A Thinking Reed

  • Can we ever get away from the sprawl?

    This is from a recent Arcade Fire performance on SNL. It’s “Sprawl II,” one of my favorite songs from their album The Suburbs (which just won the Grammy for best album). I know it’s trendy to like these guys, but what can I say? It’s a good album. (Also–how many freakin’ members does this band…

  • Solidarity, not resentment

    This article from Alternet on 12 Things You Need to Know About the Uprising in Wisconsin is chock-full of good information, but I’d like to focus in is this bit at the end, which gets at a key issue: The Right has made great political progress getting Americans to ask the question: “How come that…

  • Friday links

    –The Australian broadcaster ABC’s Religion and Ethics site has a series of articles by Martha Nussbaum on democracy and education: parts 1, 2, and 3. –Coal is not cheap. –Vegan nutritionist Virginia Messina argues that healthy diets can include meat analogues. (A corrective of sorts to anti-processed-food extremism.) –At the great metal blog Invisible Oranges:…

  • Friday Metal: Conducting from the Grave, “Unholiest of Nightmares”

  • Look for the union label

    At a time when it feels like the middle- and working-classes are increasingly under siege, the story of public employees standing up for their collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin (and now Ohio!) is one of the more inspiring things I’ve seen lately on the American political scene. Maybe the example of recent events in the…

  • Nussbaum on problems with social contract theories

    I’m reading Martha Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice, which is an expanded version of her 2003 Tanner Lectures. In it, Nussbaum develops and applies her “capability approach” to social and political justice in three areas that traditional moral theories have often ignored: duties toward the disabled, foreigners, and nonhuman animals. A major part of Nussbaum’s project…

  • The millionaire as savior

    Sweet mercy, this is atrocious and offensive. (Via Adam Kotsko, who has an interesting theological analysis.)

  • Meat industry starting to feel the heat

    Via Mark Bittman, an article on the effect that efforts like the “Meatless Monday” campaign are having on beef and pork producers: Efforts like Meatless Mondays are yet another headache for the beef and pork industries. They have been struggling to cope with the soaring cost of corn for feed and to hold on to…

  • Shouldn’t the Bread of Life resemble actual bread?

    Yesterday on Twitter I mentioned that I like it when we use real bread for communion at church and asked, half in jest, whether there were theological arguments for using tasteless wafers that I was unaware of. The answers I got, at least some of which were, I think, tongue-in-cheek, included avoiding getting crumbs of…

  • On the murder of David Kato

    I know others have been blogging this story, but we had a canon from the Episcopal diocese of San Diego at our church this morning who spoke about it, so I thought I would try to give it some small additional bit of attention. Last month, David Kato, a gay rights activist in Uganda, was…