A Thinking Reed

  • Putting the conserve back in conservatism

    The Boston Globe ran an article yesterday on the attempt by some activists to reach out to evangelicals on environmental issues. A new documentary “The Great Warming” is aimed at least in part directly at mainstream conservative Christians and features appearances by Richard Cizik, an official at the National Association of Evangelicals. It’s fairly easy…

  • Dinner with Bishop Wright

    So, yesterday at about four o’clock I received a somewhat cryptic e-mail from the curate of our church asking if I had gotten the invitation to “dinner with Bishop Wright.” I hadn’t received any such thing and, intrigued, I gave him a call. And it turned out, yes, he meant that Bishop Wright, the Bishop…

  • Taking Ahmadinejad seriously

    Not what you might think. The always-interesting Paul Griffiths asks what would happen if American Christians took seriously the Iranian president’s advice to President Bush (whether sincerely intended or not) that he be guided above all else by his professed faith.

  • The immortality diet

    This article about one writer’s attempt to practice the so-called Calorie Restriction Diet is very interesting. The CR diet, which essentially entails keeping one’s caloric intake to near-starvation levels has a fair bit of scientific evidence indicating that it may substantially increase one’s lifespan. Indeed, some of the practicioners seem to think it could provide…

  • Diocese of Mass: Just say no to marriage?

    Some priests in the Episcopal diocese of Massachusetts are sponsoring a resolution to be considered at the upcoming diocesan convention that would get the church out of the business of marrying people. Instead, couples would have to get married by a justice of the peace and could then come to the church for a blessing…

  • Living in the Berkeley of the East Coast

    Someone told me the other day that in something like 80% of the congressional races in Massachusetts there is no Republican even running. However, in my district, the incumbent Democrat, Michael Capuano, is not running unopposed. It just so happens that his opponent is running on the Socialist Workers Party ticket. We also have three…

  • A Marxist defends God

    Terry Eagleton lays the smack down on Richard Dawkins (via Brandon). The influence of Herbert McCabe, O.P., one of Eagleton’s friends and mentors, really comes through here. In his book After Theory, Eagleton even argues for a kind of Thomistic Aristotelianism as a philosophical foundation for left-wing politics and an alternative to postmodernist nihilism (See…

  • Evangelical reading list

    Christianity Today has published a list of the Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals. I’ve only read three of the titles on the list, and they’re all by non-evangelicals (C.S. Lewis, Bonhoeffer, Philip Jenkins) which I guess shouldn’t be too surprising. Given what appears to be the – ahem – uneven quality of some…

  • Some politics are local

    A friend sends along this E.J. Dionne column on the Massachusetts governor race from the Washington Post. Dionne is correct that Mitt Romney’s would-be heir, Lt. Gov. Kerry Healy has ditched her boss’s socially conservative positions on abortion, stem-cell research, and gay marriage. Instead, she’s running as a law-and-order fiscal conservative in contrast to the…

  • Kauffmania

    The blog 2 Blowhards has been running a series of interviews with “reactionary radical” Bill Kauffman this week (see here, here, here, here, and here). Makes for interesting reading, full of Kauffman’s trademark excoriation of globalization, rootless politicians, imperial wars, and anonymous corporations, as well as his love of small towns, baseball, and Dorothy Day.…