A Thinking Reed

  • Friday links

    – Chris Hayes: Postcard from Palestine – Endangered red wolves being hunted to extinction – Tea partiers fantasize about a “constitutionally pure” government – Jean Kazez on Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape – On not really believing in heaven – Corporations gain privacy rights as people lose them – Soldiers against torture – A…

  • “God loves you beyond your wildest imagining”

    This video from Bishop Gene Robinson has been making the rounds as part of the “It Gets Better” campaign: Bishop Robinson doesn’t tap-dance around anything. He simply says that those who tell gay kids that they’re “intrinsically disordered” or “an abomination” are “flat-out wrong.” I wonder how many young gay or lesbian people have never…

  • “The production and consumption of novelty”

    Interesting TED talk by economist Tim Jackson on the limits to growth and alternative understandings of prosperity (via Nothing New Under the Sun). Jackson wrote a book called Prosperity without Growth, which you can read about here. And the “eco-friendly” search engine he mentions is Ecosia.

  • John Birch redivivus

    In the New Yorker, historian Sean Wilentz notes the parallels between the ideology and tactics of the Glenn Beck-inspired tea party movement and the Cold War-era John Birch Society. The similarities extend even to drawing on some of the same crackpot conspiracy-mongering “scholarship.” What I didn’t realize before reading this is that Woodrow Wilson has…

  • The historical Jesus as a norm of Christology

    Over the weekend I read A. Roy Eckardt’s Reclaiming the Jesus of History: Christology Today. The book is more interesting than the title suggests; Eckardt writes in conversation not only with “historical Jesus” studies, but also with feminist theology, theology of religions, liberation theology, and particularly “post-Shoah” theology. His stated goal is to develop a…

  • Ethics and isolation

    Scu at Critical Animal has interesting take on the Anthony Bourdain-Jonathan Safran Foer debate I posted about last week. One of Bourdain’s arguments (which echoes an argument made by Michael Pollan, among others) is that embracing vegetarianism alienates you from human community. As Scu points out, however, sometimes this is a good thing. Not to…

  • Friday Metal: Mastodon, “Colony of Birchmen”

  • Melville’s mythology

    In his book, A Reader’s Guide to Herman Melville, James E. Miller, Jr. convincingly rebuts the oft-made complaint about all the “boring whale stuff” interspersed with the narrative of Moby-Dick. The point of all this material, Miller argues, is to elevate the tale of Ahab and his mad quest for revenge to mythic heights: The…

  • The three-way revolving door

    Not sure that image makes a lot of sense, but it’s the gist of this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about the “subversion” of economics: “[Larry] Summers’s career is the result of an extraordinary and underappreciated scandal in American society: the convergence of academic economics, Wall Street, and political power,” and “rarely has…

  • Toward a renewed Christian social democracy

    I enjoyed this article by historian-theologian Gary Dorrien on the prospects for a Christian version of social and economic democracy. According to Dorrien, while the dreams of a radical transformation of the economic system seem more distant than ever, they are still incredibly urgent, particularly in the wake of the financial collapse and the looming…