A Thinking Reed

  • Oakes on Girard, Balthasar, and Atonement

    Fr. Edward T. Oakes has a rumination on Rene Girard and the Atonement over at the First Things blog. I’ve only read Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, but found it very thought-provoking. However, I think Fr. Oakes is on to something when he points out that Girard can’t make sense of the traditional…

  • Children of Men

    Warning: spoilers ahoy! When I first read P.D. James’s Children of Men back in January I wondered how in the world they’d managed to make a Hollywood movie out of it. After all, here’s a book where the heroes are a band of Christian terrorists, the villain is an overweening government that subsidizes euthanasia, and…

  • Notes on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo: 8

    Anselm spends the balance of Book One trying to defend the following argument: [I]f it is unfitting for God to elevate man with any stain upon him, to that for which he made him free from all stain, lest it should seem that God had repented of his good intent, or was unable to accomplish…

  • Notes on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo: 7

    The first time I read this I thought that chapters XVI to XVIII of Book One were kind of a weird tangent. There Anselm discusses at some length whether there was a specific number of rational beings God intended to bring to eternal happiness, and, if so, whether God’s purpose in saving human beings was…

  • Look for the label

    The last couple of posts got a bit bogged down in philosophical abstraction (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), so I thought I’d offer an example of what I see as a good concrete proposal for changing our treatment of animals. The “Certified Humane” label is a program of Humane Farm Animal Care, a…

  • God, animals, and rights

    Brandon has a very good post in response to the post below on animal rights. He argues for a view of rights that is grounded in justice and explicitly connected with our status as creatures of God (all of us, that is). He notes that this can be done in a quasi-Lockean manner, seeing all…

  • No rights without duties?

    A surprisingly common argument against animal rights goes like this: only beings capable of exercising moral choice and reasoning have rights. Animals don’t exercise moral choice and reasoning (i.e. they aren’t “moral agents”). Therefore animals don’t have rights. I say that the frequency with which this argument is made is surprising because it implicitly denies…

  • From the road…

    I mentioned in my last post that I had lost an earlier draft. The reason for that was a squirrely internet connection in my hotel room here in Minneapolis, where I’ve been attending the Organization of American Historians conference. Part of my job is to represent the publisher I work for by at academic conferences,…

  • Notes on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo: 6 (the brief version)

    I just lost a long post on the next couple of chapters of Cur Deus Homo, so this is the abridged version… The concept of God’s honor is central to Anselm’s scheme, but it has also been severely criticized and (I would argue) often misunderstood. Anselm himself may be partly responsible for some of the…

  • Notes on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo: 5

    In Book One, chapter XII the question is posed “whether it were proper for God to put away sins by compassion alone, without any payment of the honor taken from him.” On the face of it, this seems quite a reasonable question. After all, the Heavenly Father portrayed in, say, the teachings and parables of…