A Thinking Reed

  • 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…

  • Friday metal – Faith No More, “Digging the Grave”

    I’m not sure FNM should properly be called a metal band, but they definitely have metal influences. But, more importantly, they’re one of my favorites and it’s my blog. So there.

  • The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society 2: The trouble with liberalism

    In Part I of his The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society (see previous post), Murray Jardine traces the trajectory of modern liberalism from its beginnings with Locke and Hobbes to the present. His argument is that liberalism embodies the contradictions of the technological society in that it recognizes humanity’s capacity to alter its physical…

  • What’s wrong with Pelagianism?

    In a comment to this post bs asks: Having followed the blog and its comments for a while, I’ve noticed that Pelagianism is taken (by Lee and commenters) to be a dirty word. Embarassingly, I didn’t know what it was and googled it. While I can’t say that I necessarily agree with Pelagius, I admit…

  • …and Justice for All

    James Hetfield detained at a UK airport for looking like a terrorist. “Death to America!!”

  • The problem with air power

    Powerful piece by Tom Englehardt on the problems with relying on air power in war, something that has become more central to the US’s way of war over the last half-century or so. The problem, in essence, is that so-called collateral damage, the “unintentional” killing of large numbers of civilians, is such an inextricable part…