought to be all for this, but something about it still gives me the heebie jeebies. I’ll have to think a bit more about why that is.

  • Needed: alternatives to animal testing

    The Post reports that a panel set up by the federal government to explore alternatives to animal testing has been woefully slow in approving alternative methods, even though the EU has approved something like 34 of them. Animal advocates, scientists, and even industry are impatient with the lack of progress, which they attribute, in part,…

  • Twin Peaks is awesome

    This wasn’t on my radar at all when it first aired (I guess my being 15 at the time may have had something to do with it), but we’ve been watching season 1 on DVD and it’s amazing. The way Lynch effortlessly crosses the boundaries between supernatural thriller, soap operatic melodrama, murder mystery, and even…

  • Inerrancy

    I liked this post from Elizaphanian.

  • Ronald McDonald: agent of the homosexual agenda

    The most surprising thing to me about this story was that there even is a gay and lesbian Chamber of Commerce. Who knew? p.s. It’s never clear to me what the causal mechanism is supposed to be by which all those monogamous (and petite bourgeoisie in this case!) gays destroy the “traditional family” (est. circa…

  • The holiness people

    Jeremy has a fascinating post (a re-post from his first blog, actually) about growing up in the Pentecostal Holiness Church and eventually converting to Lutheranism. As someone who was raised in a household that could best be described as moderately observant sometimes-Presbyterian, the kind of all-encompassing religious subculture that Jeremy describes is pretty hard for…

  • Poetry and liturgy

    I’m with Christopher on this.

  • Paleos, Obama, Right, and Left

    Surprisingly, two debates have largely occupied the newly live American Conservative blog: one about what exactly constitutes “paleoconservatism” and one about whether conservatives should support Barack Obama for president. The two debates are intertwined in that several of the TAC writers seem uncertain whether paleos should continue to think of themselves as a dissident minority…

  • What’s in your booze?

    The vegan booze list. I’m kicking back with a vegan-friendly Miller High Life (aka the Champagne of Beers, suckas!) as we speak.