A Thinking Reed

  • We’ve all got issues

    I can get behind the idea that the long-term debt is an issue we need to address. What I don’t get is the urgency it’s attracted in our current political debate. Just off the top of my head, I can think of any number of more pressing issues: –Global warming –Unemployment –Global poverty –Nuclear proliferation…

  • Friday Metal: King’s X, “Fall on Me”

    I don’t know if it’s really accurate to call King’s X “metal,” but “groove-oriented, soulful, progressive hard rock” isn’t quite as pithy. Anyway, this is from their excellent 1989 album Gretchen Goes to Nebraska. They’re a criminally under-appreciated band, probably because they not only straddle genres, but also straddled the Christian-secular music divide for much…

  • HSUS and egg industry reach agreement on better treatment of laying hens

    This seems like a big deal: In an historic agreement reached today by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and the United Egg Producers (UEP), these long-time adversaries will work cooperatively to enact the first-ever federal law related to the treatment of chickens. It would also be the first federal law related to…

  • John Macquarrie and process theology

    I’m currently re-reading Scottish Anglican theologian John Macquarrie‘s marvelously lucid Principles of Christian Theology (first published in 1966; I’m reading the substantially revised version that was published about 10 years later). I first read it as an undergrad when my interest in existentialism was at its height. In the first part of the book, Macquarrie…

  • State of the blog address

    I just realized that July 1st marked the 7th anniversary of my blogging efforts. I started out on a Blogspot site (“Verbum Ipsum”) and migrated over to WordPress and A Thinking Reed a few years later. (All the archives have been imported to this site.) I’ve been at it more or less continuously ever since…

  • The economic logic of cycling

    From an excellent post at the NYT’s Economix blog: Here is the economic logic behind increased efforts to promote bicycle use: Cars enjoy huge direct subsidies in the form of road construction and public parking spaces, as well as indirect subsidies to the oil industry that provides their fuel. These subsidies far exceed the tax…

  • Friday Metal: Dillinger Escape Plan, “Widower”

    This sounds like something Faith No More could’ve written, which is high praise in my book.

  • Christianity and the roots of anti-animal sentiment

    Over at the blog Year of Plenty, Craig Goodwin reviews Laura Hobgood-Oster’s recent book The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals. It’s a generally positive review, but at the end Goodwin takes issue with some of Hobgood-Oster’s explanations for our troubled relationship with the animal world: The references and historical background offered on…

  • Quote of the day

    What makes “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” interesting, to the extent that something that’s so fundamentally idiotic and soul-deadening can also be “interesting,” is what you might call its aesthetic and ontological ambivalence. From Andrew O’Hehir’s review at Salon.

  • Cities are for people, not cars

    At least that’s the attitude some European cities are beginning to take, according to this report from the NYT. In order to create more environmentally friendly, less congested, and more livable cities, Europeans are “creating environments openly hostile to cars.” Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car…