A Thinking Reed

  • Administrative note

    I’ve been giving the blogroll a long-overdue pruning and updating. A few sites have been removed that, while not officially inactive, haven’t been updated in a looong time (usually 6 months or more). But I’m always happy to re-link any blog that becomes active again. This all, of course, assumes that people still find blogrolls…

  • Varieties of liberalism

    This post (via Crooked Timber) is about British politics, but it nicely lays out the distinction between “economic liberalism” and “social liberalism,” or what we in the U.S. would call “market liberalism” (or libertarianism) and egalitarian or left-liberalism. For economic (or market) liberals, there is at times a clear sense that the free market produces…

  • More on HSUS vs. big ag

    Thanks to commenter Hillary, who identified herself as affiliated with the Humane Society of the United States, for pointing out another (lengthy) article on HSUS’s political strategy and the controversy it’s engendered. Definitely worth a read.

  • The triumphant return of Friday Metal!

  • The trouble with tradition

    Lutheran theologian Robert Benne laments the ELCA’s departure from the “Great Tradition” of marginalizing gay people and its descent into the dreaded “liberal Protestantism.” The problem, it seems, is that the ELCA hasn’t given sufficient weight to the opinions of white male pastors and theologians. One thing I’ve noticed is that whenever someone makes an…

  • Natural theology or theology of nature?

    Following up a bit on this post… In his book Religion and Science, which is based on his Gifford Lectures, Ian Barbour distinguishes between natural theology and the theology of nature. Natural theology tries to prove God’s existence by appealing to some feature of the created order. Barbour denies that natural theology can achieve its…

  • “The Age of Tough Oil”

    Elizabeth Kolbert on the disaster in the Gulf.

  • The apotheosis of Dr. Shephard

    I’m still not entirely sure what I think about the controversial Lost finale (short version: my heart liked it, but my head is skeptical), but the best, or at least most enthusiastic, apology for it I’ve read has to be this exhaustive re-cap from Jeff “Doc” Jensen at Entertainment Weekly: part 1, part 2.

  • Science, faith, and the “God hypothesis”

    Kim Fabricius has another set of provocative theological propositions at Faith & Theology–these ones on what he calls the “God hypothesis.” By this he means the attempt, by various religious thinkers, to take on the “new atheists” on their own turf and argue for God’s existence on “scientific” grounds. As usual, Fabricius definitely scores some…

  • Animal rights, human wrongs

    Nice article from the National Journal (via Scu) on the current political and legal landscape for the animal rights/protection movement. What’s striking to me is the contrast between the modesty of the goals of organizations like the Humane Society and the rhetoric of their opponents. Somehow, giving farm animals enough space to stand up and…