A Thinking Reed

  • 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.

  • Reality check

    A common conservative complaint in the debate over same-sex marriage is that efforts to expand the institution of marriage to include same-sex couples amounts to a will-to-power that recognizes no preexisting reality, but instead seeks to reshape it according to the whims and dictates of radical revisionists. A recent example comes from R.R. Reno at…

  • Early 2011 reading list

    New year, new books to read. Here are the ones currently in my to-read pile: – Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God (started) – Herman Melville, Typee (about halfway through this) – Tomas Halik, Patience with God – Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America – Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice…

  • Against austerity

    It has become fashionable among politicians to preach the virtues of pain and suffering, no doubt because those bearing the brunt of it are those with little voice—the poor and future generations. From Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. Read the rest here.

  • New social ethics blog

    Readers may be interested in this new(ish) blog: The Moral Mindfield. The about page says that it is “intended as an open forum for the discussion of the ethical dimensions of society and culture. …informed by philosophy, theology, and social theory, as well as other academic disciplines.” If I’ve got this right, the contributers are…

  • Taking a bite out of the war machine

    This is late, but it was nice to see Nick Kristof publish a column (on Christmas Day, appropriately enough) making the case for reduced military spending. To me, the person who has made the case that Americans over-rely on military solutions most persuasively is Andrew Bacevich in his three books The New American Militarism, The…