A Thinking Reed

  • Friday metal – As I Lay Dying, “Through Struggle”

  • Animal liberation?

    Reason‘s Ron Bailey has an interesting article about the moral implications of scientifically “uplifting” animals – i.e. making them more intelligent – through genetic manipulation: Some technoprogressive thinkers such as editor-in-chief of Betterhumans.com George Dvorsky argue that we have a moral obligation to uplift other species to sapiency. “It would be negligent of us to…

  • Sex and the modern Lutheran

    You may not have noticed that the ELCA has released a draft of a new social statement on sexuality, which you can read here. The Journal of Lutheran Ethics has several responses here. After a period of comment and feedback, the social statement will be taken up for official endorsement at the 2009 churchwide assembly.…

  • AmCon on the blogwagon

    The American Conservative, which snatched up paleocon uber-blogger Daniel Larison a while back, now has a group blog featuring several of its regular writers. It’s good to have a more regular outlet for anti-war conservatism in the blogosphere.

  • True patriotism

    I’m reading Walter Wink’s book The Powers that Be, an abridgement of sorts of his “powers” trilogy, and came across this quote, which seems somewhat appropriate in the wake of the Obama/Jeremiah Wright flap, but also of more general application: I love my country passionately; that is why I want to see it do right.…

  • The vegetarian’s complaint

    I enjoyed this rather scathing (though also appreciative) review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma from last year (via Matt Halteman). The author, noted literary gadfly B. R. Myers, is right, I think, that Pollan subordinates moral concerns to aesthetic ones at crucial points in his argument. I also agree that that Pollan gives short shrift to…

  • The Keystone State and the nomination

    It may just be a quirk of this drawn-out primary season, but as a native of the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I’m happy to see some attention finally being paid to the state’s political complexity. Here’s a NY Times piece about Barack Obama trying to learn to speak Pennsylvanian by bringing his celestial rhetoric down…

  • The Pollan diet

    MSN has a Q&A with Michael Pollan on his In Defense of Food and its mantra: eat food, not to much, mostly plants.

  • Sunday metal – In Flames, “The Mirror’s Truth”

    The new In Flames album, A Sense of Purpose, comes out this Tuesday! Here’s the first single/video:

  • An end to sacrifices

    I just finished reading James Alison’s Undergoing God, and the more I read of him the more I like him and think he’s onto something important. Alison, to recap, is a student of anthropologist/literary theorist Rene Girard, who has proposed a rather daring new interpretation of Jesus’ death on the cross. For Girard human selves…