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How animal rights gets a bad name
It seems to me that there a few reasons that animal rights groups get a bad reputation, even among those who might be expected to be sympathetic to the cause of better treatment for animals. First, animal rights groups, like activist groups of all stripes, have a tendency to use rhetoric that is imprecise at…
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Modest natural theology and epistemic pluralism
At the suggestion of Andy and Thomas I started reading some John Polkinghorne, the physicist and Anglican priest, this weekend. I picked up his Belief in God in an Age of Science, the only title of his they had at our library. It’s a collection of lectures Polkinghorne gave at Yale in 1996, with some…
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More on evolution, human dignity, etc.
Thomas at Without Authority has a great post exploring the threat posed to human dignity by the acceptance of a sheerly materialistic philosophy. Also, for what it’s worth, last week’s post on Sam Brownback got a nod at Slate here (and thanks to Thomas for bringing that to my attention). There have also been some…
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Sibling rivalry
This is interesting – Peter Hitchens, who unlike his brother Christopher, is religious, conservative, and opposed the war in Iraq – reviews the latter’s God Is Not Great.
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Brownback vs. Darwin?
I don’t think I’m saying anything wildly controversial when I say that it’s extremely unlikely that Sam Brownback will be our next president. And given his general philosophy of “compassionate conservatism” on steroids, I think that’s probably a good thing. Still, it’s interesting that Brownback felt the need to take the pages of the NY…
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Visitation of the BVM
(click for larger image) From John Paul II’s Redemptoris Mater: When Elizabeth greeted her young kinswoman coming from Nazareth, Mary replied with the Magnificat. In her greeting, Elizabeth first called Mary “blessed” because of “the fruit of her womb,” and then she called her “blessed” because of her faith (cf. Lk. 1:42, 45). These two…
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The triumph of the wine
This Slate article makes some speculations about why the popularity of wine in the US is skyrocketing while that of beer seems to be remaining, um, flat. The author argues that it has to do with selling a certain lifestyle, and beer isn’t keeping up. He says that wine, which used to be perceived as…
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Religious myths
I got my hands on a copy of Keith Ward’s Is Religion Dangerous? courtesy of our local library and have been enjoying it very much. In the introduction alone Ward takes on several myths about the study of religion that tend to be propagated by its cultured despisers: 1. “Religion” is a univocal term. Ward…
A Thinking Reed 