A Thinking Reed

  • Where’s the Left?

    Apparently there’s been a dust-up recently about the supposed lack of genuinely left-wing bloggers in the professional blogosphere. (See here for the run-down.) The charge, in a nutshell, is that many of the most prominent bloggers are so-called neoliberals: people with liberal policy goals but who embrace the deregulation/free-trade/globalization model that has been in vogue…

  • Christopher on “marriage as discipleship”

    Christopher makes some important points here, offering a corrective, I think, to some of the things I said here. For Christians, marriage isn’t just about “happiness,” but as Christopher rightly points out, it’s also a way of living out our discipleship. Or in Lutheran terms, it’s a vocation that allows us to learn to love…

  • Friday Metal: Underoath, “In Division”

  • New book on animal rights

    Here’s a new book that may be of interest to some readers of this blog: Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Paul Waldau. From the product description: Organized around a series of probing questions, this timely resource offers the most complete, even-handed survey of the animal rights movement available. The book covers the…

  • Saved from God or saved by God?

    Michael Westmoreland-White points to the website and blog of Ted Grimsrud, a professor of theology and religion at Eastern Mennonite University. Both sites focus on Christian pacifism in the Anabaptist tradition, particularly as represented by John Howard Yoder. Prof. Grimsrud also has a series of essays on his site looking at core Christian doctrines. I…

  • Toward reading more fiction

    I noted in my earlier reading list post that I wanted to read more fiction in 2011. To that end, I’ve started a pile at home of novels I’ve acquired but never got around to reading. So far I’ve got – Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale – Cormac McCartrhy, All the Pretty Horses – W.…

  • Ethics and human-animal relationships

    Philosopher Clare Palmer provides a summary of her new book Animal Ethics in Context (via Scu). The intent of her book, according to Prof. Palmer, is to argue that animals’ capacities, while important, are not all that’s morally relevant. We need to take context and relation into account as well—just as we do in the…

  • Jesus at the movies

    Crystal, who blogs at Perspective, had a post recently that referred to the 1999 TV movie Jesus. This got me thinking that I still regard Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (with scripting by Anthony Burgess, based in part on his book Man of Nazareth) as the definitive film adaptation Jesus’s life. I also…

  • Traditional marriage hasn’t existed for a long time

    This article from the WaPo clearly lays out why the supposed threat to “traditional” marriage posed by same-sex marriage is based on a misunderstanding: We are near the end of a two-stage revolution in the social understanding and legal definition of marriage. This revolution has overturned the most traditional functions of the institution: to reinforce…

  • Friday Metal: Kylesa, “To Forget”

    From last year’s Spiral Shadow.