A Thinking Reed

  • World’s largest food service provider goes cage-free

    Sounds like good news to me.

  • Evil empire?

    P.J. O’Rourke reviews a new book on Starbucks that offers some counterintuitive facts: Clark is frank about his bias: “Starbucks diminishes the world’s diversity every time it builds a new cafe, and I can’t help but feel troubled by this.” But when Clark looks at whether the towering Mount St. Helens that is Starbucks, with…

  • Two blogs are better than one

    First Things seems to have added a new “group blog” to its site. If you ask how this differs from “On the Square” I’d say – good question! From what I can tell, the new blog is, well, bloggier (i.e. the entries are shorter and more informal) while the old blog seems geared more toward…

  • Of staph infections and disappearing honeybees

    What does it mean to say that our industrial food system is “unsustainable”? Michael Pollan suggests an answer: when you insist on treating animals like machines as a necessary requirement of your food system and they persist in behaving like organisms. Call it biological blowback.

  • Illiberal atheists?

    Damon Linker – who attacked the Religious Right in his book Theocons – accuses the “new atheists” of promoting an illiberal version of atheism that seeks to stamp out religious belief, rather than a more generous-minded skepticism that Linker thinks goes better with liberal politics. To the extent that atheism advocates using state power and…

  • Mary through Syrian eyes

    Neat article at Commonweal on the theological insights from recently translated ancient Syrian Christian hymns and antiphonal poems.

  • Ron Paul rising

    Ron Paul breaks another one-day fundraising record. Andrew Sullivan endorses Paul for the GOP nomination here. Also, I meant to link earlier to Chris Hayes’ interesting piece on the culture clash between “populist” and “cosmopolitan” libertarians.

  • Animal protection in the farm bill

    Wayne Pacelle, CEO of the Humane Society, summarizes four animal protection amendments that made it into the Senate version of the Farm Bill, dealing with issues ranging from imported puppies to using cloned animals for food.

  • “Commitment with detachment”

    I liked this article by Carol Zaleski at The Christian Century. She adivses Christians to take a political “time out,” not in abstaining from politics, but in abstaining from obsessing about politics: Some conservative wags like to say that liberalism is a mental disease. But the mental disease isn’t liberalism and it isn’t conservatism, it’s…

  • The peasants are revolting!

    It’s been pretty amusing over the past couple of days to watch elite conservative pundits wet themselves over Mike Huckabee’s rise to front-runner status. It’s as though all those years of courting evangelical voters without actually delivering much have led to rising expectations among this crucial part of the GOP base. It’s more than a…