A Thinking Reed

  • Other nations

    We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals … We patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more…

  • Sen. Robert Byrd, animal advocate

    Obviously Robert Byrd was a complicated man. He went from being a segregationist (and Klan member!) to an ardent champion of civil rights and supporter of Barack Obama’s election. He also went from being a supporter of the Vietnam war to a fierce critic of of presidential warmaking and executive power, giving eloquent and impassioned…

  • Friday Metal: Highlights of 2010 (so far)

    Hard to believe the year’s half over! There’s been a lot of great metal released so far. Here are a few personal faves: Ludicra, “A Larger Silence” (from the album The Tenant) High on Fire, “Snakes for the Divine” (from the album of the same name) Alcest, “Écailles de Lune (part II)” (from the album…

  • Physicalism, reductionism, and the soul

    This off-the-cuff post on atheism generated some interesting discussion with Gaius about physicalism, reductionism, and humanism, among other things. I don’t know that I can express my views on the matter better than I tried to do in this post from a few years ago discussing Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire. In short, we often abstract…

  • Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith, and the perennial philosophy

    In the previous post I mentioned Aldous Huxley’s embrace of the “perennial philosophy” and his influence on the scholar of religion Huston Smith. Smith’s work had a big influence on me during my undergraduate years. When I was a callow 20-year-old atheist, Smith’s writings, as well as a series of interviews he did with Bill…

  • Huxley on distractions

    I’ve been spending what free time I have this summer dipping into the works of Aldous Huxley, both his fiction (Island, Eyeless In Gaza) and non-fiction (Brave New World Revisited). I’m currently working my way through a collection of essays called Huxley and God, which, as the title suggests, deals broadly with religion. Huxley is…

  • “Graceful simplicity” in worship

    Interesting post on Justin Martyr’s account of an early Eucharist (via Connexions). I’m not completely sold on the principle that whatever the early church did was better, but I do think there’s a case to be made for occasionally pruning the liturgy to let the gospel show forth more clearly (a sound Reformational principle). I’d…

  • Varieties of atheism

    Brandon points out the problem with lumping all contemporary atheist thinkers together as “new atheists.” He highlights the work of philosopher Owen Flanagan, whose work I’m not particularly familiar with, as an atheist who doesn’t necessarily fit the new atheist paradigm. It sounds to me–at least from Brandon’s description–that Flanagan is what I would call…

  • Balance!

    Today’s WaPo offers a review of a spate of new political books under the headline “Flame-throwing political books from the Right and the Left.” In judicious Post fashion, it finds the Left and the Right about equally guilty of partisan extremism. “If you believe the liberals,” we’re told “we have Republicans going insane after their…

  • Friday Metal: Revocation, “Dismantle the Dictator”