A Thinking Reed

  • 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…

  • Sovereignty, intervention, and self-interest

    Russell Arben Fox points us to a debate between scholar Michael Berube and what he calls “the Z Magazine/Counterpunch Left.” In a nutshell, the Z/CP crowd, notably iconclastic leftist crank Alexander Cockburn (and I say that affectionately as someone who enjoys Cockburn’s writing), accuses Berube and other left-liberals of being insufficiently pure in their devotion…

  • Notes on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo: 4

    In chapter XI Anselm turns to the question of sin, since one needs to get clear on that before determining what it means to make satisfaction for sin. Simply put, sin is to fail to render to God what is due him. But what is it that we owe? “Every wish of a rational creature…

  • Notes on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo: 3

    One of the most vexing questions about the death of Christ theologically speaking is whether and in what sense we can say it was willed by God the Father. Was it specifically the death of Jesus that was required to reconcile God and sinners? Looming here is the modern critique of traditional Atonement theory as…

  • A Marian witness

    As today is the (transferred) Feast of the Annunciation of Our Lord, I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts on the talk given by Bishop Steven Charleston on Marian devotion at our parish adult education forum yesterday. First of all, Bp. Charleston seemed like a really interesting person. He’s a Choctaw Indian who was…

  • Random weekend culture notes

    On Friday we went with some friends to see The Decemberists at the Avalon, a club near Fenway park. Fantastic! The theatricality of their music comes out even more on stage. I’m not generally a fan of “indie rock” as a genre (not sure the Decemberists even fit into that category), but these guys are…