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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…
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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…
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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…
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Religion and animals reading list
I received an e-mail alerting me to this list of books dealing with animals and religion. I’m not precisely sure why it’s on the site that it is (a site dedicated to online education programs), but it’s a good list. In fact, I’m adding Laura Hobgood-Oster’s The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals–a…
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Five essential theology books
Michael Westmoreland-White, riffing on this Christian Century article, asks folks to list “five essential theological works” from the past 25 years. (Actually, I think there was a meme on a similar topic circulating the theo-blogosphere a few years back.) Anyway, not being a theologian, or professional churchly type of any sort, I’m not really qualified…
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Jonathan Safran Foer keeps it real
One thing that Eating Animals author Jonathan Safran Foer does really well in this debate about vegetarianism with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain is to keep bringing the discussion back down to earth from Bourdain’s hyper-idealized view of meat-eating. Safran Foer’s not interested in arguing that meat-eating is always, everywhere, and under any conceivable circumstances wrong;…
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Stendahl on glossolalia
Krister Stendahl has a really interesting essay in Paul among Jews and Gentiles called “Glossolalia—The New Testament Evidence.” He argues that what we usually call “speaking in tongues” was a widespread part of early Christian expeience that was later damped down by the institutional church. He maintains that glossolalia as discussed in Paul’s letters were…
