A Thinking Reed

  • McKibbon, Roepke, and John Paul II

    Caleb Stegall reviews Bill McKibbon’s Deep Economy (which I still haven’t read) in a recent issue of The American Conservative. In the course of the review he mentions this great exchange between economists Wilhelm Roepke and Ludwig von Mises: In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in…

  • Why creation?

    (Talk about a presumptuous title!) In this post I touched briefly on the question of why God creates the universe in the first place. Keith Ward, following Hegel, suggests that in creating God is able to realize a kind of love and relationship, one with creatures capable of not responding to God, that would otherwise…

  • Friday metal – Suicidal Tendencies, “You Can’t Bring Me Down”

    Though probably best known for their early punk material (“Institutionalized,” “I Saw Your Mommy”), ST’s two best albums (IMO), How Will I Laugh Tomorrow… and Lights, Camera, Revolution are pretty much pure thrash metal. This clip is from the latter. It’s not entirely clear from the video why the authorities are cracking down on ST.…

  • Asking the right questions

    “Eco-economist” Herman Daly tries to inject some clarity into the debate on climate change. Even if some of the details are up in the air, he says, the trajectory is clear and we need to ask if this is the direction we want to be going in. It seems to me that a lot of…

  • Bad Protestant

    I’m late posting on this obviously but last night I went to a Mass in honor of Our Lady’s Glorious Assumption. It was heart-breakingly beautiful in parts, set as it was to music from Mozart’s Spatzen-Messe, KV 220 (Those words mean nothing to me; I copied them directly from the bulletin. All I know is…

  • The “Progs for Paul” myth redux

    I’ve never bought into the “Progressives for Paul” myth – the idea that there was a burgeoning groundswell of support on the anti-war Left for maverick GOP congressman Ron Paul. Gaius links to this rather silly piece saying that Paul’s “support” on the Left may be shot now that he’s “revealed” his radical small-government views.…

  • Re-thinking Hegel

    In the second half (or maybe last third) of Keith Ward’s Re-Thinking Christianity he discusses some of the post-Enlightenment developments of Christian thought and the prospects for a 21st century liberal-yet-orthodox Christianity. Interestingly, Ward attempts a partial rehabilitation of one of the currently most unfashionable theological thinkers of the post-Enlightenment era: Hegel. Since at least…

  • Macquarrie on Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament

    I returned from Florida yesterday afternoon to find some actual decent weather here in DC. I mean, it’s hot, but not stiflingly, oppressively humid like it has been. And Capitol Hill is noticeably quiet with the congressional recess. Having missed Mass yesterday morning we went to last night’s Evensong and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament…

  • Only a suffering God can help(?)

    In an earlier post I mentioned that Keith Ward, unlike many contemporary theologians, has a generally positive view of the influence of Greek philosophy and thought-forms on the development of Christian theology. In his view Hellenistic thought allowed the early Christian theologians to deepen their understanding of Jesus as not only the Son of God…

  • Sex, marriage, and false dichotomies

    Marvin has a terrific post on same-sex marriage in the church, pointing out the silliness of some of the slippery slope arguments (Next it’ll be group marriages! Marriage to animals!) made against churches blessing these relationships. Far from being part of some hedonistic collapse in moral standards, the movement for recognition of gay relationships is…