A Thinking Reed

  • 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…

  • Low-cost, middle-class transgressions

    From an article on worship at the Christian Cenutry‘s website: Instead of fretting about style, however, perhaps we should be more concerned about scale. Worship by definition should guide us to a larger place, should direct our gaze away from ourselves and toward the most vast, holy and mysterious of all horizons. But for all…

  • Mubarak out–what’s next?

    Seems like I should observe the big news of today, which, of course, is that Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak has given in to weeks of protests and relinquished power, despite that fact that as recently as yesterday, it looked like he was determined to hang on. There seem to be plenty of legitimate questions about…

  • Marriage and the Law-Gospel distinction

    I wanted to highlight a section from this Peter Berger article I linked to earlier because it’s similar to something I’ve written before, but Berger is a smarty-pants intellectual and I’m just some guy, so it should carry more weight coming from him. This is the notion that the Lutheran view (or maybe “a” Lutheran…