A Thinking Reed

  • Freedom by cluster bomb

    Michael Gerson scolds critics of “President Bush’s democracy agenda” (he doesn’t mean Bush’s commitment to transparency and accountability here at home, by the way) and manages to write an entire column without mentioning the means supported by proponents of the “democracy agenda,” namely maiming and killing large numbers of people in foreign countries. See here…

  • Holy immanentizing the eschaton, Batman!

    Did Barack Obama really say this? – “I am confident we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.” Don’t go there, dude. (via Eunomia)

  • Out in Africa

    Philip Jenkins, who arguably knows as much about Christianity in the global south as any “Northerner,” has an article on the African churches’ controversies over homosexuality at the New Republic (may require subscription to read). Jenkins argues that it’s misleading to see the intensity of the conflict over this as merely an extension of debates…

  • Book review: Small Is Still Beautiful

    Joseph Pearce is a noted English Catholic writer who has written books on G. K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis among others. In Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered, Pearce seeks to update the wisdom of E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful for the 21st century.…

  • Markets in animal welfare

    Thanks to Jeremy for directing my attention to, among other things, this issue of the journal Law and Contemporary Problems (affiliated with Duke Law School) which focuses on animal law and policy. In particular, this article by Jeff Leslie and Cass Sunstein offers an in-depth argument for a “disclosure regime” that would label food products…

  • Christian metal – not just for Stryper fans anymore

    In case you thought ATR was the only place on the web where Christianity and heavy metal fandom intersect, the blog Metal Sucks offers a “guilty pleasure” playlist of Christian metal. I’m not crazy about any of it, though the As I Lay Dying song is ok. And yes -Stryper does make the cut.

  • Should we stay or should we go?

    A debate at the Commonweal Magazine website between Matthew A. Shadle and Andrew Bacevich. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, so caveat lector and all that.

  • Obama the green

    Grist is impressed with Barack Obama’s energy plan. Overall I’ve been underwhelmed by Obama and have had a hard time understanding the enthusiasm of certain of my Democratic friends. But we could do a lot worse than a President with an ambitious plan to tackle climate change and a commitment to a more rational foreign…

  • Natural law, homosexuality and the ELCA

    Carl Braaten has published a spirited defense of natural law ethics at the Journal of Lutheran Ethics with which I’m in substantial agreement. I think that if natural law ethics didn’t exist we’d have to invent it, and that people who claim to be deriving their ethics solely from uniquely Christian principles have usually smuggled…

  • Skeptical of the skeptical environmentalist

    The Washington Post Sunday Outlook section ran a lengthy piece form “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg (based on his new book), arguing that we need to avoid the “extremes” in the climate change debate – those who deny that human-caused climate change exists on one hand and those who see it as an extremely serious and…