A Thinking Reed

  • The year in book blogging

    Inspired by a post from Elliot, I thought it might be neat to collect in one post the year’s book blogging here at VI. January: Keith Ward, What the Bible Really Teaches (here, here and here) Rowan Greer, Christian Hope and Christian Life (here and here) Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (here and here) February:…

  • Animal cloning and "granting things their space"

    I don’t suppose it’ll come as a surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I think that cloning animals for meat and milk is a bad idea. Leaving aside the health considerations, what bothers me is that it’s one more step in reducing animals (and, by implication, the rest of nature) to the status…

  • A uniter, not a divider

    Gerald Ford, R.I.P. I’d say the pardoning of Nixon is outweighed by the fact that he presided over my birth, surely a great boon to the Republic. More substantively, he doesn’t seem to have done nearly as much active harm during my lifetime as a number other presidents I can think of. For one thing,…

  • Against keeping Christmas to ourselves

    Two worthy Christmas posts. First, from Siris: And so we see the significance of Christmas. Annunciation is the Feast of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh; Epiphany is the Feast of His manifestation to the world as flesh. But Christmas grabs us, seizes us, because it is the Feast of His Humility, that he did…

  • Will the last Christians to leave the Middle East turn out the lights?

    Christians in the Middle East are being put at risk by the “short-sighted” and “ignorant” policy on Iraq of Britain and its allies, the leader of the world’s Anglicans has said. Doctor Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, warned Saturday that Christians could be chased out of the region due the hostility created by the…

  • Stephen R.L. Clark’s "anarcho-conservatism"

    I’m on vacation, visiting the wife’s ancestral homeland of Indiana. Blessedly free of online distractions for the most part. Hence the relative dearth of posting. But I have been reading a really interesting book by philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark called The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics, and Politics. Clark has written on a variety of topics,…

  • Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics

    I received an e-mail drawing my attention to the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, a recently launched think tank whose mission is to foster “the advancement of progressive thought about animals.” The director is Rev. Andrew Linzey, who regular readers will be familiar with (I reviewed Linzey’s Animal Theology here). Although it doesn’t appear to…

  • VI top 6 albums of 2006

    Sheerly based on personal preference and in no particular order: 1. Mastadon, Blood Mountain2. Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood3. Johnny Cash, American V: A Hundred Highways4. Decemberists, The Crane Wife5. Trivium, The Crusade6. Jars of Clay, Good Monsters

  • Nock online

    The Ludwig von Mises institute has made several of the works of the great anarchist writer Albert Jay Nock available on line (via Tory Anarchist). These are mostly out of print and hard to find works, so it’s quite a resource. Nock’s Our Enemy, the State is a classic and, while Nock was considered a…

  • Food for thought on war & peace

    Brandon is hosting the second “Carnival of the Citizens,” focusing on “Justice, War, and the Quest for Peace.” Lots of interesting-looking posts (most of which I haven’t had time to read yet).