A Thinking Reed

  • Friday metal: Between the Buried and Me, “Alaska”

    In just under the wire (at least for me) as one of the best metal albums of 2007 is Colors by the band Between the Buried and Me. This was a Christmas present from Josh and his wife, and I’ve been listening to it pretty much nonstop since we got back from Indy. It’s heavily…

  • The Virgin Birth: does it matter?

    Via Graham, here’s an article in the (UK) Spectator that asked a variety of public figures whether or not they believe in the Virgin Birth. The answers range from the thoughtful, to the flippant, to the downright idiotic (someone named Colin Wilson declaims that “you’ll have some difficulty finding any educated person who believes in…

  • Catch-all blog update post

    Sorry about the dearth of posting: a confluence of extreme busyness, travel, and computer issues has put a cramp in my blogging style. Although one perk is that I’ve been forced to detach from the various teapot-sized tempests roilling the blogosphere, which is always a benefit of time away from the computer. We’re in Indiana…

  • Fly, Conchords, fly!

    A friend of ours sent us the first season DVD of the HBO show Flight of the Conchords about two guys in a band from New Zealand who move to New York with misadventures aplenty ensuing. It’s pretty hilarious: they frequently break into songs of various genres. As in these clips: “Most Beautiful Girl in…

  • God’s Own Party

    Harold Meyerson points out one of the problems with touting your party or candidacy as the “Christian” one: people will start to actually expect you to live up to the standards of Jesus. Here’s something C. S. Lewis had to say about the idea of a “Christian” political party: It is not reasonable to suppose…

  • 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…