A Thinking Reed

  • The moral impotence of science

    Although it’s dressed up in the pseudo-scientific language of evolutionary psychology, this defense of free trade and outsourcing elides the same issues as most such defenses. The question of trade policy isn’t just whether our society gets richer as a whole or on average, but also what the effects on particular people are and whether…

  • I left my heart in Boston, but the rest of me is in San Francisco

    I’m here in beautiful San Francisco for a company meeting, set up in a posh hotel on Nob Hill. You forget how great this place is when you’ve been away: perfect weather, beautiful architecture, terrific restaurants,… sigh. I flew in last night from Boston and boy are my arms tired! Ba-dum-bum! But seriously folks… I…

  • Notes on a theocentric ethic of creation, 3

    Heavenly Father, your Holy Spirit gives breath to all living things; renew us by this same Spirit, that we may learn to respect what you have given and care for what you have made, through Jesus Christ our Lord. – Andrew Linzey This prayer from Andrew Linzey nicely encapsulates the themes of a genuine Christian…

  • The Middle East: not that important?

    I don’t agree with everything in this Edward Luttwak article (particularly the stuff about the hopeless backwardness of Arab culture and the “perfectly understandable hostility of convinced Islamists towards the transgressive west”), but he makes some points that need making. Our political class is way over-invested in the idea that the Middle East is of…

  • Jesus Our Redeemer

    Gerald O’Collins, S.J. is an Australian Jesuit who’s taught at Gregorian University in Rome since the 70s. I greatly enjoyed his book on the Trinity (and blogged a bit about it here), so was pleased to discover that early this year he published Jesus Our Redeemer: A Christian Approach to Salvation in which O’Collins offers…

  • Notes on a theocentric ethic of creation, 2

    In addition to theocentricity and what I’ve called a “qualified” anthropocentrism, any Christian ethic of creation needs to address the issue of the “fallenness” of creation. This is a controversial topic since, while most theologians have no problem with the idea of human fallenness (in some sense), the idea that the non-human creation is somehow…

  • Notes on a theocentric ethic of creation, 1

    As a kind of follow up to yesterday’s post, I’ve been thinking a bit more about what a Christian environmental (or better “creation”) ethic might look like that steers between anthropomorphism and misanthropy. I think a key concept here is theocentricity. A theocentric ethic would recognize that human beings, while perhaps the most valuable creature…

  • Cockburn’s heresies

    I’m not endorsing his arguments, but idiosyncratic leftist Alexander Cockburn never disappoints in roasting up liberal sacred cows. In the wake of the VA Tech shootings he called, not for gun control, but for militias. This week he comes out as a skeptic of anthropogenic climate change.

  • Beyond antrhopocentrism and misanthropy

    I’ve been reading a short collection of essays by Wendell Berry called Another Turn of the Crank. I’m not ready to sign on to Berry’s agrarian vision, but I do think he makes some important observations. In an essay called “The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity,” he points out that much of…

  • Obama’s interventionism

    Though they’ve been united in their loathing of the Bush administration and its conduct of the war in Iraq, there’s always been a division on the Left between interventionists and non-interventionists. The former deplore the means the Bushies have employed, while latter also oppose the ends (“American global leadership” a.k.a. “hegemony” or just plain “imperialism”…