A Thinking Reed

  • The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society 3: The Christian revolution

    (See previous posts here and here.) In chapter 8 Jardine discusses what he calls the cosmological and anthropological revolution wrought by Christianity and why it holds the key to facing the dilemma of the technological society. That dilemma, recall, is that we human beings have found ourselves with the capacity to radically alter our environment…

  • Does God want us to be free?

    (Switching gears here; we’re talking about political freedom now, not the metaphysical variety.) There’s been an interesting debate recently, swirling around some of President Bush’s more exuberant comments about political freedom being a “gift from the Almighty.” The reference comes from a recent David Brooks column (not accessible to us proles who don’t subscribe to…

  • May the farm be with you

    Genius (via Zippy Catholic). Grocery Store Wars

  • Could we turn out not to have free will?

    Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a blog post suggesting that some forms of atheism make free will and moral reasoning absurd. Will Wilkinson responded by essentially saying that this is a psuedo-problem (link via Unqualified Offerings). I think Wilkinson doesn’t really acknowledge the source of the worry here. He writes: Here are two things you know: free…

  • Disfranchised

    I see the signs for DC Vote all over the place. Is there a compelling reason why residents of the District shouldn’t have congressional representation? For those of a more radical bent there’s also the DC Statehood Party (which merged with the Greens). You can also get yourself the (quite popular) “Taxation without Representation” license…

  • Green is the new Right(?)

    Philosopher Roger Scruton has a pretty good piece on conservatives and the environment in the latest American Conservative. He mostly avoids the ususal conservative pitfalls when talking about the environment, namely snarky dismissal or ad hominem attacks against Al Gore and dirty hippies. Scruton does make some solid points about the dangers of any “movement”:…

  • Fun with blog ads

    I couldn’t help but notice that blog-friend Graham at Leaving Muenster is sporting an ad for the “Family Values” tour on his site! Now, I could be going out on a limb here, but I’m going to bet that Graham is probably not a fan of Korn, Evanescence, Atreyu, Hellyeah, or Trivium. Gotta be careful…

  • Rudy as Nixon and the varieties of conservatism

    Evangelical Christian and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who left his job at the White House, writes in today’s Washington Post that Rudy Giuliani is more of a Nixonian conservative than a religious one: In his elections, Nixon appealed to conservatives and the country as a culture warrior who was not a moral or religious…

  • My mama told me, “You’d better shop around”

    We’ve been in DC now for over two weeks, and in that time have visited two different churches. Last week we went to a nearby ELCA congregation. It seemed like a nice place – the service was pretty straightforward Lutheran, if a bit low church (very little liturgical singing/chanting, e.g.). The folks we met were…

  • Friday random 10 – packed in boxes style

    On Fridays lot of bloggers like to post lists of a random shuffle of whatever music is on their iPod or computer or what not. I, by contrast, am still partly living out of boxes, having just moved. Consequently, I’m grabbing random CDs to listen to from the one open box of CDs near my…